New York City has also banned AI for younger students as concerns over classroom use grow
Another school district has banned AI from being used in the classroom by students across all grades. While this isn’t the first ban of its kind that we’ve seen, what’s interesting is that it was introduced just weeks after the district started piloting Google Gemini for older students. Frederick County became the latest school district to ban AI use in the classroom this week, voting 6-1 to restrict the technology from pre-K through 12th grade. Initially, the board considered only banning AI for younger students, but eventually extended the ban through high school.
Yeah. People are already seeing it having adults outsource their critical thinking, imagine what it is going to do to the minds of children?
Sure, whatever. This is a distraction from the fact that education itself is a joke in the US. Critical thinking isn’t exactly their major export, and it’s got literally nothing to do with AI.
Pfft. Y’all are missing my point: you underfund education, you get a country full of idiots. It’s been at least 1/3 morons for decades now, and suddenly people want to point the finger at AI, or the internet, or video games, or calculators. No. The problem is fundamentally failing generations of children year after year by voting stupidly, not voting, and / or literally railing against education and the educated. Your country’s in a fucking tailspin because distractions like this crap work so well on your populace. Every. Single. Time.
This is like saying we might as well give walley style mobility scooters to kids because they don’t get enough exercise anyways…
They still learn some critical thinking going thru their day, if teachers are pushing AI, then the kids will use it for everything.
After that the techbros will say teachers are now pointless, kids will get strapped up with video camera glasses and supervised by police officers who’s only job is to make sure the glasses stay on.
There’s levels to this shit and this isn’t just useful here, it makes the things the tech ros want to do next even harder.
Like, do you really think their end goal is a teacher and students using AI as much as they want?
They want to condition the next generation to accept constant surveillance and to trust chatbots as authority figures over anything else.
Getting it out of classrooms is one of the most important things that we can’t wait to address, and that’s saying a lot in 2026
Of all the ai that I have tested, Gemini is the most lying manipulative and sycophantic. It is so bad it makes the others look good. It is almost never right.
That is an indication of the LLM “temperature” being set too high. Unfortunatly it looks like Google has disabled user/operator settable temperature replacing it with a new “thinking levels” setting. If you could set the temperature to zero, you get rid of any sycophancy and nearly all hallucination and instead just get back “I don’t know” type answers, which is my preference anyway.
Sadly it looks like the lowest “thinking level” is “minimal” but even that level allows for the model to introduce reasoning (and hallucination). I don’t like this change tha Google made.
AI is anathema to teaching and learning.
Easier isn’t better for learning, it’s actually worse. Until you have solid foundations in something, AI should not be used.
Arguably, unless you can use a more ethical AI, it should be discouraged.
AI is anathema to teaching and learning.
Your statement on its face value, sure I agree, but I can see a path were AI is a fantastic tool for teaching and learning critical thinking. If the teacher is able to alter the “temperature” setting of the LLM, they could crank it all the way up to 1 (meaning full creativity) which will likely induce AI hallucination.
The AI LLM can create output which can speak to a topic but even those with only a little bit of knowledge can easily see the flaws in the AI response. It would give the student a chance to see how rational sounding output can be factually wrong. It would teach students to evaluate the statements individually and tease out logical fallacies or even outright manufactured falsehoods.
Further, if the teacher can again set the temperature lower (perhaps to .7) which reduces the creativity then the LLM output would be more factual with possible logical or factual errors. This would increase the difficulty on the students to be able to inspect what they are given as LLM output and explore the tools and resources available to provide a human check on not only AI, but anything that another human says too.
It can become an excellent tool for teaching critical thinking.
EDIT: The more I’m thinking about this, the better I see this as a teaching tool. Tests students take to cover the material can be teacher created questions accompanied with a completely AI generated answer and the question to the student is “Is this true or bullshit? If bullshit, which parts are wrong?”. Every question on the entire test could use that format. It would be a great test of the student because they’d have to know the material well enough to know where the LLM produced a “right sounding answer” but was in fact, wrong. Even better, if a student tried to cheat using their own AI to answer the “bullshit or not?” question there’s an even higher chance the students cheating LLM would give a wrong answer because of the repeated Error Cascade.
So I don’t disagree that AI can be used as a teaching aid.
There used to be tons of really cool Java applets (before the whole security implications of bundling applets in the browser reared their heads) that made learning interactive.
AI is great for generating interactive content or diagrams for teaching. It can be a tutor to help explore questions when a student doesn’t understand something, or needs additional explanation.
Your example could also help — when I was a student a teacher brought in published papers and asked us to find issues with them, so it’s an established method with a new take. Though, I have had a lot of issues with temperature on newer LLMs, there a lot more stable than they used to be, but you could load up an older Qwen for this on consumer hardware.
My point is more that AI inside of a task is problematic. AI in Google Docs is going to hurt learning, the friction of writing and choosing formatting and punctuation builds mental pathways. Passing homework to ChatGPT removes all the banging your head against a problem that mates you remember how to solve it. Taking a photo of a math problem means you’ll never write 4 pages of balancing an equation just to get it back to the original formulation instead of the desired proof, and so you’ll never build the intuition that keeps you moving forward.
Can I ask what software/device are you using to post to Lemmy?
Mlem, why?
Mlem
You used an em dash in your post response. Its extremely rare for a human to do that, but extremely common for LLMs to do so.
I just think they’re neat.
I don’t want to give up perfectly good grammatical options to the machines. On iOS and macOS two dashes get switched to em dash, or alt+hyphen does, so they’re easy to type. You can also do en dashes, but I don’t really know when to use those.
I probably make too many typos to be a bot, but I guess that could be programmed in…
said Gemini was chosen because it was the only tool the board evaluated
We chose Gemini because we couldn’t be bothered with doing actual research. Educators of the year award.
gsuite is almost a de-facto standard for K-12. A lot of institutions can get it for free or cheap which is really attractive to cash strapped districts with a minimal IT budget. Our school was a Microsoft campus and we’d have at least 50% of incoming freshmen who were clueless about using O365 because they were all google classroom K-12. If I were a guessing man (and having been in a similar situation), the board probably asked IT for suggestions, and they said, “just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite.” Hell, that’s why we went with Teams during the shift to remote schooling in COVID. We already had it in our O365 subscription, and implementing another solution in like no time would’ve been expensive and a pain in the ass.
the board probably asked IT for suggestions, and they said, “just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite.”
I work in IT and your reasoning is solid but there’s a better chance that conversation went more like the board said “here’s every AI option but the one already in our platform” and then IT asked what the AI needed to be able to do and got a ¯\(ツ)/¯ back.
Then IT said “just go with gemini, we already have it in our gsuite."
I have this exact conversation once every few months, but about forms. “Can we get some kind of survey platform? Like surveymonkey?” “We already have office 365 forms, just use that”
I think this is the right approach they’re taking:
- no AI for young kids so they can learn the underlying principals of things on their own
- AI for older kids that have learned those fundamentals and will have to grow up and interact in a world with AI as adults
This is the same logic used for decades where young kids weren’t allowed to use calculators for simple addition/subtraction/multiplication/division, but calculators were a requirement for higher Algebra and above.
Your reading comprehension is ass. They piloted it for high school students for just a few weeks before realizing it was a bad idea for all ages. It doesn’t make sense to use chatbots in any learning environment, where you have no way to verify output.
Your reading comprehension is ass.
Cool, so is yours apparently. Someone else already pointed this out , and I already admitted my mistake.
It doesn’t make sense to use chatbots in any learning environment, where you have no way to verify output.
You’re certainly welcome to your own opinion, but we’ve already covered counter arguments to that point too..
I can’t see that comment, I probably blocked them or something.
You’re certainly welcome to your own opinion
Why golly thanks
It would give the student a chance to see how rational sounding output can be factually wrong. It would teach students to evaluate the statements individually and tease out logical fallacies or even outright manufactured falsehoods.
How? By asking their chatbot to verify each statement? School is a place for facts and trusted sources; I don’t see any convincing reason to change that.
You’re certainly welcome to your own opinion
Why golly thanks
Sure thing, friend.
How? By asking their chatbot to verify each statement?
Wow, you’re really failing on the reading comprehension tonight. This is explained in the immediately proceeding sentence to the one you quoted of mine which you either skipped or did not comprehend. That sentence is “even those with only a little bit of knowledge”. The student wouldn’t have to ask a chatbot. The student would already know enough domain knowledge of the example topic to know the LLM output is wrong.
I’m not sure whats up with your abrasiveness tonight, but I’m not interested in it. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Have a nice night.
Abrasive? I think you’re extremely thin skinned. I called your reading comprehension ass and you already admitted it was ass, let’s move on.
The student would already know enough domain knowledge of the example topic to know the LLM output is wrong.
This would immediately fail for any factual question though, like, “what is the currency used in Japan?” If the chatbot responds “yuan”, the only domain knowledge that would allow you to see that as bullshit is the actual currency used in Japan, but in which case, why ask?
I mean to be fair half of what they teach in American history class is just utter bullshit anyway so AI ain’t doing no harm there. “The pilgrims and the native americans were super nice friends and nothing bad ever happened.” “Thomas Jefferson might have had slaves, but he was like really nice to them.”
Schools already gets some things wrong, why not make it worse?
Not a real argument
I wasn’t making an arguement for using AI I was just being tounge in cheek
But that isn’t the approach they’re taking, that’s the approach they’re reversing course on. They’re now banning AI for pre-K through 12th grade
You’re right. I misread that. I think they’re making a mistake with that, but I get it. How to adapt the early education methods to a world with AI now has no proven path yet.
I can see having targeted coursework to teach students to use AI productively and responsibly. Outside of that, the temptation to let AI do all the work and learn nothing is strong, and I’m not sure it’s worth interfering with those few precious years where kids can become proficient at reading, writing and math to drench their brains with AI. Besides, they’ll probably use it outside of school anyway, making school be the one place where they’re forced to do their own thinking.
And AI specifically degrades the kind of critical thought that high school is supposed to make absolutely certain that the kids have before leaving.
High school also functions as a method to prepare students for how to interact with the world. Dumping them into a world where AI is commonplace with no knowledge or mental protection from it would be a disservice to them.
Isn’t the whole thing that none of the skills you need to deal with an AI world come from actually using AI?
