Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools | Hacker News Reader

Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools

nytimes.com

220 pointshandfuloflight183 comments

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.

I can't help but think of this Chesterton Quote:

"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."

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.

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.

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.

So you'd rather give money to the company that stole the copyrighted material of experts and academics instead of giving them money? Sure some textbooks are corporate greed schemes themselves, but many others are just the work of a group of professors

they literally said that they think Mamdani is doing the right thing and that they understand they're hindering their education by using AI the way they are, did you even read the comment before making your response?

Missing information is different from paying the person who steals information instead of paying the person that produces it. Did you bother to think critically before you replied, or is an AI doing all your thinking as well?

You're literally stealing from yourself by paying for tuition and not getting any benefit from it besides a piece of paper that won't hold to scrutiny once someone asks you to code something on an interview or in a company.

Intern quality at my FAANG has been dreadful for the past year, and new grads aren't much better. Most don't pass probation nowadays.

I figure this is quickly becoming an either use steroids for bodybuilding competitions even if you're against them or opt out of competing kind of situation.

It's more like showing up to the gym with a fake muscle suit and then everyone can see you can't lift shit.

I can’t imagine how many shortcuts I would have taken as a kid/teen or stressed uni student if AI were an option.

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”.

Big regret.

Edit: For reference, the regret came when I tried to do some RF related projects on the side. Those projects would likely have gone somewhere if I put some effort into even the basic calculus from high school.

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).

Math in general is something that you don't need to know until you need to know it, the problem with "just in time" learning is that if you don't already know it then you won't even be able to know when it's needed and which specific bits of math you need to learn for the specific situation you find yourself in.

If you don't know math, you often won't be able to even realize when math is needed.

There's a Steve Yegge quote about this:

> You'll gradually realize that your math deficiencies aren't just something that you might need to beef up on if you ever "need to"; you'll see that virtually every problem space has a mathematical modeling component that you were blissfully unaware of until Done, and Gets Things Smart gal points it out to you and says, "There's an infinitely smarter approach, which by the way I implemented over the weekend." You stare slack-jawed for a little while, and then she says: "Here's a ball. Why don't you go bounce it?"

Yeah, that's true, and I've been in that situation. Unfortunately the math I was missing was not calculus or anything I had exposure to in school, or any actual experience in practical application. You can't know everything.

If you overly rely on the computer assistance during the learning stage, there are fundamental principles you won't get a firm grasp on, and then you'll be at a disadvantage if you need it later. As someone who did use calculus after school, I'm glad I actually learned the subject.

You're right that most people don't need to know calculus in their lives, but to my knowledge calculus also isn't generally required to get through college/university for most people, so it's fair to assume that the people in the course are there because they need or want to learn it. When I was a TA for calculus, most of my students were pre-med, engineers, or in other sciences.

That's wishful thinking. I have been placed into professional situations where I needed calculus and, as I found out to my sorrow, all the CAS software packages in the world wouldn't have helped because I didn't have/remember enough math fundamentals. The CAS cannot provide any kind of answer if you don't know how to ask it the right questions.

Calculus can get pretty heavy, but I really value the comfort it gave me of the concepts of velocity and acceleration, (not to speak of higher orders) of which I am sure I wouldn’t understand nearly as well without the calculus background. I’m sure for most of HN velocity and acceleration, etc seem like super basic concepts, but I just don’t think I could apply the mental models as easily as before I took calculus.

> if you are, you'll get to use all the computer assisting tools you want

I've done work on fluid simulations. It sure would have been nice to understand the buttons being pushed so I can better validate what's going on.

And I think I did well in calculus. Just not "mastery of multi-variable calculus to transform fluid dynamics formulas into software" well.

In 2004 I had a program on my TI-89 "Calculus Made Easy". It would do basically everything AND show your work.

Someone gave it to me about 2/3's of the way through Calc 1. I truly regret having become dependent on it. I studied enough to know roughly what I was doing but not enough to not be dependent.

I suspect learning with AI is the same sort of thing. You're learning, but you're not deep learning .

I read a quote that I think is analogous to AI usage. Knowledge cannot be transferred it can only be learned.

As a counterpoint, I am self-studying physics while relearning the calculus and math I took in undergrad.

AI has been immensely valuable, but I suspect only so because I am intrinsically motivated to learn this material. When I make errors in solving problems due to a confusion in understanding, it can help me work through the problem the same way a TA would, without having to wait and where I can ask a million clarifying questions until the idea is concrete in my mind.

Could I abuse it to just answer questions for me? Absolutely. But since that’s at odds with my actual goal, I don’t.

I use simple algebra and occasionally a bit of geometry estimating and managing construction projects, but I’ve never found it necessary to find an exact solution for an area under a curve or the rate of change of a function at a specific point.

I don’t know how to solve an integral, but I understand that an electricity meter or flowmeter (gas and air) is performing continuous integration to keep track of total power usage or fluid flow. That’s good enough for me, and if I had to I could approximate a solution with a piece of paper, a pair of scissors, and a reasonably accurate scale; or trapezoids and graph paper.

Re: your edit, calculus would definitely come in handy if you had an interest in RF. The good thing is, you could still learn it :)

This definitely would have been me.

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.

The kid motivation is not the knowledge but the grade, in all subjects but the few that interest them.

Until that will chance the any and all shortcuts will be used, because the goal of the kid is to:

* get grades high enough to keep parents happy * do fun stuff

The motivation to get knowledge for something other than your own hobbies/curiosity only comes when you need to start paying the bills and get a job

Agreed. Anyone advocating for heavy AI use in primary and secondary school education obviously doesn't remember their own motivations at that age.

I never cheated, but it's far too high a bar to expect adolescents to be able to restrain themselves from a magic answer machine.

And the more they use it, the further they're going to fall behind in the basics (being able to do math, read, and write).

That’s one of the tragedies of AI to me. I fear that apart from everything else, it will make us collectively stupid and lazy.

I see this everywhere, with people seemingly losing the ability to use the tiniest amount of intellect or mental effort, if only AI can give something that vaguely looks like it might be the answer. Even if the output is great and AI is a great force for the better, and we will all share in its glorious outputs - we’ll degenerate into a lazy, stupid mass unable to reliably count our own fingers.

And that’s a future to be afraid of.

I laughed at the idea of Wall-E as a kid. At least the "humans give up all autonomy and wheel around in sci-fi carts served by an AI" (as a 10YO I was neutral to the environmentalist message).

Now, 20 years later, I see the underpinnings of this being formed in real time. I did not heed the warnings.

Hell im taking shortcuts now as a fully grown adult; just because it is so _so easy_, and I absolutely see my skills atrophy.

It’s terrible.

The wrong assumption is that you had any skills before that. But what you (and nearly all of us did) was using other sources to generate work. You looked up stuff online, asked a colleague who did this before and so on. Then simply fitted you heard into what you were doing. Now the source is one place and you are romanticizing former you.

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..

It's like banning teachers or textbooks from school. LLMs are the single greatest learning technology ever created.

If kids use them for learning and not just cheating. You have to learn how to learn and how to think for yourself before you can do that

LLMs can teach you that too. You do not need to learn that first.

They can, but I don't think we are there yet. No need to sending taxpayer dollars to silicon valley on educating the next generation using a new technology that hasn't proven itself in education yet.

LLMs greatly remove the social aspect of the teacher-student relationship. They are probably fine for tutoring and replacing things like Khan Academy but they are no substitute for a human teacher.

Are you sure that taking shortcuts to information isn't potentially doing more damage to learning?

Being able to access information faster is not really a problem. I don't know anybody that was super upset that the encyclopedia came on a bunch of CD roms instead of bound volumes.

Not having the skills to assess the accuracy / validity of the information you accessed at breakneck speed however is going to be the downfall of us all.

Ai just made it easier to generate misinformation faster. We were already suffering from the blight of misinformation spreading through various media channels.

If AI can be used to better teach effective media and information literacy, we should be rolling that out in schools.

But it sounds like AI in public schools is largely just being used for speed running homework.

Yeah, it's the speed-running homework and unchecked potential for misinformation that are really problematic. I agree that if it was only a more efficient and accessible repository of information, it wouldn't be nearly as bad, and that's partly what I was getting at in my top-comment (the "may be a version of AI that helps people learn" part).

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.

I don't want the government to be forcing people into the worse outcome just to make outcomes more equal.

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

LLMs have been better than many teachers I've had in my life. To no fault of the teachers, it's hard to compete with something that has understanding of every subject, is hooked up to the internet, and is given 1:1 time with the person learning at any time of the day, answering promptly.

LLMs have enormous capacity for supporting a person who is motivated to learn and wants individualized support and instruction. That doesn’t describe all students and there’s no reason why seat time in the classroom should be used that way - students can still use an LLM to help them learn if they’re motivated to do that, but not during class.

Sure, classroom sizes can be a detriment to those that require more hands on instruction time. But that's not everyone and not every school suffers from overcrowding.

LLMs are also more flattering

your absolutely right!

Confidently pretends to have understanding of every subject but is frequently spectacularly wrong

LLMs are very good at convincing people they are learning, because they give answers quickly and fairly accurately. But that makes them bad teachers, not better teachers. The fact that LLMs are good problem solvers is to their detriment when it comes to teaching. We don't want to solve problems in this domain, we want to slowly trickle information and build practice so students can solve problems.

I think people conflate productivity for learning. LLMs can greatly help with productivity. But... so can hiring an employee. Well, what have you learned? Nothing, you outsourced 90% of it. You decidedly learned less than if you were less productive and did it yourself.

Just so we're clear, phones were already banned in classrooms. "Personal" use of AI within a classroom to help someone like a personal calculator or a personal "cheating aid" was already banned.

This bans it from all teaching tools and materials as well.

Good? The amount of just flat out wrong information the average LLM spits out makes it unfit for education IMO. I can’t imagine asking teachers to have to personally vet every single lesson plan to ensure an AI wasn’t hallucinating when producing the content.

If they were using a two year old gpt-4o type model, I'd agree. But now I'm not sure this is a problem. Now digital tools in general are known to be harmful in learning.

There's good teachers and bad teachers, there's good AI implementations and bad ones. This bans all of them.

I'm not particularly worried, meaningful experimentation will continue in private schools. I just hope public schools can learn from that and open it back up when it's mature.

Frontier LLMs with Internet search are different beasts than what you're describing as an average LLM. In 5 years I don't think you're going to be able to get away from LLMs if you care about correctness, and we're already to the point where if a calculation matters I want an LLM to check my math.

> In 5 years I don't think you're going to be able to get away from LLMs if you care about correctness

Okay. Let’s revisit this in five years. In the meantime, let’s not experiment on our kids.

I'm not talking about future capabilities, I'm saying it will cease to be arguable within 5 years. We can't just bury our heads in the sand. Kids are going to need to engage with this directly, and it cannot wait until after they graduate high school. I'm not saying give up doing things by hand, but also everyone needs to learn to work with AI to do advanced math. It's not one or the other, it has to be both.

> We can't just bury our heads in the sand. Kids are going to need to engage with this

This was the same argument made for smartphones in schools.

> it cannot wait until after they graduate high school

I have a strong opinion about technology in early education. The evidence is more mixed for high-school students—I don’t have a view there.

If the argument is no AI in elementary or middle school, and controller introduction in high school, I could get on board with that as long as the solution is being developed by the state and not one of the AI companies or tech giants.

> everyone needs to learn to work with AI to do advanced math

Most people don’t need to know advanced math. Our problem, currently, is college students being unable to do basic math. Or hold attention through a book.

> it has to be both

Why? AI isn’t a mature technology. I’m not convinced someone who was chatting with ChatGPT in 2023 is more productive with AI, today, than someone who started building agentic workflows into their processes six months ago.

>>solution is being developed by the state

I'm curious, how do you envision this development happening? You're (presumably) calling for all school boards to ban any AI developed anything in classrooms like NY just did.

Are you expecting public universities to perhaps carry out studies first?

For reference, I think putting a tablet with an AI in front of kids to talk to is a silly boogeyman most people seem to be talking about in this thread. My vision was always teacher tooling that would greatly expand the teachers ability to develop individualized curriculum and test a kids progress in a classroom etc. But calling for such blanket bans means we can't even test any of this..anywhere.

> how do you envision this development happening?

Idk. I don’t have a great solution. But I also don’t think kids being slightly less familiar with AI at schools is a real problem.

> how do you envision this development happening?

Literally two classrooms I’ve seen in the Bronx in the last 6 months. Tablets are cheaper than teachers.

> My vision was always teacher tooling

I like this. I support it. I don’t support putting it in front of kids. Given how corrupt our AI leadership is right now, erring on the side of caution seems prudent.

> calling for such blanket bans means we can't even test any of this

No? We still have AI everywhere. We can still do controlled studies.

>> Given how corrupt our AI leadership is right now, erring on the side of caution seems prudent.

None of the headline grabbing CEO's have any official education relationships. This seems like a "I saw some bad headlines" vibey reaction.

>>No? We still have AI everywhere. We can still do controlled studies.

Not in schools we can't, where Teacher productivity has slumped. Teachers are spending more time doing admin work, and less time with kids. Meanwhile, rich parents who send their kids to Private schools can experiment ASAP (this ban doesn't affect them), and get any and all productivity enhancements. Shouldn't the government be creating some space for experimentation? Shouldn't it be the onus of the banning party to create this space?

>I'm not talking about future capabilities, I'm saying it will cease to be arguable within 5 years

So... talking about future capabilities.

>Kids are going to need to engage with this directly

Just to get this straight: are you the kind of person to give your 1st grader a calculator and say "just use this. you won't ever have to add numbers by hand anyway"? So much metaphors of AI go around calculators, but this is a problems we solved decades ago.

>everyone needs to learn to work with AI to do advanced math

We have so much complaints over the application of math as is. Now you're arguing that it's useful again because we can offload it to an AI?

> Just to get this straight: are you the kind of person to give your 1st grader a calculator

I think banning smartphone/computer use before 3rd grade in the classroom sounds like a good idea.

Math is incredibly useful. I think the biggest problem with math is that people don't understand how to apply it, it's not that applications are hard to find. AI actually explains how to apply it very directly. I can never remember how to calculate compound interest, an AI can do it instantly.

Mamdani's banning teachers from using AI to grade assignments.

> So... talking about future capabilities.

No, I'm talking about current capabilities. The studies that prove that current AI is better at grading assignments than humans will take at least a year, if not several.

The question is if we change what assignments teachers give, or if we accept that grading is a task best done by computers. If we change the assignments that teachers give, I don't know what that looks like. Regardless, there's going to be a lot of experimentation going on. Banning AI doesn't help.

> I'm not saying give up doing things by hand, but also everyone needs to learn to work with AI to do advanced math.

I started secondary school (British closest equivalent to highschool) in autumn 1995. One of the teachers opined that they liked Apple's computers "but no point teaching them because they'd be bankrupt soon". Took a while for the school to replace the RISC OS machines with Windows.

By 2000, when I started my A-levels (UK has two years between secondary school and university for this qualification), Windows and MacOS had changed so much as to make any lessons from the start of secondary school, on RISC OS, irrelevant.

Five years later, 2005/06, I noticed while using my laptop to record my final year of university lectures (I was on a four year course), that most of us in the lecture hall had gone from pen and paper in the first year to laptops in the final year.

Five more, 2010, smartphones had no mice, and the on-screen keyboards were significantly different from physical keyboards. Multitasking was a very different experience compared to a desktop or laptop OS. Social media was replacing "never tell anyone on the internet your real name" with "tell everyone on the internet even the most banal details about your life".

Five more, 2015, and smartphones and apps were shifting from exceptions to expectations.

Five more, 2020, we're walking into rooms and telling the always-listening microphone to adjust the lights or play some music, and using the now-free video calls we'd come to expect as a minimum requirement of any chat service to get us through the isolation of the pandemic.

Two years later, 2022, people started cheating on their homework with an AI which knew more than they did, even despite how bad early AI was at maths in particular.

Four years later, 2026, the AI isn't just helping kids cheat, it is solving (a limited subset of) previously unsolved maths problems at research level.

Even last year, 2025, when it was "merely" doing well on Olympiad-type challenges, I didn't even understand the questions. My A-levels included maths and further maths, which isn't a boast because I didn't follow this up with a maths degree, but it should give a sense of how much further ahead of mandatory schooling AI already was even last year.

I agree, but there's also teachers who give out wrong information too. Often it's when the teacher doesn't have a deep understanding of the topic and are just repeating what they've heard (or misheard) and they will typically compound the issue by not allowing curious questioning.

There's also the issue that modern teachers are more like exam coaches rather than trying to actually teach kids.

Teachers earned their titles, they had to prove repeatedly that they are fit for a job that includes proving that you can learn things, that you have a logical thinking, that you are a decent enough person and that you have developped the social skills to lead a bunch of volcanic young people, taking the best paths to their grow and benefit.

AI is just the weird guy that sneaked its way in, without any reference. That is know to lie often in a very convincing way, specially when it does not have an answer, and that can be persuaded to include a lot of weird random ideas or fake facts in their classes.

> calculators are banned from math classes

Not all math classes yes, if your are learning basic arithmetic yes calculators should not be allowed, but if am learning say applied statistics I would be wasting time adding numbers by hand and not learning what I am actually supposed to be taking the course for. A tool is just a tool[1].

Even when it was not allowed, schools would still teach you how to use a calculator correctly and your peers that 80085 looks like BOOBS. Effective AI usage education specifically as an aid to learning is important for children today. There is no avoiding the fact that generative models will part of their whole lives .

The instructor or the school board with inputs from professional experts in learning pedagogy should be taking this kind of call at individual course level. IMO it shouldn't be the mayor doing a blanket ban

[1] There were time when instead of calculators, you would need to carry Clark's Tables booklets you weren't expected to learn numerical analysis to just use value of ln(n) , Clark's tables were a tool, so was the calculator, or a computer or now a machine learning model.

You wouldn't be taking applied statistics if you didn't pass basic arithmetic.

Exactly why a blanket calculator ban for entire education system would be bad. It should be course specific decided by someone with pedagogical understanding of course contents ?

The comment you're responding to doesn't appear to have been edited, so you might benefit from rereading the sentence you quoted a snippet from.

So why I Dont learn how semiconductors work before I do JavaScript? Or assembly code? I can cheat straight to JavaScript

Imagine if you had! You might be the 100X JavaScript writer.

More seriously everyone knows there are patterns that keep repeating themselves from low level on up. The more exposure you get the better you get at understanding them. I think there's a reasonable question about if the best methodology for understanding is to see the same thing repeatedly (that is just study JavaScript) or to see multiple variations on the same thing (that is learn the entire stack imperfectly).

The counter to this in my mind is that learning for it's own sake is often imperfect. If I know I'm learning about semiconductors simply to get on to learning Assembly and then JavaScript (my actual goal) I'll retain less then if the initial steps are the goal itself.

Pedagogy is a tricky thing.

>why I Dont learn how semiconductors work before I do JavaScript?

because you chose computer science/SWE instead of Computer Engineering. At least, those were in fact the differences in my programs at my alma mater.

even then, introductory assembly was a 200 level course at my school. we did in fact learn how assembly code worked to help better prep us for advanced software courses where we manage memory and develop domain knowledge.

> there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point

Yeah, a bad reason.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-10/are-calculators-affec...

> In a 1997 review of the extent to which calculators were being used in schools, numerous studies were examined that indicated the use of calculators at primary levels had no detrimental effects on students' arithmetic abilities.

> Unfortunately, the research indicated that calculators were still being used for trivial things like checking answers and were making little difference in mathematics education.

> Although teachers indicated their support for the use of calculators across all levels of primary school, there was little evidence that these ideas were being taken up and implemented.

> Parental disapproval of the use of calculators was cited as a possible cause of the limited take-up.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that Marilyn vos Savant had said that it is acceptable to use a calculator when learing arithmetic (I do not remember the reason given) but that clocks should not be used to learn time. (I might be mistaken, since I do not remember for sure.)

I wasn't able to find anything about (analog I presume) clocks for education, but it sounds like she is against calculators for elementary arithmetic education: https://parade.com/345575/marilynvossavant/why-math-students...

I might have misremembered then, or maybe it was someone else.

And you think a 9YO has the discipline to understand when a calculator is used for "checking work" compared to using it to answer their questions and get positive feedback?

That's the part this study seems to handwave. We don't need a full calculator ban, but very controlled usage is necessary.

The point of the study is that they should be using calculators to answer their questions rather than spending an inordinate amount of time on manual calculations that don't further their education and cause them to lose interest in the subject.

>don't further their education and cause them to lose interest in the subject.

Yes, that's my issue. The study is focused on grades and I'm more concerned about deeper logical thinking. You don't get the latter without some friction, and that let's you build up for skills needed in high school and beyond.

The mechanical ability of typing 1+1 into a calculator isn't my concern. It's the ability to know why you're typing 1+1 in as an intermediate step in solving real problems.

> It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers

When I was young I attended a karate dojo. One interaction that always stayed with me was when someone asked why the guy with a black belt could do the katas differently.

The sensei answered that when learning, your task is to learn to do the katas perfectly. As a black belt, you have amply demonstrated that, so now your task is to be creative and build on the foundations.

I liked that answer, it applies to everything. Learn the basics before you are allowed to question them. After that, you must question them.

thats an awesome example

giving ai to children without limits is like giving them leg-braces or wheelchairs; they'll get used to it and never learn to walk or run by themselves much less karate... they'll be cripples from the start.

To anyone who has not read the short story 'The feeling of power' by Isaac Asimov, it is a treat predicting this trend from the 1950s.

https://dn710709.ca.archive.org/0/items/TheFeelingOfPower/Th...

We typically leave decisions like that up to teachers though, not the mayor. So they can vary what's allowed on different assignments.

Good. Kids need to learn how to think before letting other stuff do it for them.

Do they? I mean so much of learning (certainly of school) is along the lines of "this is the way it is, don't worry about first principles just accept this"

If there's learning how to think stuff going on I'm not sure I want the schools doing that, it seems more like the job of parents.

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.

I can see the 2040 study already: “Schoolchildren who did not use AI in primary school show higher outcomes”

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?

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?

Perhaps when AI is better to just guide the student to slove a problem rather than spell out the answer for them. In that sense an AI tutor that is well designed for this specific task would be infinitely patient and explain in many ways till the student gets it. We're not there yet so I applaud the current ban.

It's already beginning. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12232635/

There are so many things as a kid I did not agree with or understand but was forced to do anyway, and now as an adult am glad. Right down to being forced to wear a hat and sunscreen (in Australia).

If I had ChatGPT as a kid I would have learned nothing.

https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/gen-z-cheating-homework-schoo...

Higher homework scores, but _substantially_ worse test results.

About what you'd expect, right? Friction is important for learning. Make the process too smooth and it slides right off the brain.

a lot of these studies with technology, etc, are concerned with outcomes in primary/secondary(high) school, which, tbf, no one gives a fuck about, as life outcomes are what matters

a great harm in human society is overconfident extrapolation, especially when treating humans as analogous to weather elements

however, there is literature that explores this aspect, but not relative to what we know right now (and if it is a global trait, does it matter at the general population level?)

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.

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.

bigger reason to ban AI in public schools then. AI + neglectful parents is a disaster in the making.

Yes that would work out well if by this ban we could also properly fund schools to create enough teaching staff. But you and I both know that's not happening.

So on the off-chance one of these tools (that even used AI in the background) could create a tool that actually worked well for, say, gifted public schools kids that don't need as much one-on-one attention, they could free up limited human teacher hours to give weaker kids more attention, that is no longer a possibility.

That possibility, only remains for private school kids, who don't even need it in the first place.

Nyc public schools get $40k/pupil. If there aren't enough teachers, I dont think money is the issue.

Even allowing for generous overhead a ridiculous small class size of 15 could afford $320 000/year salary.

Its not the money.

What if the learning from private schools is to have small class sizes, well paid teachers, and a situation where parents have time and resources to spend their kids? It’s hard to compare public versus private

Yea. This ban's gonna create none of that. Read my other comment in this thread.

This is in no way a secret…

Weird title. Should be:

"New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools"

First sentence is "A new policy announced by the Department of Education bars younger students from using artificial intelligence, but stops short of a moratorium."

Not sure how handfuloflight got "Mamdani Bans AI in NYC Schools" from that. I'm also seeing zero instances of "Mamdani" in the article?

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

Mamdani should investigate why NYC spends almost twice as much per student as the city of Zurich, Switzerland (which itself spends an enormous amount on education) but lags behind the U.S. average in reading and math test scores: https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/01/29/naep-scores-sho...

Isn't Zurich far richer per-capita than NYC? I would think there is more than just what happens in a school that dictates the testing outcomes.

NYC median income is about $80,000, while Zurich is $95,000. But my test-score comparison is between NYC and the U.S. national average. I'm just using Zurich as a data point for how much a rich, expensive non-U.S. city spends on education.

I see that data is correct, but let's zoom in. There are lots of private schools for the richer, and that might help lead to this fact regarding NYC public school students:

> 75.3 percent were economically disadvantaged [0]

75.3% = "if their family participates in specific economic assistance programs or meets distinct low-income thresholds."

[0] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/reports/nycps-data-at-a...

NYC has approximately several million more students than the city of Zurich.

And several million more immigrants than the entire country of Switzerland.

PER CAPITA, come on now

That's irrelevant. Scale matters when you're discussing costs because costs increase nonlinearly.

There's a far deeper and longer standing issue here and that's rent-seeking.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

  > But nobody gets rich that way so you end up buying into a worse system

software development is like this too; you can do fine without all the fancy ceremonies and tools as long as you get the basics right, but rent-seeking and consultants run rampant to everyones detriment

I wish we can limit AI in posts such as here, and/or for some creators.

As an example Two Minute Papers used to to be great but these days he's mostly covering AI advances, which to be honest become boring really quickly.

An apt analogy to me was the one I read that using AI to write is like using a forklift to lift weights at the gym - the point isn't that the weights need to be moved, it's to exercise your body.

Good. Classrooms need very little: good teachers, books, chalkboards, and pencil/paper. That's it.

IMO the _material_ being taught is secondary; what truly matters is teaching kids to think, to be bored, to engage with something they don't love but do a good job anyway, to find things they _do_ love that might exist on the other side of some amount of difficulty. They need to be taught how to think, and to have some grit.

Forget AI, silicon valley parents don't want their kids using phones and computers either.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/silicon-valley-parent...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...

There are some truly excellent initiatives leveraging AI as teachers, rather than as cognitive crutches, and it's important that they are not tossed out with the bathwater. Math Academy is one. I hope for a Cambrian explosion of variations of this approach. Imagine a resourceful and infinitely patient tutor guiding you through the most difficult concepts of your education, deeply attentive to your signals about flaws in your mental model, and feeding you carefully crafted clarifying challenges with engineered timing.

AI feeding students the right answers is damaging, but feeding them the right questions at the right moment is the way forward.

> There are some truly excellent initiatives leveraging AI as teachers, rather than as cognitive crutches, and it's important that they are not tossed out with the bathwater.

It takes years to understand the effects of the changes we implement in our school systems and curriculums and this attitude of change it now and hope for the best later is what's gotten us to a point where high school students can't read at a high school level (and this problem was happening before LLMs).

Your hypothetical utopia of education should not be tested out on the masses.

If AI has a major impact on the job market as some believe, then it would be interesting to see a society where AI related profits are used to provide free education for everyone who wants it.

At some point they will begin running out of human created data for model training and schools with strict AI policies will be the best source of non AI data going forward.

Thats kind of a symbiotic relationship that makes sense for students and AI companies.

Once AI output begins replacing human output and the models begin training on it, there may be increasingly few places left for data that isnt likely to lead to a model collapse.

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.

If Chinese kids are taught how to use AI from an early age, while American kids have to wait until they are in university, which ones are going to be make economically competitive when they become adults?

I think we already know the answer to this question, I’m not sure what America plans to do about it, or maybe just fade away into irrelevance?

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.

Seems like a well designed policy. Currently for one year and up to the middle school level.

Parents can still let their kids use AI when/where appropriate (outside the school's official curriculum). There's a lot more to life, growing up, and learning than what politicians do with traditional education.

Agency is key.

AI has been a profoundly useful tool in my learning.

The well-resourced kids will continue using AI at home and the disadvantaged kids will get left even further behind.

Are you in an elementary school right now? If not, then I fail to see how this is relevant to kids using it there.

A famous CS teacher from NJU in China said something like this: If you do not use AI, you should leave the school now.

Cool story bro.

at some point we need to stop caring what china is doing and start doing what is needed for ourselves... this "china is doing x so we have to do y" china derangement is ruining everything.

I am unsure what China's contribution has been beyond slave labour that destroyed the American middle class? I did like Parasite.

gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/nyregion/ai-ban-schools-n...

It's interesting to see the difference (so far) in comments about banning AI versus banning social media.

Because the "in schools" changes the calculus massively. You see a similar reaction to banning phones and personal computers while in school.

Kids can still access and use AI outside of school meaning the enforcement is entirely on the school and doesn't require massively a privacy invasion for adults by way of age verification. Schools already put children under (from an adult perspective at least) a pretty intense rules regime so this doesn't represent any kind of change—indeed it's probably better framed as a lack of a change from the status quo.

Good. We need this everywhere.

Title: New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools

non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/nyregion/ai-ban-schools-n...

*moves back to NYC*

I’m seriously transferring offices to be in NYC. My taxes are going up significantly and I don’t care.

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: https://abcnews.com/Technology/new-york-city-public-schools-...

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.

My opinion: it's a good policy and frankly just common sense.

- Students using AI risk offloading their cognition onto the AI and thereby skipping the actual learning process.

- Teachers using AI likewise do a disservice to the students.

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].

[1]: https://www.law.berkeley.edu/academics/registrar/academic-ru...

This is the right way. We need to teach critical thinking skills and not train kids to be helpless drones.

I remember a scene in Star Trek, where an AI is used to help teach the little Vulcan kids.

Star Trek isn't real.

“Isn’t real” isn’t a rebuttal.

It’s just refusing to think.

It's a rebuttal in the same way that saying the Vulcans in Star Trek use AI in their classrooms. Star Trek is a fictional story in a fictional universe that doesn't have to follow the laws and rules of science, society, reality, etc for the sake of telling a story that fans will want to follow.

I think you miss the point of Star Trek, it, even more than most SF, isn't "really" about the future fictional or otherwise -- it is using the tropes of SF to make commentary on our society through analogy. That being said, I'm not sure the OP recognizes that Vulcans aren't entirely presented positively on the show -- they are generally viewed as missing part of life with their lack of emotions.

Too many words.

It's cool and fiction is how we stress-test ideas before they become policy.

No one on Star Trek was "stress-testing" anything of the sort.

Stress-testing only works in reality, where the stresses are also real, or even in a simulation of reality.

Star Trek is neither, it's just fantasy. It doesn't test anything.

Star Trek is a plausible future I'd like to live in. It depends entirely on education, cultural values, and ethics. It's a future worth striving for, real or not.

Star Trek isn't plausible. Free energy isn't possible. Matter replication isn't possible. Teleportation and faster than light travel aren't possible. You can't simply out-think and out-pluck the laws of physics.

edit: not even with AI. Because I know there are people here who believe that AI will turn into a superintelligence so advanced that it will literally rewrite the laws of reality like the Eschaton from Charles Stross' Singularity Sky but that also isn't possible.

Moreover the pure egalitarian and voluntarist society of Star Trek isn't plausible. Humans aren't simply going to "evolve beyond our base desires," as Picard once put it. Even if we did have Star Trek style replicators, free energy, teleportation and FTL, and everyone had everything they could possibly want freely provided to them without cost or obligation, people would still want to have more than their neighbor to dominate and control, to be king of the mountain. They would still hate and kill.

You can't educate people out of human nature, and every manner of abomination can and will be justified by someone's ethics or cultural values.

I should clarify that when I wrote plausible I meant the societal aspects you touched on in your second point. As long as we are human, we will continue to experience our imperfection and continue to be prone to giving in to our base desires. And of course one group's culture shapes their ethics differently than another group's. Ethics is, after all, arbitrary. But one could still look at Star Trek and imagine a society where people's needs are met better than they are now, where we have systems in place to prevent a complete erosion of society better than we have now, where the basic principle of not exploiting others for personal gain is taught better than we teach it now, where we don't tolerate those that violate that principle.

You will still have hate. People will still kill. But one could look at Star Trek and imagine it's plausible to live in a society that doesn't tolerate school shootings or the systemic breakdowns that led to that.

>But one could look at Star Trek and imagine it's plausible to live in a society that doesn't tolerate school shootings or the systemic breakdowns that led to that.

We already have that at least, it's basically anywhere but the United States.

Unfortunately if Columbine and Sandy Hook didn't change things for the better I think the US is a lost cause in that regard.

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?

Seems premature but then again humans are always a bit skiddish around change

Still, not shocking that the DSA stronghold that elected someone like Mamdani is going to be passionate against AI.

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.

Grew up in Greece and was shocked that calculators are used in high school math.

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.

How is technology adoption in education not political?

It can become political, like anything else. But isn't inherently. It does not attempt to answer some political or ideological question.

The question is "do you want to teach the tool and its use or do you want to teach thinking manually". The west is under the impression that if you don't teach the tool then people will be unemployable.

They will be teaching AI in high school. This ban is only for the lower grades.

Even when they teach it, screen time will be limited to 45 minutes per week.

It's not about 'passion against AI', it's a year waiting period. There isn't much evidence that AI improves student outcomes, and there's more cases showing harm, so the responsible approach is to wait for more information.

Also, they've banned phone use for quite a while now, which I think most people agree is correct in a learning env.

> humans are always a bit skiddish around change

skittish

"skiddish" isn't a word, the only thing I can think of is leaving a 'skid mark' in one's underwear...

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.

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.

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.

> Keeping younger students away from computers is dumb

No. There's proven research that shows reading a book or writing with a pen or pencil is much more stimulating and beneficial compared to looking at a screen or tapping/typing on it.

But they also need to have computer skills if they're going to survive in this world... it's too late to teach them once they're old enough to have the safeguards removed.

If you let them develop critical thinking skills, it'll actually be easier to reach them.

Yeah, I suppose we should hold off on teaching them everything that isn't critical thinking, lest they develop skills other than what is deemed acceptable by people like you.

Maybe we should have them live in 15th century lifestyle towns! Wouldn't want them having any contact with this awful world!

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.

How prevalent do you think are children that live within wandering distance of a college that lets random children enter and use their computers?

Colleges with key punches? Probably pretty close to zero.

My point was more that, I think it's incorrect to assert that it's necessary for kids to directly use a computer in order to effectively learn about them. We have tons of concrete evidence of kids learning to be excellent at programming and understanding computers without directly using one. It happened with the kids I described.

So give your kid an Apple-II or TRS-80 then?

I'm pretty sure we ran these experiments in France in the late 80s/early 90s, it was pretty clear that exposure to real computers was useless in elementary school, and even in middle school technology teachers weren't a big fans of teaching computer skills before 14 (basically around the same time as they taught tin soldering).

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.

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