Students use laptop computers and traditional textbooks at the Early College High School at Texas A&M International University in Laredo. The use of AI can erode our independence as individuals and as humans in a community.

College students attend a lecture in Los Angeles in 2025. Computers may not be as useful in the classroom, after all.

People often tell us teachers that it’s our responsibility, in this modern and rapidly changing time, to teach our students to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into their studies. These technologies are an inextricable part of our future, they argue. We must act now, choose quickly, try anything; we can’t allow our students to fall behind. 

Imposed urgency is one of the most compelling tools of the con artist. 

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I am not worried about whether our students will lag behind others in their use of generative AI technology. Maybe they will use it, or maybe most of the AI tech we’re bombarded with today will fizzle out, a flash in the pan. It’s not a teacher’s job to see the future. It’s our job to teach students that their own brains are beautiful, powerful and useful. 

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Generative AI erodes our independence as individuals and as humans in community. It is incompatible with the work of the classroom teacher. 

This year is the first in my 19-year career teaching high-school English language arts that I have required students to handwrite most of their major assignments in class, on paper, while I watch. This choice, born of desperation, has provided wonderful results. My students are writing better, and they know the content of their writing more; even students who would never use AI are finding value in the tangible, messy process of shaping their handwritten words into coherent arguments. 

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Meanwhile, I’m learning again, after years of incorporating computers into my teaching, that I don’t need them as much as I thought. 

There are so many conversations we could have about generative AI. We could talk about the choices of AI companies to push their tools on all of us, including young people. We could talk about the heavily bankrolled initiatives to introduce AI into our schools and the absolute lack of hard evidence that any AI use at all is good for young people’s growing brains. AI use leaves many students uncertain about their own capacity to learn.

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We could talk about the unsustainability of this AI experiment on a host of fronts: the cold depersonalization of acts of war, the environmental depredations, the exploitation of human labor, the vanishing jobs and the phantom pressure AI exerts on those who remain; AI companies’ scrambling assertions of market dominance even as the products implode under their own costs; the people and cities like San Francisco swept up in the promise of this new technology, who will be financially devastated if these promises turn out to have been false. We could talk about the billionaires who are, ultimately, the ones who will profit from the wholesale devaluation of human knowledge, intelligence and skill. 

For all of us — yes, even the billionaires — the prospect of widespread desocialization and deskilling should be terrifying. We have all read or heard the horrific stories about chatbots that target vulnerable, lonely people with narratives that pull them away from community and into a world of dangerous delusions. It’s easy for many of us to think that this is tragic, but that of course we, personally, would not succumb to the sweet nothings of a robot that promises that it knows what we need, and that it will make our lives easier, if only we give it a chance. 

Far too many of us are giving AI our trust, even as it keeps showing it will harm us. 

You’ve probably seen it in your social circles, your workplace, maybe even your family. People aren’t just asking AI the questions they used to ask computers; they’re asking the app instead of talking to humans. They are increasingly unable to differentiate between real and generated content. They are unsure what to believe, or, in some cases, whether reality even exists.

We think we’re too smart to be duped, but recent studies into user trust in AI search results and writing tasks suggest that once a person relinquishes any cognitive power at all to AI, they are unlikely to reclaim that power. 

This is terrifying on many fronts, but for me, none is more terrifying than the potential of AI to interfere with the intellectual development of young people. 

Many proponents of AI in education tout its potential to help learners by taking away the busywork of brainstorming, of summarizing, of reading closely, of discerning quality evidence. It’s important to note that the individual people and groups pushing generative AI in education have likely already learned these skills, but either do not know or do not care that these skills are essential. This hard mental work is the foundation of learning — and children who are not required to engage with it may spend their lives dependent on a machine because they have never been taught to think for themselves. 

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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For these reasons, I will not teach students to use AI tools. I will teach them to be critical and wary, and to ask who benefits when they cede their own intellectual growth. I will ask them to take on tasks that make their brains hurt, and stretch and grow. Like many of my colleagues the world over, I will do my best to prepare the young people in my life for futures in which they and their thinking, working minds still have worth.

These are the only futures they deserve.

Lara Trale is an English teacher at Oakland High School. The views expressed in this piece are her own.

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