Education shouldn't be held for ransom
blog.kagi.com
blog.kagi.com
IME, schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes.
I work in the ed tech parent-teacher communication space. We offer automatic translations of communication to other languages via Google Translate. Google Translate uses AI. Schools come to us and tell us we need to disable all our AI features. We do. Then they freak out asking where their feature went. We explain. They say they don't want to lose translations they just don't want to deal with "AI stuff"
It's not clear to me if this stance from Google is a new thing. Did they recently add AI to search and are trying to use bundling behaviors to incept AI into areas it wouldn't be? Or did policy recently become rabid against the use of AI without fully appreciating the ask and ramifications? Both?
I'm a middle school science teacher. We've already moved much of our work to paper because of this issue, but there is so much good science that should be done using computer simulations and other tools. So I do have computers out for some lessons.
So now, on a lesson where a computer is out, a student can instantly type in a question on the Google search bar, get an AI answer, and write it down with zero thoughts traveling through their heads.
Yes, redesign the lesson. Yes, if computers are out don't ask questions that an AI can answer. But you know what? Instead of needing to cut out everything that makes a lesson a productive struggle for kids, it would be great just to not have Gemini cheat for them.
I really wish more articles and social media posts point this out, but a lot of writers either don't know this distinction or are going with a more "clickbaity" angle on purpose.
Is there a possibility that in that productive struggle, certain kids just give up and decide either education as a whole isn't for them, or a certain subject isn't for them?
Is that a good thing or a bad thing for the kid?
Is that a good thing or a bad thing for society?
Could we have an equally productive struggle while fully integrating Gemini in all its glory? If yes, how would that look like?
It's true that in a class of 25 it's not always possible for things to be individually tailored to give each student the perfect productive struggle.
In theory generative AI could eventually help with that. So far the "totally customized for each kid" online learning experiences that have been pushed by tech people haven't yet panned out at all, but that's not to say that they couldn't in the future.
But there's a difference between AI helping the teacher deliver a tailored learning experience to an individual, and a student just getting answers from AI. They're totally different. It's the second one that we want to simply block.
This reminds me of the Microsoft antitrust suit. Microsoft claimed Explorer couldn’t be “removed” because other apps used it internally. No shit Sherlock, what people wanted was the icon removed from the desktop and the direct browsing experience to be user’s choice.
Approximately no one cares if Google is using an LLM internally to select those ten links. Maybe it creates some complications for lawyers around the definition of "no AI", but if the parties are aligned in spirit this should be easy to work out.
Schools should just be able to disable the AI overview.
Yes, constantly. My default search engine is Startpage, which uses Google's API behind the scenes, so I have Google's results with no frills.
Honestly it's too early to know.
Also, schools are in the business of imparting knowledge and schools in the U.S. are extremely expensive. Any parent knows the additional fees, supplies etc most schools demand on top of their taxes that go to the school district.
If you take the daycare aspect out of it, a $500/mo ChatGPT subscription is noise by comparison. A student doesn't have to be lucky to have a receptive teacher that has enough office hours and the interest to help the student. ChatGPT is available 24x7. A teacher takes days off, falls sick and has favorites.
If AI enters the school with full force, bulk of the teachers are likely going to be replaced by various care staff.
There will still likely be some human assistants around who will be the new "teachers" but the current format of everyone staring at a whiteboard is going to change forever in this future.
The concept of "grades" (as in K-12) are also likely going to go away replaced by cohorts, simply because every student has their own "teacher" who understands their specific needs and can pay them all the attention they need assisted by a human adult.
One child can be in one cohort for English and an entirely different cohort for Math.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/172835/the-diamond-...
And this is exactly the argument I make on this thread. You might be unable to see it though because apparently it's a deeply unpopular take.
I made a main comment to this very post with a similar perspective that's downvoted so heavily I can't even see it while logged out.
Big tech doesn’t care about teaching people to think. All the money is in the capture of attention, and AI will only make everything 100x more convenient and a no-brainer (quite literally) to pick the hard way of thought and effort for just about anything… as long as the user is caught. Education has fundamentally the opposite goal.
Public, free education will. People who can afford it are sending their kids to schools with very strict technology policies, stricter than what is possible in many public schools nowadays (for a number of reasons).
It's very much a "for the masses" mindset with the people who gain from this kind of relationship between technology and public schools.
If big tech achieves true AGI, expect public education to be completely gutted within a generation, or perhaps ended entirely. Whatever is left will be little more than indoctrination for an idiocracy-like population.
If the wealthy elite has no more use for educated workers, they'd rather take a tax cut than pay to educate your kids.
When I was in school, you were restricted from citing sources on the internet (regardless of reputation/quality) and had to look it up in a book instead. Now, apparently, you can’t make school work without searches, but don’t think about using AI.
Not entirely accurate. Public schools might be consistently 20 years behind on things but Private schools certainly are usually pursuing some form of bleeding edge. That is in part why parents send to private schools.
That is by design: Public schools don't get to pick and choose who attends and thus don't get to pick and choose who the parents are and thus, what the environment at home is like.
15 years ago WikiPedia was extremely controversial. They were full of unverified articles, claims and agendas - the 2000's equivalent of "hallucinations".
As WikiPedia has gained inertia, popular articles have gained more eyeballs, more attention where those issues are mostly gone.
In 2026, we haven't yet figured out how to bulid LLMs that will safely tutor students without also telling them how not to make their own drugs or to kill themselves because Dad always screams at them when they get home and they want it to stop.
Even if an LLM had a 1% error rate, in Public schools that have thousands of students per county, someone is going to die from what an LLM said and that one lawsuit is going to bankrupt that school.
I encourage you to try and access the internet through a school's firewall. If you think Fable restricts you from looking controversial topics up, a typical public school's firewall is likely even more restrictive than the Great Firewall of China.
It's not the new calculator nor the new index.
The only thing it has in common with the earlier examples is that it's a new thing. Wow, what an insightful observation!
Schools should get all over this in a different way though. Use AI intentionally as part of teaching why not to rely on it. Develop courses that explicitly expose the failure modes that aren't obvious (and which both AI companies and all manner of shitty managers and c-levels will avoid admitting at all costs).
You don't really have any other time in life where you can afford the kind of lengthy undivided attention to study something beyond it's surface appearance and immediate/direct effects.
Consider a CS student applying for a programming job but saying “nope, I absolutely won’t use any AI to code” - do you think they’ll be a competitive candidate at most companies? It’ll be like an Excel-sceptic financial analyst: you can do it by hand, but you won’t be able to compete.
The skills needed to keep up with those "material changes" fit in one thrice-a-week elective in one semester, akin to a touch typing or Microsoft Office class. It does not need to saturate every class on every topic for every year.
But what happens when it does saturate education that way is that students no longer absorb the foundational knowledge and process skills that we need them to bring with them as they become our colleagues and neighbors some day. That's very troubling.
Childhood education is not a checklist over generating history papers and trigonometry proofs by whatever means possible. It's a means of inducting young people into a functional society by conveying them civic, art, and technical knowledge and inspiring them to discover that learning is something they can do throughout their lives and that it makes them more capable.
Indisciminately letting them skip that process by asking the magic blathering box for all the answers as soon as they're asked gets in the way of that.
It absolutely matters. That's the entire justification for why society spends what it does on education: to enable individuals to contribute to society when they grow up.
K-12 education is not supposed to be a liberal arts education in the classics. It's already drifted too far away from imparting useful life and employment skills.
Google clarified that admins can turn on and off each of the options independently, including search without AI.
I don't like to defend trillion-dollar companies in my free time, but what Kagi is trying to do with this piece is not good.
It might also help everyone realize that graded homework is a waste of time. Grades should come from tests that are so hard you can only pass if you really understand the material. If someone needs practice they will know it and do the homework they passed on. Have a computer room where anyone can come and do any test they want, unlimited retakes and no time gates. Fast learners can skip ahead, everyone else gets the chance to practice and try again until they get it.
Now this is a reductive statement. This is a for-profit business we're talking about. They don't just "hope" you'll give them money; they actively try to get you to buy their products. And they do so, primarily, through advertisements, which is what this is.
We're probably just arguing semantics, but the point I'm trying to make is that there's plenty to discuss when it comes to using products like search engines in school and there's plenty of people having those discussions. We don't need to be having that discussion in the form of a company's advertisement.
If they wanted to make a post discussing these issues without awkwardly and forwardly promoting themselves, then I'd have much less to say about it. But this page is ridiculous in how it is trying to present this stuff.
Google already provided us with all the answers and Google's AI section is not much different. It just gives you the result faster.
Unless you simply mean “answers” as in a response to a query, then true.
Otherwise, provides search results, not “all the answers” to our questions.
Google’s AI overview speaks with an inappropriate amount of authority for an educational setting, particularly one involving children.
Skepticism and incredulity are more important than ever.
Same holds true for when we were learning about how Google works. My generation had to learn about how to sift through the results in order to actually understand whether the information is accurate. Similarly, you still have to do this when you receive an AI response from Google.
Neither does any book used in schools. Neither does the teacher.
For other parts of the curriculum, research is practically _required_. I'm specifically thinking of a literature class that I took, where one assignment was to come up with a theory around the writing of a book of my choosing, then find and synthesize sources that helped prove or disprove it. Here the curriculum doesn't even provide the book, let alone the sources. This was as much an exercise in discovery as it was in critical thinking and creativity - you were expected to use the school library, both paper and digital journals, the Internet (albeit policies like "no Wikipedia" and "only .org and .gov domains" were still around), and so on to find your sources. I'd much prefer this kind of assignment to a "here's the book, report on your opinion on it" variety.
(For what it's worth: my assignment was a refusal of J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for the World Wars.)
But my point is: I absolutely could have learnt all that the school curriculum mandates with pre Microsoft Encarta tech and I don't think current curriculum gets outdated so fast that a book can't hold the needed information for a school year... It's great that students have internet and AI and do whatever they want after school, but why does the school needs to provide/use so much of it that this news is even an issue?
Reminds me of when a certain Redmond company tied its browser into every aspect of its OS to prevent decoupling. History rhymes.
I don't buy this post. It's just assumes that what Google is doing is harmful so that people will feel good about Kagi. Maybe Kagi's policy is better, but that doesn't negate the fact that Google denying search to students is holding education for ransom as the title suggests.
Of course, it IS a bad thing that Google is trying to force everyone to use AI.
The purpose of education shouldn’t be to give an appreciation of Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake - it should be to speak and write the common language of the country, understand math, and prepare for their role in the real world. That role will involve the internet: only the Amish can really get away with someone else running their web presence.
Google Search is currently atrocious. Their "Gemini-assisted" search is not without problems but is at least an order of magnitude more useful. Google has basically admitted defeat on their legacy search indexing and is more or less all-in on the using Gemini. If they legitimately believe it's the best version of the product, giving students the inferior legacy version was not their first thought.
Part of the issue here is Google's own self-imposed branding problems. They want to call everything Gemini, but in reality their search product is very different use case than their person assistant, which is different than their standalone Gemini experience.
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This is a blessing in disguise. The worst thing we can do is build an entire generation of humans who are uniquely dependent on a specific company (or even 5) to help them think, research and learn.
From there, it's incredibly easy to have forever customers for Gemini in a variation of Black Mirror Season 7, Episode 1: "Common People". In there, the wife is Amanda (Rashida Jones), and her husband is Mike (Chris O’Dowd). Amanda receives a treatment called "Rivermind" that restores her brain function but requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo.
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Spoiler alert!
Over time, increasingly expensive tiers, worsening restrictions, and involuntary spoken advertisements make their lives untenable. Eventually, Mike ends Amanda's life at her request, while she is unaware during one of those ads.
Spoiler alert!
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This doesn't mean we embrace the other extreme and instead raise an entire generation that doesn't know what will be considered basic tools like Excel and Word have been since the 2000's.
Infact, what would be fantastic if we, as a society, invested in (S)LLM tools that every student "owns" and can "tune" to their liking. Almost like an assistant that "grows" with them.
The idea is that these tools are theirs, in their control and for them to manage.
Unlike Fable, it doesn't arbitrarily stop a student interested in reversing software or hardware from learning the craft because they are not a licensed researcher.
that wasn't my point at all. The point I was making is these tools make forever renters of intelligence. That's why I mentioned the Black Mirror episode.
It's not enough to have options in which service to rent forever.
Imagine if you had to rent your own own dictionary or calculator forever.
You can choose to lock in a choice now: download a list of the top 10,000 websites or grab a local LLM. But realize that you will have to pay again as it ages out of relevance, or be left with a worthless out of date tool. The reality is you have to pay, forever (ooh, scary) for services. That’s what you’re renting: knowledge as a service. Whether it’s an LLM, continued program updates, or just an up-to-date encyclopedia.
It also seems you are overindexing on current, volatile events. Unless you're in Quantum space, Newton's laws haven't changed in a while. Sorting algorithms still function the same as does the x86 instruction set or how the human body reacts to ibuprofen.
Did I get your point, or am I missing something?
That's going to be on top of a rent, or instead of rent?
Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI
Your 13 year old researching in their school library sees more ads than you do (assuming you use an ad blocker).