Long read: At home and at school, AI is transforming childhood

“Some 61% of high-school pupils and 69% of teachers get help from AI with their work for school, according to a survey from the Rand Corporation, a research organisation”

Indeed, governments across the world are facilitating its adoption: “President Donald Trump signed an executive order in April urging America’s schools to “integrate the fundamentals of AI into all subject areas”. Singapore this year introduced lessons on the basics of AI  in primary schools. China plans to teach AI in all primary and secondary schools by 2030. In Hangzhou, the city that is home to DeepSeek, one of China’s AI champions, children receive at least ten hours of annual instruction in AI , from model-training to the principles of neural networks.

Pupils may first encounter AI second-hand, as teachers use it to generate worksheets, quizzes, personalised assignments and the like. A trial last year in 68 secondary schools in England by the Education Endowment Foundation, a charity, found that science teachers equipped with ChatGPT  could reduce their weekly lesson-planning time by nearly a third. AI can help them spruce up their teaching, too. Last month Microsoft released a tool that turns lesson plans into games in “Minecraft”, where children can build elements from the periodic table, for instance.

Children are also being taught directly by AI. In Flanders, Belgium, around 4,000 students are using ai-powered reading tools made by Microsoft. One, called Reading Progress, records children reading aloud and alerts them to mistakes. Another, Immersive Reader, allows students in the multilingual region to read a text in their first language and then in Dutch, clicking on words to see illustrations of their meanings. It can also translate the teacher’s instructions in real time.”

There’s no doubt that AI will have a levelling effect in terms of democratising education. As poorer countries with shortage of teachers will find AI a credible substitute, even personal tutors often a privilege of the rich could be made available to all, making learning more personal.

“Google predicts that “AI may ultimately allow every learner to take a truly individualised learning journey.” Ben Gomes, Google’s chief technologist for learning, describes how this could unlock access to knowledge. Growing up in pre-internet India, he borrowed the British Council library’s only book on electronics. “I would bring it home and pore over it, and there was no hope I would understand it because it was at the wrong level,” he says. Now ai  tools like Google’s Learn Your Way can adapt texts to users’ reading ability. It can add personalised touches as well: in an economics lesson on labour markets, children who like football are given an example about Lionel Messi, whereas those who prefer film get Zendaya.

Parents are supplementing this kind of instruction with ai tutors at home. This is especially popular in China, where ultra-competitive exams have made tutoring a big business. A government crackdown on after-school instruction in 2021, to ease pressure on stressed-out families, has been an unintended fillip to companies making AI-powered educational devices. Whereas human tutors were banned from teaching the main curriculum, even online, AI  tutors were not. Yang Renbing, head of JZX, a startup in Hangzhou that sells tablets equipped with an A teacher, says monthly sales have risen tenfold in the past year.” 

However, risks of AI driven “brain rot” are apparent. Like in a piece we featured in 3L&3S a couple of weeks ago: “Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology measured students’ brain activity as they completed an essay-writing task, some with and some without the help of ChatGPT . The brains of those using ChatGPT fired less; those students were also less able to recall an accurate quote from the essay they had written.”

The good news is that solutions are being developed to address this in such a way that students (and the rest of us) use AI in the most optimal way without losing our independent ability for critical thinking: “In most contexts, users want AI to provide answers. In education, that is the student’s job. Khan Academy’s AI -powered tutor, Khanmigo, is not supposed to give students answers. Instead, it talks students through problems, drawing the answers out of them. The big AI firms are following suit: in July OpenAI launched “study mode” for ChatGPT, offering “step-by-step guidance instead of quick answers”. Google’s “guided learning” setting does much the same.

In the hands of a responsible student, such tools help. But a child with a tight deadline or an Xbox addiction may opt for the standard setting. “Efficient use of AI is going to win out over the use of AI that leads to better…learning,” predicts Julia Kaufman of RAND . The risk of cheating at home may lead to more assessments at school—meaning less time for teaching.”