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.