The counter-case is powerful. AI can explain patiently, translate instantly, widen access and give teachers back time. In a Harvard physics RCT, a carefully designed tutor more than doubled learning gains; an English school trial found ChatGPT cut teachers’ planning time by 31%. And, yes, students must learn how to interrogate technology they will meet everywhere. All true. Plus, “AI-made” is no more a verdict on truth than “human-made” is a guarantee of it.
But it still does not follow that children should be given AI at school.
The mistake is to forget what education is: For Plato, education was a turning of the soul towards what is true and good. Paideia meant the formation of a person and citizen, not the accumulation of outputs. Milton wanted an education capable of fitting people to act justly, skillfully and magnanimously. Comenius imagined schools as workshops of humanity. Across their differences, the tradition agrees on one point: education should not simply manufacture answers. It should forms the human powers by which answers can be understood, judged and acted upon.
That formation requires attention, memory, language, difficulty, correction—and the productive struggle of trying before one knows. AI can abolish precisely this. The essay improves; the writer does not. The equation is solved; the mathematical mind is not. The child appears more capable while becoming more dependent.
This is not hypothetical. In a PNAS field experiment with nearly 1,000 secondary-school pupils, an AI assistant sharply improved performance. But once removed, its users performed 17% worse than pupils who had never used it. This is also when assessments become absurd. Asking whether Aisha has reasoned well - using AI - is like awarding a driving licence because her autonomous car has reached the destination.
The dividing line is not human versus machine. It is formation versus substitution. And the popular mantra to “teach them to check AI” is circular: in order to catch a confident hallucination, a shallow analogy or a hidden omission, one must already know. The judgement required to use the tool is exactly what school has not yet formed.
So yes: forbid student-facing, answer-producing AI in schools. Not for teacher administration, accessibility or rigorously designed tutors—but until a school can prove four things: that the pupil must think before the machine responds; that the tool scaffolds rather than substitutes; that independent mastery is tested without it; and that teachers can diagnose what cognitive work has actually occurred.
Herein lies the most uncomfortable truth: AI will not rescue weak pedagogy. It will automate it, conceal it and scale it.
First, we must form the mind. Then, we may give it leverage.
Pubblicato il 23 agosto 2026