<a href="https://archive.ph/borIf" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/borIf</a>
Even if you're pro-AI, there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point. It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers before moving them to nailguns.<p>I can't help but think of this Chesterton Quote:<p>"It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses."
I can’t imagine how many shortcuts I would have taken as a kid/teen or stressed uni student if AI were an option.<p>I can see even a well-meaning student stuck in this aspirational cycle of “I’ll do it myself next time, but right now I just want to catch up.”
There were certainly integral solving validators online when I took calculus in high school. At some point I gave up and just used that, because “the money is in web application development, I don’t need that calculus stuff”.<p>Big regret.
I have never needed calculus since leaving university, nearly 40 year ago. If you're not in hard engineering, you probably won't (and if you are, you'll get to use all the computer assisting tools you want).
This definitely would have been me.<p>I burned 100s of hours into my 400 level classes, some of those hours were completely wasted on things that I could never figure out how to get them to work.
It's also not banning parents from using AI with their kids or showing their kids AI outside of school so I don't know the issue. Does anyone here actually have kids in school and can report on what kind of "AI" these kids are using, because I can almost guarantee they would be using it as a glorified wikipedia at the absolute top end. They aren't going to be doing the kind of stuff people on here are using it for..
Im for this as I use AI in my current college classes to learn things quickly. Also, save money aka not have to buy/read the textbook.<p>Using AI allows me to take and feed my notes to it and have it create multiple choice quizzes. Same for assignments where my teacher asks us to define terms. So far doing this I am able to retain things quickly and speak intelligently during the next class.<p>So dont read the textbook, just learn what is needed and graduate. Mandami is definitely right on this as my new way of learning will get me A(s) and B(s) but im thinking i will miss a lot of important pieces of information.
It's like banning teachers or textbooks from school. LLMs are the single greatest learning technology ever created.
Saying that a human teacher is equivalent to an LLM is derogatory to the teachers and exaggerating the capabilities of the LLM. I say this as someone who uses these things daily in my work and personal life. Let's not murky the waters with complete falsehoods
If kids use them for learning and not just cheating. You have to learn <i>how</i> to learn and <i>how</i> to think for yourself before you can do that
Are you sure that taking shortcuts to information isn't potentially doing more damage to learning?
technology seems to bifurcate outcomes - the top students seem to get much better than previous cohorts but the rest of them seem to get a lot worse.
Good. Kids need to learn how to think before letting other stuff do it for them.
Good. The more I use AI the more I feel like it will drag humanity into a local maxima that we'll never be able to escape from.
Makes sense. I had to learn how to add / subtract before I could use a calculator. Note: This policy doesn't seem to apply to high school
I can see the 2040 study already: “Schoolchildren who did not use AI in primary school show higher outcomes”
It's already beginning. <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12232635/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12232635/</a>
I’d bet the opposite. There were some poor researches trying to confirm your guess
What's your reasoning? Did iPads/Chromebook exposure make younger people better or worse at computers?<p>Maybe if there are education-tailored AI models strictly limited to explaining and never giving the answer, but even then, how will you know when it's wrong?
The dirty secret on NYC schools is that the upper-middle class tends to send their kids to private schools unless they can get their kids into some gifted/talented public schools. The real experimentation on what tools will and will not work is happening there under the watchful eye of wealthy hyper-involved (see: comfy jobs w/ adequate spare time) parents.<p>I don't know what level of digital tools is best for which types of kids, but the public school system would be prudent in adopting the learnings from the private school system and making sure the best education isn't just available to the rich. The current mayor is mad-effective at his job but does have a habit of doing the ol' wink-wink nod-nod to keep his base happy. This (along with a pointless Waymo ban) sounds like one of those actions.
I remember a scene in Star Trek, where an AI is used to help teach the little Vulcan kids.
Seems premature but then again humans are always a bit skiddish around change<p>Still, not <i>shocking</i> that the DSA stronghold that elected someone like Mamdani is going to be passionate against AI.<p>Will be interesting to watch outcomes diverge over the next few years. If you’re gonna ban stuff, do it at local levels like this so we can see differences play out across many locations/districts.
You bring up politics when this topic is about technology adoption in education.<p>Grew up in Greece and was shocked that calculators are used in high school math.<p>An interesting note: "And teachers will not be able to ask A.I. to grade assignments." This prevents teachers from using it as well, which is an interesting angle.
It's interesting to see the difference (so far) in comments about banning AI versus banning social media.
Seems like a well designed policy. Currently for one year and up to the middle school level.
I agree with other posters that kids need to learn critical thinking skills at an early age. I hope we don't see Texas educators trying to take the opposite side of the coin and mandating AI teachers at all (or any) levels just to try to own some more libs in NYC. This state has enough problems.
Forget AI, silicon valley parents don't want their kids using phones and computers either.<p><a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/silicon-valley-parents-leading-backlash-120000367.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/silicon-valley-parent...</a><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley-tech-fans-children.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...</a>
There's a far deeper and longer standing issue here and that's rent-seeking.<p>We know what works in education. It's phonics and direct insturction, basically. But nobody gets rich that way so you end up buying into a worse system through two steps:<p>1. Education PhDs need to justify their existence. They do by reineventing what works. This is basically how we came up with sight words to replace phonics, which is largely responsible for destroying literacy. Whoever comes up with these schemes gets to get academic cachet for being a thought leader. They get invited to all the cool conferences and parties; and<p>2. Rent-seeking edtech companies end up creating solutions for things that aren't really problems. This long predated AI. It suffers from all the normal issues of corruption in government procurement. Politicians and superintendents are enticed ("bribed") to buy solutions that teachers are then mandated to use, forcing students onto devices to work a program with dubious results.<p>You see this pattern play out in a ton of government R&D. For example, SMR reactors in nuclear power. There's no world that SMR makes sense. Nuclear plants benefit from scale. But behind all this you'll find a bunch of physics academics who pushed this idea to get status, some of whom then get hired by SMR startups and others get involved in government procurement. Everybody is grfiting.<p>So while I welcome schools not using AI early on, that's barelly scratching the surface. And that begins with teaching literacy and holding students back until they can read sufficiently for their grade level.
*moves back to NYC*
Good. We need this everywhere.
But I assume students already aren't allowed to just submit genAI output and afaik most classes don't involve computer use, so what's really the change?
Thank you Mayor Mamdani and the DSA. This is a major win for keeping children from losing their minds, retaining education quality, and promoting socialization.
Title: New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools<p>non-paywall: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/nyregion/ai-ban-schools-nyc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.-FA.Hu8D.YOA_utvxrl-U&smid=url-share" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/nyregion/ai-ban-schools-n...</a>
Yep, just like the tech elite. Peter Thiel limits his kids to 90 min/week screentime.
Here's another (non-paywalled) source for this news: <a href="https://abcnews.com/Technology/new-york-city-public-schools-banning-ai-middle/story?id=136134872" rel="nofollow">https://abcnews.com/Technology/new-york-city-public-schools-...</a><p>The ban goes through eighth grade, and in high school apparently there's a specific AI literacy class. It's unclear from the article if that's the only AI in high school or it's just unregulated.<p>My opinion: it's a good policy and frankly just common sense.<p>- Students using AI risk offloading their cognition onto the AI and thereby skipping the actual learning process.<p>- Teachers using AI likewise do a disservice to the students.<p>In the middle of all that, there may actually be a version of AI that can help people learn without incurring the major downsides, but I've not seen any evidence of that in the current AI systems, to the point that an outright ban in the school setting makes sense. I'm heartened to see more education organizations think similarly [1].<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.law.berkeley.edu/academics/registrar/academic-rules/artificial-intelligence-policy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.law.berkeley.edu/academics/registrar/academic-ru...</a>
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This makes about as much sense to me as banning all personal computers in the eighties from schools. You are putting these kids at a decided disadvantage.
i wouldn't let my kid use a phone or a computer till a certain age. age 1 - 11 is about having strong foundations in basics and these basics haven't really changed in a couple of decades at least. Reading, critical thinking, math etc... all don't need computers to a certain age. I say this as someone who got on a pc at age 10 and have made a living off being interested in computers.
Kids can play on slot machines when they’re older. An 8 year old doesn’t need Claude.
It's limited to "younger students", and keeping younger students away from computers also isn't a bad idea IMO.
I think young exposure to real computers (where you create, and have to figure things out; not consumption machines) provides access to a level of fluency that is otherwise difficult or impossible to achieve, just like many other skills (language, music...)
I think that can be done without having them sit in front of a computer or even really using a computer, though. Lots of kids have stories about wandering over to a college campus when they were in middle school, wandering into a room with the keypunch machines, and learning about computers that way. Very few of those kids directly used a computer, but they learned it anyway.
Keeping younger students away from computers is dumb, but we do need to go back to the basic computer literacy classes of the early/mid 2000s, e.g. typing, basics of desktop operating systems like the filesystem, using word, powerpoint etc. It's appalling how lacking high schoolers seem to be in these kinds of skills.
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The current state of AI isn't remotely anything like having a personal computer as a young kid in the 80's. What the F are you talking about? How do those two things even remotely correlate?<p>This AI zealotry on here is getting unhinged. Young kids need to learn to think, comprehend and reason without some AI doing it for them. You depress me with your backward takes.