Schools are rushing to draft policies. They panic. They write rules.
Is that actually the first step?
Maybe not.
This week on the podcast we skip the bureaucracy. Aleta Margolis runs the Center for Inspired Teaching. She says the answer isn’t a handbook. It is a conversation. Real talk.
Then EdSurge’s editor-in-chief Sarah McKibben joins the call. She doesn’t speak from an ivory tower. She talks about her kitchen table. Her two middle school kids use AI right there in the living room. Raw. Unfiltered.
Real progress starts with a conversation not a rule
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Data paints a messy picture.
A RAND survey shows only about one-third of students say their school has an actual school-wide AI policy. Chaos elsewhere. Aleta argues that top-down mandates fail. If you write rules without the students, they break them. Co-creating guidelines? That sticks.
Teachers are stressed too.
NPR and Ipsos polled educators recently. Fifty-four percent said AI makes teaching critical thinking harder. Roughly three-quarters think the impact of this tech will beat the internet. Computers are old news. This is different.
Kitchen Table Realities
Sarah’s house looks like most of ours now.
It’s a mix. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it creeps you out.
Her kids are navigating a landscape that adults barely understand. She spotted a student using an “AI humanizer.” The app masks the machine fingerprints. It slips past plagiarism detectors.
Who’s that student? A competitor? A peer?
It happens. In real time. While parents drink coffee nearby.
Productive Struggle
Here is the common ground. Both guests land on the same point.
It isn’t the tool. It is the mind.
Are kids thinking with AI? Or are they bypassing the brain entirely? The worry isn’t the chatbot. It is the atrophy. If they skip the struggle, they never build the muscle.
Productive struggle. That is the goal. Not silence. Not perfection. Thinking.
The concern is not AI itself but whether you learn to think with it or just let it do the work for you
You can listen to the episode if you want more nuance.
The debate isn’t settled.
Rules come and go.
Kids adapt.
Do you really think a PDF will stop them?
