Is Education Failing our Students in this AI-Driven World?

Education is not adapting quickly enough to AI-driven changes in work, Chris Benson argues. Daniel Weitnach says AI arrived faster than social media and is changing how people work and learn, while social media generally did not reshape most people’s day-to-day jobs. Some schools initially barred students from using AI, in part because they lacked ways to incorporate it into coursework. But students’ use of AI is likely to continue as the tools improve, so schools need institutional support, approved curricula and state requirements that leave teachers room to adapt. Teachers may otherwise be expected to carry out policies they did not help set.

Schools need to teach students how to use AI in the workplace without neglecting foundational knowledge and human capabilities, Daniel says. One risk is that students who turn to AI for answers too early may miss core skills such as basic math. Chris argues that students still need subject knowledge, critical thinking and creativity to use AI effectively and solve problems. Working through difficulty can also develop decision-making, resilience and character. He compares spelling to these foundations: spell check reduces the need to correct every error manually, but spelling still helps people communicate accurately.

The learning effects of AI depend on how it is used. A 2025 field experiment involving nearly 1,000 high school mathematics students in Turkey found that students who practiced with chatbot assistance later scored 17% lower on an unassisted exam than the control group. In a Harvard undergraduate physics study of around 200 students, however, a carefully structured AI tutor produced stronger immediate learning gains than an active-learning classroom comparison across two lessons. The results point to a distinction between using AI in ways that displace students’ effort and designing it to support learning; the studies do not establish that AI use has one uniform effect.

Chris favors systematic integration over treating student AI use as cheating. Making a full year’s curriculum available on the first day, for example, could let students explore topics ahead of schedule and give parents more time to help where their children struggle. He imagines students working with personal AI tools that provide tailored prompts while a human teacher guides the class. Teachers would remain important as facilitators of personalized learning. AI-generated essays could also become material for evaluating accuracy, framing and possible improvements, with assessment focused on how deeply students understand a subject rather than whether they can access a quick answer.

AI is already changing which skills matter at work. Chris says it lets him produce code faster and devote more effort to creative work; proficiency in Rust matters less to his work now than it did a year ago. He warns that students could have difficulty adjusting if education responds too slowly, and says some university graduates are already struggling to adapt. Purdue has introduced an AI competency requirement across its undergraduate degrees, an incremental approach one speaker praises. That speaker’s company expects employees to use AI in day-to-day work and says graduates who are uncomfortable seeking AI assistance may struggle. At the same time, students may learn to associate AI with cheating when professors prohibit or try to detect its use, even though professors face constraints of their own.

The speakers stress that education should build abilities that remain useful as tools change. One says a PhD developed confidence, critical thinking, problem-solving and creativity more than earlier schooling did: producing novel research means challenging established knowledge and defending work under expert scrutiny. Learning to operate amid ambiguity can be valuable, even as AI assists research exploration and may contribute to discoveries. A PhD is not the only route to those skills; entrepreneurship and creative work such as writing and art can develop them too. Chris argues that teaching fundamentals through ambiguity, creativity and struggle, while using tools for rote tasks instead of relying on memorization, could strengthen critical thinking. Daniel expects education to look different, while noting that systems often lag technological change but can eventually adapt.