{"slug": "magid-schools-shouldnt-ban-ai-they-should-teach-it", "title": "Magid: Schools shouldn’t ban AI. They should teach it", "summary": "Schools should teach students how to use AI responsibly rather than ban it, according to Larry Magid, CEO of ConnectSafely, in a piece featuring Kerry Gallagher, education director at ConnectSafely and an assistant principal in Massachusetts. Gallagher argues that banning AI creates a 'shadow tech environment' where students lose guidance from trusted adults, and that thoughtful integration shifts learning toward higher-level thinking such as analysis and synthesis. The article draws parallels to the 1970s calculator debate, emphasizing that AI, like calculators, can become an essential tool for complex problem-solving when used appropriately.", "body_md": "**Getting your**\n\n[Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...Even if you try to avoid it, AI is probably part of your life. It’s being embedded into an increasing number of products and services, including refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, cars, software and online services. It’s also increasingly becoming the way organizations interact with the public, as you may have noticed if you’ve called a company or agency or engaged in an online customer-service chat, only to find yourself communicating with an AI-powered system rather than a person.\n\nAnd if you have kids, chances are pretty good that they’re using AI at school, at home, on their phones or all of the above.\n\n**AI backlash**\n\nStill, many people worry about AI, and I’m seeing a bit of a backlash, including from some young people as well as adults calling for school districts to ban its use.\n\nTo get some perspective, I spoke with Kerry Gallagher, education director at my nonprofit, ConnectSafely, and a frequent writer on AI for parents and teachers. She’s also an assistant principal for teaching and learning at a middle and high school in Massachusetts and a parent of two teens. Her school uses educational AI apps it has purchased but recognizes that students also use popular products like ChatGPT and Google Gemini at home and on their phones.\n\n“If a school board simply bans AI,” she said, “students don’t stop using it; they just stop talking to us about how they use it. Banning creates a shadow tech environment where kids lose the guidance and ethical modeling of trusted adults.”\n\nWhen parents or colleagues express concerns about AI, Gallagher responds by asking, “Tell me more about that question. Tell me why you’re asking, like what have you seen or heard or experienced?” Breaking it down to specific concerns makes sense to me.\n\nI’ve had similar discussions with AI skeptics, some of whom have little or no experience using it themselves. While it’s good to be skeptical of any technology, some concerns are based on news or anecdotal reports about bad things happening or worries about things that might happen, even if they are rare. Yes, bad things have happened as a result of AI, but that’s true with most things in life, including cars, sports and kitchen knives. The key is to understand and manage the risks while taking advantage of the benefits.\n\n**Shifting to ‘higher level’ thinking**\n\n“When schools integrate AI thoughtfully,” said Gallagher, “it isn’t about giving kids a shortcut to bypass the hard work; it’s about shifting the work toward higher-level thinking. If an AI model can effortlessly answer a basic recall question on a worksheet, then that recall question shouldn’t be our primary way of assessing student learning anymore. We want students doing the analysis, the evaluation, and the synthesis, skills that require real human cognition.”\n\nThe debate reminds me a little of conversations in the mid-to-late 1970s, when inexpensive four-function calculators became popular. There were those who said they should be banned in schools, and if the purpose of a lesson was to teach basic arithmetic, that made sense. But calculators, and later computers, eventually became essential tools for higher-level mathematics, allowing students to focus on more complex concepts and skills, including problem solving, mathematical reasoning, graphing, statistics, algebra and calculus. If calculators had been around when I was in middle and high school, I might not have had to wait until graduate school to be able to tackle complex mathematical and statistical problems.\n\n**There should be limits**\n\nSchools shouldn’t choose between banning AI and embracing it without limits, but instead should teach students when, why and how to use it responsibly. Gallagher said whether AI is appropriate depends on the student’s age, the subject and, most importantly, the learning objective. Her school allows students to use AI to practice for AP history exams, including getting feedback on their writing. “But it would be different if the exam were AP English, where the craft of your writing is precisely what you’re being scored on.”\n\nFor a while, some teachers at her school relied on AI detectors to determine whether students were using AI, but Gallagher said teachers learned that the tools were “rather inaccurate or unreliable.” Students also figured out how to fool them. “They learned that you could have the AI provide an output that completes the assignment and then change maybe 10% of the sentences to fool the AI detector.”\n\n**AI for jobs in 2030 and beyond**\n\nAI is here to stay and will become a major part of work life, not only for knowledge workers but for nearly everyone in the workforce. If schools are going to prepare students for jobs in the 2030s and beyond, they will have to teach basic AI skills, including understanding its limitations and knowing how to do lateral reading, checking what AI tells them against reputable and authoritative sources.\n\n**Managing risks**\n\nThat’s not to say AI doesn’t have risks and limitations, but many of its risks can be managed. In addition to verifying accuracy, students should learn to look for bias, protect personal and confidential information, distinguish facts from opinions, and check citations rather than assuming they are legitimate. They also need to know how to frame questions, often called “prompt engineering.” Providing clear instructions, relevant context and specific criteria can yield more useful results. It can also help to ask AI to identify uncertainty, provide sources and consider alternative viewpoints. Sometimes even asking, “Are you sure?” can prompt a model to reconsider its answer and identify a mistake, although that’s no substitute for checking reliable sources.\n\nBut even if students use AI for research that they later verify, it should not substitute for their own thinking or analysis. Students should eventually become CEOs of their own domains, using AI and other resources to gather verified information while employing their own knowledge, judgment and critical-thinking skills to decide what that information means and how to use it.\n\nAnd educators need to be trained to help their students use AI effectively and responsibly. Every high school football coach is expected to know how to teach student-athletes to play the game as safely as possible. Educators need the same kind of preparation when it comes to AI.\n\n**Companies need to be accountable**\n\nI don’t want to let AI companies off the hook. They need to double down on making their products safe and responsible and work harder to reduce errors and hallucinations, bias and other unintended consequences. They also need to find ways to make their products appealing without making them addictive, and make clear through the way AI responds, not just through a disclosure, that AI is not human, not infallible and not your best friend or therapist. Governments and school districts also have a role to play by adopting sensible policies and regulations.\n\nThe goal shouldn’t be to keep AI away from our kids, but to teach them when to use it, how to use it and when to put it aside.\n\n*Larry Magid is a tech journalist and internet safety activist. Contact him at larry@larrymagid.com.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/magid-schools-shouldnt-ban-ai-they-should-teach-it", "canonical_source": "https://www.mercurynews.com/2026/08/13/magid-schools-shouldnt-ban-ai-they-should-teach-it/", "published_at": "2026-08-13 15:00:20+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-13 15:18:35.319364+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy", "ai-ethics"], "entities": ["Larry Magid", "ConnectSafely", "Kerry Gallagher", "ChatGPT", "Google Gemini"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/magid-schools-shouldnt-ban-ai-they-should-teach-it", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/magid-schools-shouldnt-ban-ai-they-should-teach-it.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/magid-schools-shouldnt-ban-ai-they-should-teach-it.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/magid-schools-shouldnt-ban-ai-they-should-teach-it.jsonld"}}