Students Are Asking Adults to Set Limits

Students, teachers, and ministries all raised concerns about cognitive dependence this week. Their concern was not simply that AI exists, but that schools may allow convenience to replace the skills students still need to build.

What Happened This Week

Early in July, Kamar Samuels, the chancellor of the New York City public schools, sent a note to his principals with a short and unusual request.¹²

On July 28, in Orlando, the Orange County Public Schools board voted to adopt its first artificial intelligence policy.³⁴

On Tuesday, August 18, Common Sense Media released Teens in the AI Era, a nationally representative survey of one thousand seventeen American teenagers between the ages of thirteen and seventeen.⁵⁶

On August 14, a Spectrum News dispatch out of Columbus reported the quiet arrival of a rule that had, weeks earlier, become the law in Ohio's schools.⁷⁸

On Wednesday morning, WBUR reported that a middle school in Springfield, Massachusetts is set to become the first public school in the state to pilot Alpha School's AI-driven learning model.⁹¹⁰

Late in July, McGraw Hill released its 2026 Global Education Insights Report.¹¹¹²

On August 10, the government of New South Wales, Australia's most populous state, released a statement with a title most ministries would not have written.¹³¹⁴

What These Stories Have in Common

A student can value AI and still want protected space to read, write, calculate, and reason independently. Limits can support learning when they are tied to a clear educational purpose.

Koan starts from a simple premise. The final answer is no longer a reliable measure of learning. Schools need to understand how students reached that answer and whether the work made them more capable.

What Schools Can Do

Schools should identify the skills students must be able to perform without assistance and create regular opportunities to practice them. AI can then be introduced where it helps students go further without hiding whether the foundation is present.

Preparing students for an AI-enabled world includes teaching them when not to use AI.