I’ve visited school districts from Tennessee to NYC. American kids are not ready for the AI revolution.

The first instinct of any school meeting a new technology is often to block it. Calculators, phones, YouTube, and now AI. It isn’t necessarily a poor instinct. When you’re responsible for other people’s children, and something arrives that nobody yet understands, a block buys time.

I saw this first hand when I visited Hamilton County, Tennessee; a district that takes STEM seriously, and had invited me out to observe its computer science and maker program. I tried to access ChatGPT on the school wifi, but quickly realized it was blocked. The fix was easy: I simply used the mobile data on my phone to access it instead. Every student in that building would have done the same. This is not a district that’s behind or an outlier. It is doing what the majority of over 13,000 school districts in this country have defaulted to.

It reminded me of a story an English teacher told me, about her efforts to stop her class using AI for homework. While marking her students’ assignments, she noticed about a quarter of the essays she was reading looked remarkably similar. She sent an email: ‘If you used AI, please let me know.’ A hundred per cent of the students responded admitting that they had. Her policy hadn’t succeeded at anything, other than to show her that children aren’t hiding AI from us. Instead, we are hiding from AI, which is costing us the one conversation that would help them.

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