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."
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.
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 .
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 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.
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 :)
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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 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?
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].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.ph/borIf
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."
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.
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 .
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 read a quote that I think is analogous to AI usage. Knowledge cannot be transferred it can only be learned.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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..
So why I Dont learn how semiconductors work before I do JavaScript? Or assembly code? I can cheat straight to JavaScript
It's like banning teachers or textbooks from school. LLMs are the single greatest learning technology ever created.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
You wouldn't be taking applied statistics if you didn't pass basic arithmetic.
Good. Kids need to learn how to think before letting other stuff do it for them.
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”
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.
It's already beginning. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12232635/
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.
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.
AI has been a profoundly useful tool in my learning.
Are you in an elementary school right now? If not, then I fail to see how this is relevant to kids using it there.
The well-resourced kids will continue using AI at home and the disadvantaged kids will get left even further behind.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I remember a scene in Star Trek, where an AI is used to help teach the little Vulcan kids.
Star Trek isn't real.
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.
“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.
Seems like a well designed policy. Currently for one year and up to the middle school level.
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.
Good. We need this everywhere.
*moves back to NYC*
I’m seriously transferring offices to be in NYC. My taxes are going up significantly and I don’t care.
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?
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.
This is the right way. We need to teach critical thinking skills and not train kids to be helpless drones.
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 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?
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...
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...
Yep, just like the tech elite. Peter Thiel limits his kids to 90 min/week screentime.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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).
So give your kid an Apple-II or TRS-80 then?
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.