by Note: I capitalize the name of school subjects as a convention in this piece.
The unprecedented hype and hysteria surrounding generative AI chatbots reveals something deeper than concerns about academic integrity. If what attracted you to teaching was a desire to maintain dominance over younger, shorter, weaker, or dumber humans, then I’m afraid you may have made a serious vocational error.
This isn’t about cheating, but a loss of control. Teachers are long past being the primary source of knowledge available to children. Current AI anxiety is not only a recapitulation of previous moral panics about new technology, but a failure of imagination as well. Rather than embrace a vision of AI that is liberating, empowering, democratic, and creative, schools once again embrace the technology’s weakest parts, not only resulting in lost opportunities, but at our peril.
We live in a period of human-engineered chaos, turmoil, and fear, with legitimate reasons to be alarmed by the seeming lack of control, coarsening of culture, and unraveling of social norms. But the decisions made by schools in the name of “protecting students” are more likely to harm them. AI-wielding youngsters are simultaneously cast as victims and enemies of the enterprise when artificial intelligence is viewed through a lens of “cheating” on “assignments.”
When “Solutions” Make Things Worse
My colleague Scott McLeod shared a blog post by history teacher David Cutler, ChatGPT-5 Just Changed My Mind — AI Has No Place in My Classroom. (Cutler, 2025) In that article, Cutler admits to his own use of ChatGPT and previous optimism about the software until version 5.0 was released.
“I’ve never been anti-technology. I’ve even written about ways AI can help students when it’s used with care. But my first real encounter with ChatGPT-5 — released just yesterday— stopped me cold. This is different. This is dangerous. And I’m finally sounding the alarm.” (Cutler, 2025)
What changed that made ChatGPT go from useful to dangerous with a single upgrade? In Cutler’s mind, ChatGPT 5 is much better at cheating on the sorts of writing assignments inflicted on students. In other words, ChatGPT is really good at producing nonsense no one cares about. Schools should expect more.
Cutler draws an analogy to calculators that reveals fundamental misunderstandings:
“When calculators first showed up in classrooms in the 1970s, many teachers believed they would destroy math education… But here is the key difference: calculators automated only one part of the process — computation. They did not decide which problem to solve, figure out how to set it up, interpret the answer, or explain why it mattered.” (Cutler, 2025)
Cutler makes two factual errors here. First, the availability of calculators over nearly half a century has barely registered any impact on mathematics curriculum or pedagogy. Math textbooks still don’t use the same symbol for multiplication or division used by computers since the Nixon administration. Second, calculators automated calculation, not computation. Computation is exactly what AI can enhance in Math and every other class as well.
When Cutler argues that “ChatGPT-5 is an entirely different kind of disruption… that is not replacing a tool — that is replacing the thinking itself,” he misses the point entirely. Experts like MacArthur Genius Dr. Stephen Wolfram suggest that we are entering a glorious age of computation that transcends what is typically taught in school. Wolfram defines computation as “organizing your thoughts clearly enough that you can explain them to a sufficiently smart computer.” This is wholly consistent with Cutler’s own aspirations to produce creative empowered thinkers.
His proposed solution reveals the problem: “At this point, I’m convinced there’s only one viable solution: more in-class writing. I’m done assigning large take-home papers.” In this case, the cure is worse than the disease. Wasting class time to make students recall facts will diminish the quality of their History education and decrease student affection for school.
Good Teaching
Whatever happened to the old bromide of “you’re only cheating yourself?” Perhaps educators should strive to imagine classrooms and curricula where “cheating” is impossible, not through surveillance, trick questions, or severe penalties, but where it is irrelevant. This should not be hard to achieve. Teaching isn’t testing. Teaching isn’t a sting operation either.
I have long asserted that school has an obligation to introduce children to things they don’t yet know they love—to create the conditions in which kids wake up eager to return to school to continue working on something that matters to them with teachers who wake up each morning and ask themselves, “How do I make this the best seven hours of a kid’s life?”
Computers and other computational technology should always be viewed in aspirational ways—as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression. They don’t just make learning the same old stuff kids have always been taught more efficient but afford opportunities to learn and do in ways that were unimaginable in the recent past. Kids can be historians, rather than being taught history. Mathematicians, rather than being taught math. Musicians, rather than being taught about music.
Don’t you dare disrespect children by accusing them of short attention spans when they’re on globe-trotting 24/7 soccer teams, play video games until their limbs go numb, listen to 3-hour podcasts, and read the Harry Potter books in their original Swahili. The kids are OK. Your curriculum may be unworthy of their attention.
The Writing Problem
The teaching of Writing in our schools is shambolic, but for some reason students do not find it as repulsive as math instruction. Yet, just as there is a giant chasm between the jewel of human intellect, mathematics, and the teaching of “Math,” writing instruction bears little resemblance to what writers do.
Does anyone ever question why the taller you get, the more words you are expected to produce for a teacher? As a professional journalist, author, and book publisher, I assure you that my biggest challenge is writing fewer words, not more. In school, verbosity is prized. Are children ever tasked with being succinct?
Regardless of the career one pursues, you are likely to write considerably more than school predicted. Worst of all, the form and style of writing required by modernity is not taught in school. Marketing copy, proposals, manuals, financial reports, projections, models, even social media posts require different writing chops than are covered by most school writing curricula. Scientific and technical writing are hard to find in the curriculum.
Writing is a habit of mind, not a chore or physical exercise. It should be purposeful and worthy of sharing, not merely a task that can be quickly graded. Yet WRITERS do not use the ancient scratching stick to express their ideas, nor are they encumbered by the limitations of pen and paper. Word processing is the universal means of production for written communication everywhere but school; two generations after its widespread availability.
Some of the rationale for this shameful behavior is budgetary, but a lot more has to do with the comfort of teachers, especially teachers concerned with cheating. A seemingly excellent high school A.P. English teacher in a wealthy suburb told me that all his students are required to submit their “writing” produced with pen and paper. I summoned all the self-control I could muster not to say what I was thinking. “I don’t know what you think you teach, but it’s certainly not Writing.”
History is Glorious!
Concerns over cheating result from the nature of the “traditional” assessment task, writing a paper. Teaching history as the act of causing students to recapitulate a set of facts, or even complex ideas, in written form for an audience of one person seems a great waste of a history teacher, instructional time, and the young person’s capacity to learn, grow, think, create, argue, and make sense of the world.
Why exactly do we make kids write papers in history class? Do any of these exercises result in a contribution to knowledge or personal insight? Writing without an audience is ______. Who is the audience for these papers? Who wants to read or grade them? What if you taught History without papers, quizzes, or tests kids can cheat on?
History is all around us and naturally engaging when taught well. There are television channels and podcasts dedicated to it. Documentaries are incredible and incredibly popular. Genealogy shows have turned countless teens into historians “Finding Their Roots.” Forget spectacular PBS documentaries. You cannot look away from even formulaic fare like “Foods that Built America,” “Inventions that Built America,” “Hazardous History,” and “The Mega-Brands that Built America.” My family recently sat in stunned silence during a riveting hour-long history of Doritos. It had everything—entrepreneurship, gas chromatography, cooking, ethnic studies, marketing, demographics, migration. We discussed our newfound “discoveries” for days. A great teacher could spend a semester leading students in research projects about objects we take for granted.
Recently, my partner and I sat in a parking lot with the engine running to hear an entire NPR exposition on the history of public toilets. Again, the story was fascinating, complex, overlooked, and consequential. My Facebook feed is full of “You have got to be kidding me” factoids and photos that inspire me to learn more—you guessed it—history. Neat phenomena is a powerful motivation to learn.
In 1998, our thirteen-year-old son loved history. At an event with Seymour Papert, my partner asked his wife, Suzanne Massie, how one might learn History in the constructionist fashion Papert so clearly proposed for Mathematics and the sciences. Massie was a Russian scholar, historian, author, and civilian credited with accidentally helping end the Cold War (seriously, Google her). (Lydon, 1993) She considered the question and replied, “Your son should read Dorothy Sayers,” before walking away muttering, “history is a mystery.”
I quickly jotted down the name of this historian I was unfamiliar with, only to discover that Dorothy Sayers was not an (official) historian, but a Victorian era mystery writer. The protagonists in her novels used the forensic tools of a historian to solve mysteries. We bought our son The Nine Tailors and a few other Sayers books. He loved the books and is now a veteran secondary school History teacher. This is what happens when students engage with history as historians do and when “cheating” becomes irrelevant because the work itself is meaningful.
Like countless other spontaneous discoveries, a mere introduction to a fascinating author, like Sayers, can lead one down a rabbit hole possessed with a desire to learn more, make connections, and practice history.
The Path Forward
Let me be clear. I’m for children becoming competent writers, historians, readers, and mathematicians. I am against cheating and dishonesty. I am also against teachers making school less relevant or narrowing the curriculum for fear of cheating.
Time is the scarcest of all resources in school and every second spent scribbling in a Blue Book or confiscating computational technology results in tradeoffs. In Cutler’s case, he just won’t be able to teach as much history as he would like to.
Before we overreact to the threat of AI, let’s see if there is a way to enhance timeless learning experiences and abandon old ones that honestly offer little return on investment. History should be the focus of History class. If one sticks to history, they may find that artificial intelligence has much to offer—or not.
The current trajectory of generative AI simultaneously centralizes intellectual, political, and economic power in a few companies, but educators have a choice. Just as educators should reject the use of AI to make clerical chores more efficient (and ultimately bountiful), it is their obligation to question their assumptions about the nature of schoolwork, its efficacy, and its necessity.
Moral panics are not free of consequences. The idealism of progressive education is tempered by an overemphasis on assessment, rather than the subject itself, let alone learning anything of value. Since computation is “the paradigm for today’s world,” as Wolfram argues, depriving students of access to this learner’s apprentice is counterproductive.
I’m reminded of an insightful exchange in the first episode of The Addams Family:
Truant officer: But don’t you want them to learn?
Gomez Addams: Learn? You say… Look at that little Wednesday’s (spiders).
Truant officer: Spiders?
Gomez Addams: Pedigree! You ever know a child who could raise thoroughbred spiders?
Truant officer: No.
Gomez Addams: There you are.
Truant officer: But I was referring to more formal learning, uh, uh, reading?
Gomez Addams: What is there for a 6-year-old to read?
Truant officer: But some day she’ll be 26.
Gomez Addams: See you then!
The question isn’t whether AI will change education. It is whether we’ll use this moment to finally create schools worthy of children’s curiosity, capacity, and intelligence, or whether we’ll double down on practices that were already failing them.
Favorite Things
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|  Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History |
 Children Want to Write: Donald Graves and the Revolution in Children’s Writing |  A Fresh Look at Writing |
References
Cutler, D. (2025, August 9, 2025). ChatGPT-5 Just Changed My Mind — AI Has No Place in My Classroom. Age of Awareness. https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/chatgpt-5-just-changed-my-mind-ai-has-no-place-in-my-classroom-b23468fa4313
Lydon, C. (1993, February 1993). Agent of Influence. The Atlantic. https://www.suzannemassie.com/agent_slide1.html
Veteran educator Gary Stager, Ph.D. is the author of Twenty Things to Do with a Computer – Forward 50, co-author of Invent To Learn — Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, publisher at Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, and the founder of the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. He led professional development in the world’s first 1:1 laptop schools thirty years ago and designed one of the oldest online graduate school programs. Gary is also the curator of The Seymour Papert archives at DailyPapert.com. Learn more about Gary here.
Gary, I also saw Cutler’s rather misguided post and responded with this:
“You cannot ‘ban’ technology – we know that is not satisfactory for best learning and not possible, apart from those in-class archaic approaches to assessment. What are you trying to assess exactly? I wonder if so many written pieces of work are appropriate in today’s learning? What about a socratic circle in class? What about a class debate? …and many other approaches to assessment when it is reimagined in the emerging AI era. I encourage you not to fall back on negativity towards AI – not good for you or your students. Learn how to work with it as an equal learning partner and insist your students do the same.”
I also shared this https://theconversation.com/i-got-an-ai-to-impersonate-me-and-teach-me-my-own-course-heres-what-i-learned-about-the-future-of-education-262734, and this quote resonates with the debate:
“In AI, two alternate positions are often simultaneously true. AI is both emotionally intelligent and tone deaf. It is is both a glorified text predictor and a highly creative partner. It is costing jobs, yet creating them. It is dumbing us down, but also powering us up.
So too in teaching. AI threatens the learning space, yet can liberate powerful interaction. A prevailing wisdom is that it will make students dumber. But perhaps AI could actually be unlocking for students the next level of personalisation, challenge and motivation.”
As my colleague at the University of Northampton, Jim Harris, states…. there will always be CAVE’s (Colleagues Against Virtually Everything). However, I feel those that teeter from one side to the next, negative to positive, belief to disbelief are perhaps the most disruptive in an unsettling way.
Thanks for your thoughts as always…..