Over the past few weeks I’ve talked to handful of high School students about how AI is being treated at their schools, and the results are largely disappointing (though somewhat understandable).

Ultimately, I have three main takeaways from the conversations.

Schools are scared of AI

The general thought from the schools is “No AI for anything, ever”. You can’t use it in any way, for any assignment, at any time. Of course, this is faulty logic, because bits of AI are baked into so much, and because the definition of “AI” is very loose.

As a small example, when you’re texting someone and your phone suggests the next word or suggests fixing a typo, that very much could be considered AI. If Google Docs underlines a word to help with spelling, did you just cheat and use AI?

I get what schools are going for here, but it’s much more gray than they think. That leads to…

Handwritten essays

Since detecting AI-written work is nearly impossible, schools are requiring students to write essays in class, by hand. That makes sense to me. While I don’t love writing long pieces of text by hand, this seems like a reasonable solution. Allowing any use of the computer in class or at home to write an Essay would undoubtedly be used some some students to cheat by using generative AI like ChatGPT and this is the best way to avoid that.

No learning

Having students write essays by hand is fine, but there should also be some curriculum to help students learn to make proper use of AI. The ones I’ve talked to have not seen anything related to learning about AI, how to write solid prompts, or anything related to that. The schools literally don’t talk about AI at all. It’s going to have a major impact in almost every field, so pretending that it doesn’t exist is doing a major disservice to these kids.

For those currently employed and are worried about AI, I recently heard this statement: “AI won’t take your job, but somebody that knows how to use AI will take your job.“

AI will impact jobs, for sure, but those that can work effectively with AI will be best positioned as time goes on.

All of this said, I don’t envy the position that school administrators are in right now. It’s easy for me to sit here and say “they should teach students more about writing prompts for AI”, but how should that be done? Have separate classes for that? Integrate it into some existing classes? There are no easy solutions here, but it seems that schools are largely putting their heads in the sand which absolutely feels like the wrong way to approach this.