{"slug": "to-prevent-llms-from-destroying-education-the-work-must-happen-in-class", "title": "To prevent LLMs from destroying education, the work must happen in class", "summary": "Educators must accept that any assignment completed outside the classroom will eventually be completed by an LLM, forcing all evaluative work to occur in environments where LLMs are inaccessible, according to a July 24, 2026 article. The author argues that learning requires effort and that LLMs have delivered zero benefit to education, urging educators not to spend time integrating them into classrooms.", "body_md": "*published: July 24, 2026*\n\nEducators have to accept an undeniable fact: any assignment that's completed outside of the classroom *will* in the limit be completed by an LLM and not the student. Even the most diligent and conscientious students will eventually fall to the siren's song of *doing literally anything else* instead of the assignment.\n\nThis is even more inevitable if the student is in any way competing for position with the other students. Such a situation is the platonic ideal of a [prisoner's dilemma (opens new window)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma) which are always the underlying mechanism of a [race to the bottom (opens new window)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom). Any assignment that is part of that competition, such as being part of their grade, will *force* students to cheat lest they fall behind.\n\nThe only way forward is a tough pill to swallow, but it's become literally impossible to avoid: *all* evaluative work must happen in environments where accessing LLMs is impossible, which most of the time will be the classroom.\n\nIt goes without saying that this isn't fair to educators. They don't deserve to have to clean up the mess created by the LLM companies.\n\n**It doesn't matter.** [\"Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.\" (opens new window)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unforgiven)\n\nLuckily [inverted classrooms and mastery-oriented learning (opens new window)](https://support.khanacademy.org/hc/en-us/articles/360030753412-Why-Mastery-Learning-by-Sal-Khan) present an opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat and make education *better* than it used to be. But first let's address all the people who think education should \"embrace AI\", and reveal that idea as the pernicious marketing lie it really is.\n\nIf you think a person can meaningfully learn anything or gain any kind of skill when they have access to an LLM, you haven't been paying attention.\n\nLearning requires effort. It's well established that people only really learn when they have to *do* something that is difficult. [It's really easy to think you understand something (opens new window)](https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/12/22/illusion-of-explanatory-depth/), but only by actually having to produce it from scratch do you confront the real gaps in your understanding.\n\nPeople can't seem to admit how dire the situation is. The [absurd cult of AI mania that's poisoned most executives (opens new window)](https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/) is so strong that even some of those above critical articles felt the need to include some sop to LLMs, saying that \"structured methods could yield benefits\". Maybe theoretically, but it's the LLM companies' job to provide that proof, not everyone else's.\n\n**No normal educator should spend even a small amount of time figuring out how to use LLMs in the classroom.** LLMs, especially in the chatbot form factors delivered by the LLM companies ([because they're addictive (opens new window)](https://science.ubc.ca/news/2026-04/are-you-addicted-your-ai-chatbot-it-might-be-design)), have delivered precisely zero benefit to education. Any benefit they seem to provide *actually* comes from the internet of free open knowledge that underlies them. Welcoming chatbots into the classroom is like welcoming in a [lotus-bearing (opens new window)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus-eaters) con artist who pretends they wrote the books you already have in your library.\n\nA teacher's job is to teach, not to expose their students to a technology they're already exposed to and whose entire value proposition is that any idiot can just talk to it.\n\nIn examples like [Khan Academy (opens new window)](https://blog.khanacademy.org/research/) we already see how a web app that provides trees of bite-sized concepts with attendant videos and quizzes is enough to basically fully personalize any course material. The remainder of adaptive need is best done by human teachers, and won't be meaningfully improved by hallucinating sycophancy machines. Mastery learning used to be too difficult to be practical, but normal web technologies make building a personalized quiz environment extremely doable.\n\nI hope the people at Khan Academy also learn the lesson sitting in front of them: [LLMs are too unpredictable and too easily manipulated to be useful in education (opens new window)](https://www.chalkbeat.org/2026/04/09/sal-khan-reflects-on-ai-in-schools-and-khanmigo/). There might someday be ways to usefully deploy them, but I'd wager even those uses would be pretty narrow and boring. Khan Academy already has a winning approach, they just have to not get distracted.\n\nMastery learning is the way forward. We now have the opportunity to move past the assembly-line system that abandons students with widening understanding gaps and pressurizes them under do-or-die tests on rigid schedules. It's well-demonstrated that [understanding gaps predict almost all of the variation in learning speed between students (opens new window)](https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2024/02/06/learning-rate-paper/), so any system that tackles them directly ought to be superior.\n\nAnd it's more respectful to students as well! I'm guessing every student would much prefer an educational experience where they're guided through rigorous but actually effective work in the constrained time blocks of class-time, and then left to enjoy their lives afterwards. Even if school had to be a bit longer, the clarity and focus of no more *home*work seems like a good tradeoff to me.\n\nLLMs have created a genuine crisis, but [crises are often the only times real change can happen (opens new window)](https://crisisengineering.layeraleph.com/crisis-engineering-the-book/). Take this as an opportunity to genuinely make things better!", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/to-prevent-llms-from-destroying-education-the-work-must-happen-in-class", "canonical_source": "https://blainehansen.me/post/learning-is-for-students-not-llms/", "published_at": "2026-07-27 18:03:34+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-27 18:22:49.458513+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Khan Academy"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/to-prevent-llms-from-destroying-education-the-work-must-happen-in-class", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/to-prevent-llms-from-destroying-education-the-work-must-happen-in-class.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/to-prevent-llms-from-destroying-education-the-work-must-happen-in-class.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/to-prevent-llms-from-destroying-education-the-work-must-happen-in-class.jsonld"}}