I haven't felt as concerned about this news article as others.
IME, schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes.
I work in the ed tech parent-teacher communication space. We offer automatic translations of communication to other languages via Google Translate. Google Translate uses AI. Schools come to us and tell us we need to disable all our AI features. We do. Then they freak out asking where their feature went. We explain. They say they don't want to lose translations they just don't want to deal with "AI stuff"
It's not clear to me if this stance from Google is a new thing. Did they recently add AI to search and are trying to use bundling behaviors to incept AI into areas it wouldn't be? Or did policy recently become rabid against the use of AI without fully appreciating the ask and ramifications? Both?
Schools want to control whether Gemini and other generative AI is available to students.
I'm a middle school science teacher. We've already moved much of our work to paper because of this issue, but there is so much good science that should be done using computer simulations and other tools. So I do have computers out for some lessons.
So now, on a lesson where a computer is out, a student can instantly type in a question on the Google search bar, get an AI answer, and write it down with zero thoughts traveling through their heads.
Yes, redesign the lesson. Yes, if computers are out don't ask questions that an AI can answer. But you know what? Instead of needing to cut out everything that makes a lesson a productive struggle for kids, it would be great just to not have Gemini cheat for them.
> Schools want to control whether Gemini and other generative AI is available to students.
I really wish more articles and social media posts point this out, but a lot of writers either don't know this distinction or are going with a more "clickbaity" angle on purpose.
> that makes a lesson a productive struggle for kids, it would be great just to not have Gemini cheat for them
Is there a possibility that in that productive struggle, certain kids just give up and decide either education as a whole isn't for them, or a certain subject isn't for them?
Is that a good thing or a bad thing for the kid?
Is that a good thing or a bad thing for society?
Could we have an equally productive struggle while fully integrating Gemini in all its glory? If yes, how would that look like?
What people mean by not wanting AI - what you said - is so brain dead obvious that to claim not to understand is an absolute lie.
This reminds me of the Microsoft antitrust suit. Microsoft claimed Explorer couldn’t be “removed” because other apps used it internally. No shit Sherlock, what people wanted was the icon removed from the desktop and the direct browsing experience to be user’s choice.
This is basically pedantry, they want generative AI and AI search off. If anyone is confused then you should be asking more questions to understand the desires.
Yeah it's pretty likely that schools are adding strict no AI clauses in their Google Workplace contracts and Google's lawyers are including search in that definition just to be safe. If they then want to enable it manually, sure.
> schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes
Honestly it's too early to know.
Also, schools are in the business of imparting knowledge and schools in the U.S. are extremely expensive. Any parent knows the additional fees, supplies etc most schools demand on top of their taxes that go to the school district.
If you take the daycare aspect out of it, a $500/mo ChatGPT subscription is noise by comparison. A student doesn't have to be lucky to have a receptive teacher that has enough office hours and the interest to help the student. ChatGPT is available 24x7. A teacher takes days off, falls sick and has favorites.
If AI enters the school with full force, bulk of the teachers are likely going to be replaced by various care staff.
There will still likely be some human assistants around who will be the new "teachers" but the current format of everyone staring at a whiteboard is going to change forever in this future.
The concept of "grades" (as in K-12) are also likely going to go away replaced by cohorts, simply because every student has their own "teacher" who understands their specific needs and can pay them all the attention they need assisted by a human adult.
One child can be in one cohort for English and an entirelydifferent cohort for Math.
Have you personally, ever used AI to teach you something? What was it and how was your experience? Was is the same, superior or inferior to a standard, typical, in-class learning experience?
I have certain ly asked about topics i am not familiar with. It is difficult to say i learned anything better than a regular google search at best. However, I am not sure what lacks in the inclasslearningexperience that needs wholesale replacement.
We could literally build "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" now. I'm sure someone is working on it. Whether that will be a net positive for students is unknown.
AI is indispensable teacher already. Patient, kind, will trying myriad of different angles to explain concepts that are still foreign to the pupil. My 13-year old uses AI all the time for studying, review, quizzing, grasping new concepts... Compared to humans, AI is far superior in many regards. I am very patient by nature but my kid is just so curious about everything and I get peeved when I am unable to explain something to her in terms she understands. AI will go one way and then another way and then another way and then will provide questions and quizzes and ... to make sure concepts are grasped correctly, with additional things to take a concept further. I would never say that private company should replace teachers with the chatbot, AI is "not a private company" in general and there are many ways to use AI which is not tied to some one (or two or three) private companies. But not using AI as a tool in this day/age I think is quite silly
Ai, is not a private company but the providers that would get the contract are. If open source or even open wieght llms are likely then I would be willing to concede a tiny bit more. The only nonprofit I can think of making genAi hid the weights and went for profit as soon as it was viable, you can see how this is cause for skepticism.
Can you see how "explicitly requested (by staff) machine translation of school communications into parents' languages" is different from "students had the LLM write their term paper"?
This really isn't complicated. Students should be able to search for something and get back the "ten blue links" which they are forced to actually click through and read, without an AI overview or any other kind of conversational chatbot.
Approximately no one cares if Google is using an LLM internally to select those ten links. Maybe it creates some complications for lawyers around the definition of "no AI", but if the parties are aligned in spirit this should be easy to work out.
Schools should just be able to disable the AI overview.
Okay but the internet isn’t really a series of searchable documents anymore. Even when it is, what use is searching through 50 web pages to research other than tedium? If you want to practice manual research, restrict the kids to physical books only. Otherwise you’re just teaching them how much better AI is than Google search.
Education is going to be left in tatters after AIs creep into every facet of (tech-enabled) life.
Big tech doesn’t care about teaching people to think. All the money is in the capture of attention, and AI will only make everything 100x more convenient and a no-brainer (quite literally) to pick the hard way of thought and effort for just about anything… as long as the user is caught. Education has fundamentally the opposite goal.
Public, free education will. People who can afford it are sending their kids to schools with very strict technology policies, stricter than what is possible in many public schools nowadays (for a number of reasons).
It's very much a "for the masses" mindset with the people who gain from this kind of relationship between technology and public schools.
Public free education is already in tatters in many neighborhoods and has been for many decades. People already pay a lot of money to live in a neighborhood with expensive housing prices in order to price out from living there people whose children would make the local public school worse (by e.g. getting into physical fights). People sometimes pay for a private school to avoid this because it is cheaper than a house in a neighborhood with people whose children make good students to spend time in close physical proximity with.
> Education is going to be left in tatters after AIs creep into every facet of (tech-enabled) life.
If big tech achieves true AGI, expect public education to be completely gutted within a generation, or perhaps ended entirely. Whatever is left will be little more than indoctrination for an idiocracy-like population.
If the wealthy elite has no more use for educated workers, they'd rather take a tax cut than pay to educate your kids.
It’s so funny how schools are consistently 20 years behind on things.
When I was in school, you were restricted from citing sources on the internet (regardless of reputation/quality) and had to look it up in a book instead. Now, apparently, you can’t make school work without searches, but don’t think about using AI.
> It’s so funny how schools are consistently 20 years behind on things.
Not entirely accurate. Public schools might be consistently 20 years behind on things but Private schools certainly are usually pursuing some form of bleeding edge. That is in part why parents send to private schools.
That is by design: Public schools don't get to pick and choose who attends and thus don't get to pick and choose who the parents are and thus, what the environment at home is like.
15 years ago WikiPedia was extremely controversial. They were full of unverified articles, claims and agendas - the 2000's equivalent of "hallucinations".
As WikiPedia has gained inertia, popular articles have gained more eyeballs, more attention where those issues are mostly gone.
In 2026, we haven't yet figured out how to bulid LLMs that will safely tutor students without also telling them how not to make their own drugs or to kill themselves because Dad always screams at them when they get home and they want it to stop.
Even if an LLM had a 1% error rate, in Public schools that have thousands of students per county, someone is going to die from what an LLM said and that one lawsuit is going to bankrupt that school.
If that’s the claimed concern, why do the students have any internet access then? Unsavory information is only a single google search and click away - while that doesn’t have the “satanic panic” aspect of LLMs, it’s the exact same information.
> Unsavory information is only a single google search and click away
I encourage you to try and access the internet through a school's firewall. If you think Fable restricts you from looking controversial topics up, a typical public school's firewall is likely even more restrictive than the Great Firewall of China.
The only thing it has in common with the earlier examples is that it's a new thing. Wow, what an insightful observation!
Schools should get all over this in a different way though. Use AI intentionally as part of teaching why not to rely on it. Develop courses that explicitly expose the failure modes that aren't obvious (and which both AI companies and all manner of shitty managers and c-levels will avoid admitting at all costs).
You don't really have any other time in life where you can afford the kind of lengthy undivided attention to study something beyond it's surface appearance and immediate/direct effects.
How do you not recognize that it’s a new tool that will materially shape how people work 10 years from now? For most office workers, I guarantee they will interact with it more often than a calculator.
Consider a CS student applying for a programming job but saying “nope, I absolutely won’t use any AI to code” - do you think they’ll be a competitive candidate at most companies? It’ll be like an Excel-sceptic financial analyst: you can do it by hand, but you won’t be able to compete.
In the context of child education, it doesn't matter at all if it will "materially shape how people work in 10 years".
The skills needed to keep up with those "material changes" fit in one thrice-a-week elective in one semester, akin to a touch typing or Microsoft Office class. It does not need to saturate every class on every topic for every year.
But what happens when it does saturate education that way is that students no longer absorb the foundational knowledge and process skills that we need them to bring with them as they become our colleagues and neighbors some day. That's very troubling.
Childhood education is not a checklist over generating history papers and trigonometry proofs by whatever means possible. It's a means of inducting young people into a functional society by conveying them civic, art, and technical knowledge and inspiring them to discover that learning is something they can do throughout their lives and that it makes them more capable.
Indisciminately letting them skip that process by asking the magic blathering box for all the answers as soon as they're asked gets in the way of that.
"In the context of child education, it doesn't matter at all if it will "materially shape how people work in 10 years"." is fundamentally wrong.
It absolutely matters. That's the entire justification for why society spends what it does on education: to enable individuals to contribute to society when they grow up.
K-12 education is not supposed to be a liberal arts education in the classics. It's already drifted too far away from imparting useful life and employment skills.
Hi there -- I wrote this post. What's deceptive about it? I mentioned that Google walked it back some and even link to it. But what educators that I've spoken to want is no AI Overviews in Google Search, which still isn't an option.
> Google's explanation, from Chris Phillips, its vice president for education, speaking to The New York Times, is that "Search and AI are deeply integrated," so one cannot be switched off without the other.
Reminds me of when a certain Redmond company tied its browser into every aspect of its OS to prevent decoupling. History rhymes.
And it's so easy to see that it's bullshit. Just go to the web tab on Google search and there's the results without an AI overview. The search results still use conventional algorithms, the AI overview is an LLM interpretation of the search results, unless the query is so simple the small LLM can answer itself.
I like Kagi and I agree with the sentiment in this post, but having worked in EdTech, I'd be very surprised if any school or school group found budget, or even understood the need, for de-googled search. I would love to be proven wrong though.
It's on their website, the most ok place for them to advertise themselves. If you walk into a Porsche dealership and start counting the logos - don't be surprised if it takes a while :)
It's more like: the message being pushed hard is immediately undercut by the fact that this is just an unapologetic ad. Ironically, that deflates the whole point of the ad itself. It's hard to take Kagi's ethical position seriously when it basically boils down to, "Listen, all we want is whatever is best for kids- and hey! Turns out we offer just that for $5 per month per student :D"
I think that's a bit reductive - their product has always been a more pro-privacy/pro-user search engine and as a business they have to charge for it. I don't think that means because they talk about ethics they can't also mention that's essentially their mission - even if that means they hope you'll give them money.
>even if that means they hope you'll give them money
Now this is a reductive statement. This is a for-profit business we're talking about. They don't just "hope" you'll give them money; they actively try to get you to buy their products. And they do so, primarily, through advertisements, which is what this is.
We're probably just arguing semantics, but the point I'm trying to make is that there's plenty to discuss when it comes to using products like search engines in school and there's plenty of people having those discussions. We don't need to be having that discussion in the form of a company's advertisement.
If they wanted to make a post discussing these issues without awkwardly and forwardly promoting themselves, then I'd have much less to say about it. But this page is ridiculous in how it is trying to present this stuff.
The AI response also doesn't really provide you effective answers unless you have a decent understanding and critical thinking capability.
Same holds true for when we were learning about how Google works. My generation had to learn about how to sift through the results in order to actually understand whether the information is accurate. Similarly, you still have to do this when you receive an AI response from Google.
Sort of. Maybe the answer is 100% accurate 85% of the time. So if you trust this one source, you will do pretty well most of the time. That seems completely different from having different sources each time and having to decide which are accurate.
Do you really need anything at all from the web nowadays to learn the school curriculum? Why? Can't we provide students with the material needed to study? Are we teaching kids the latest published papers?
This is desirable for some parts of a school curriculum. Take high school math: we ask students to solve arbitrary problems with a limited set of tools (geometry, algebra, calculus). We don't ask them to solve problems that require tools they don't have (matrix math, differential equations, set theory). The point of high school math is not to perform DSP (another tool) or invent theorems (a research project).
For other parts of the curriculum, research is practically _required_. I'm specifically thinking of a literature class that I took, where one assignment was to come up with a theory around the writing of a book of my choosing, then find and synthesize sources that helped prove or disprove it. Here the curriculum doesn't even provide the book, let alone the sources. This was as much an exercise in discovery as it was in critical thinking and creativity - you were expected to use the school library, both paper and digital journals, the Internet (albeit policies like "no Wikipedia" and "only .org and .gov domains" were still around), and so on to find your sources. I'd much prefer this kind of assignment to a "here's the book, report on your opinion on it" variety.
(For what it's worth: my assignment was a refusal of J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for the World Wars.)
Finished in 2010 and I'm completely out of the loop, I know. Yes I used the web and wikipedia to copy and paste for the usual group project/powerpoint, computer class where we play around with gimp etc but that was a very very minor part, specially during the mandatory school years in my country, before age 16, 17.
But my point is: I absolutely could have learnt all that the school curriculum mandates with pre Microsoft Encarta tech and I don't think current curriculum gets outdated so fast that a book can't hold the needed information for a school year... It's great that students have internet and AI and do whatever they want after school, but why does the school needs to provide/use so much of it that this news is even an issue?
I don't understand this at all. To provide children with a good education, you don't need Google search. You need a good teacher who will encourage curiosity of the students and some basic materials.
I don't buy this post. It's just assumes that what Google is doing is harmful so that people will feel good about Kagi. Maybe Kagi's policy is better, but that doesn't negate the fact that Google denying search to students is holding education for ransom as the title suggests.
Of course, it IS a bad thing that Google is trying to force everyone to use AI.
A big part of education should involve preparing students to operate in future jobs and with the world. You absolutely need to know how to search the internet, discriminate between reputable and poor-quality sources, and arguably to use AI.
The purpose of education shouldn’t be to give an appreciation of Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake - it should be to speak and write the common language of the country, understand math, and prepare for their role in the real world. That role will involve the internet: only the Amish can really get away with someone else running their web presence.
Our school bans wikipedia on their network, doesn't buy any online encyclopedias, rarely buys text books, and tells the kids to "research" stuff on their own - aka google search.
Then it could be a good thing if Google restricts search to your school, wouldn't it? Because then the school would be forced to acknowledge the mediocre job they're doing and do something else. If your school already does such a poor job, then perhaps you should hope that the tech they do use collapses because then they'd actually have to do something useful for a change.
If you mean to say kids don't need computers or the internet for learning anymore then no, that ship sailed 20 years ago. We aren't only talking about 3rd graders here. Plenty of high schoolers are studying advanced topics and doing independent project work and research that goes well beyond the 3 encyclopedias in their school library.
I'm not particularly pro-Google, but I think it's worth giving them the benefit of the doubt here.
Google Search is currently atrocious. Their "Gemini-assisted" search is not without problems but is at least an order of magnitude more useful. Google has basically admitted defeat on their legacy search indexing and is more or less all-in on the using Gemini. If they legitimately believe it's the best version of the product, giving students the inferior legacy version was not their first thought.
Part of the issue here is Google's own self-imposed branding problems. They want to call everything Gemini, but in reality their search product is very different use case than their person assistant, which is different than their standalone Gemini experience.
EDIT: Downvote ALERT: I'm being downvoted so heavily I soon won't be able to respond to comments for atleast 8h. Sorry if I don't respond until tomorrow, I read every comment!
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This is a blessing in disguise. The worst thing we can do is build an entire generation of humans who are uniquely dependent on a specific company (or even 5) to help them think, research and learn.
From there, it's incredibly easy to have forever customers for Gemini in a variation of Black Mirror Season 7, Episode 1: "Common People". In there, the wife is Amanda (Rashida Jones), and her husband is Mike (Chris O’Dowd). Amanda receives a treatment called "Rivermind" that restores her brain function but requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo.
=======
Spoiler alert!
Over time, increasingly expensive tiers, worsening restrictions, and involuntary spoken advertisements make their lives untenable. Eventually, Mike ends Amanda's life at her request, while she is unaware during one of those ads.
Spoiler alert!
=======
This doesn't mean we embrace the other extreme and instead raise an entire generation that doesn't know what will be considered basic tools like Excel and Word have been since the 2000's.
Infact, what would be fantastic if we, as a society, invested in (S)LLM tools that every student "owns" and can "tune" to their liking. Almost like an assistant that "grows" with them.
The idea is that these tools are theirs, in their control and for them to manage.
Unlike Fable, it doesn't arbitrarily stop a student interested in reversing software or hardware from learning the craft because they are not a licensed researcher.
Apologies. I am fencing it with a spoiler. I wrongly assumed anyone who's a fan was caught up with the episode released on April, 2025, nearly 2 years ago.
What’s the point of that? We don’t make students write their own dictionary or build their own calculator as a prerequisite for using those tools. To your point about Excel and Word, most students from 10/20 years ago don’t know what Lotus is or how to execute commands in the terminal, but are still able to use computers effectively in their lives. There’s a multitude of search engines and LLM providers available - if schools don’t like what Google is doing, they are free to swap.
> if schools don’t like what Google is doing, they are free to swap.
that wasn't my point at all. The point I was making is these tools make forever renters of intelligence. That's why I mentioned the Black Mirror episode.
It's not enough to have options in which service to rent forever.
Imagine if you had to rent your own own dictionary or calculator forever.
How useful is a set of encyclopedias from 1930? How useful is a set of encyclopedias from 1989 to answer a question about Russia today? How useful is a front end UI textbook from 2005, today?
You can choose to lock in a choice now: download a list of the top 10,000 websites or grab a local LLM. But realize that you will have to pay again as it ages out of relevance, or be left with a worthless out of date tool. The reality is you have to pay, forever (ooh, scary) for services. That’s what you’re renting: knowledge as a service. Whether it’s an LLM, continued program updates, or just an up-to-date encyclopedia.
If you're making the argument that knowledge has a shelf life and so you're always paying to update that knowledge, I urge you to consider if those payments are onetime or recurring.
It also seems you are overindexing on current, volatile events. Unless you're in Quantum space, Newton's laws haven't changed in a while. Sorting algorithms still function the same as does the x86 instruction set or how the human body reacts to ibuprofen.
Regardless of how much Google walks back, the real dystopian atrocity IMO is that your kids using Google Search at school get ads in their results that cannot be disabled.
Your 13 year old researching in their school library sees more ads than you do (assuming you use an ad blocker).
You and I are missing something. I made a similar point as you did and I'm being downvoted so heavily I soon won't be able to respond to comments for atleast 8h.
They need search (not necessarily Google) for accessing essentially any resource on the internet. How many URLs do you know by memory? How many URLs do would you learn just by seeing a link from another site?
I haven't felt as concerned about this news article as others.
IME, schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes.
I work in the ed tech parent-teacher communication space. We offer automatic translations of communication to other languages via Google Translate. Google Translate uses AI. Schools come to us and tell us we need to disable all our AI features. We do. Then they freak out asking where their feature went. We explain. They say they don't want to lose translations they just don't want to deal with "AI stuff"
It's not clear to me if this stance from Google is a new thing. Did they recently add AI to search and are trying to use bundling behaviors to incept AI into areas it wouldn't be? Or did policy recently become rabid against the use of AI without fully appreciating the ask and ramifications? Both?
Schools want to control whether Gemini and other generative AI is available to students.
I'm a middle school science teacher. We've already moved much of our work to paper because of this issue, but there is so much good science that should be done using computer simulations and other tools. So I do have computers out for some lessons.
So now, on a lesson where a computer is out, a student can instantly type in a question on the Google search bar, get an AI answer, and write it down with zero thoughts traveling through their heads.
Yes, redesign the lesson. Yes, if computers are out don't ask questions that an AI can answer. But you know what? Instead of needing to cut out everything that makes a lesson a productive struggle for kids, it would be great just to not have Gemini cheat for them.
> Schools want to control whether Gemini and other generative AI is available to students.
I really wish more articles and social media posts point this out, but a lot of writers either don't know this distinction or are going with a more "clickbaity" angle on purpose.
> that makes a lesson a productive struggle for kids, it would be great just to not have Gemini cheat for them
Is there a possibility that in that productive struggle, certain kids just give up and decide either education as a whole isn't for them, or a certain subject isn't for them?
Is that a good thing or a bad thing for the kid?
Is that a good thing or a bad thing for society?
Could we have an equally productive struggle while fully integrating Gemini in all its glory? If yes, how would that look like?
What people mean by not wanting AI - what you said - is so brain dead obvious that to claim not to understand is an absolute lie.
This reminds me of the Microsoft antitrust suit. Microsoft claimed Explorer couldn’t be “removed” because other apps used it internally. No shit Sherlock, what people wanted was the icon removed from the desktop and the direct browsing experience to be user’s choice.
This is basically pedantry, they want generative AI and AI search off. If anyone is confused then you should be asking more questions to understand the desires.
Yeah it's pretty likely that schools are adding strict no AI clauses in their Google Workplace contracts and Google's lawyers are including search in that definition just to be safe. If they then want to enable it manually, sure.
> schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes
Honestly it's too early to know.
Also, schools are in the business of imparting knowledge and schools in the U.S. are extremely expensive. Any parent knows the additional fees, supplies etc most schools demand on top of their taxes that go to the school district.
If you take the daycare aspect out of it, a $500/mo ChatGPT subscription is noise by comparison. A student doesn't have to be lucky to have a receptive teacher that has enough office hours and the interest to help the student. ChatGPT is available 24x7. A teacher takes days off, falls sick and has favorites.
If AI enters the school with full force, bulk of the teachers are likely going to be replaced by various care staff.
There will still likely be some human assistants around who will be the new "teachers" but the current format of everyone staring at a whiteboard is going to change forever in this future.
The concept of "grades" (as in K-12) are also likely going to go away replaced by cohorts, simply because every student has their own "teacher" who understands their specific needs and can pay them all the attention they need assisted by a human adult.
One child can be in one cohort for English and an entirely different cohort for Math.
You believe that the ai will teach? Would you want a private company to replace all teachers with a chatbot, if it can?
Have you personally, ever used AI to teach you something? What was it and how was your experience? Was is the same, superior or inferior to a standard, typical, in-class learning experience?
I have certain ly asked about topics i am not familiar with. It is difficult to say i learned anything better than a regular google search at best. However, I am not sure what lacks in the inclasslearningexperience that needs wholesale replacement.
We could literally build "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" now. I'm sure someone is working on it. Whether that will be a net positive for students is unknown.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/172835/the-diamond-...
AI is indispensable teacher already. Patient, kind, will trying myriad of different angles to explain concepts that are still foreign to the pupil. My 13-year old uses AI all the time for studying, review, quizzing, grasping new concepts... Compared to humans, AI is far superior in many regards. I am very patient by nature but my kid is just so curious about everything and I get peeved when I am unable to explain something to her in terms she understands. AI will go one way and then another way and then another way and then will provide questions and quizzes and ... to make sure concepts are grasped correctly, with additional things to take a concept further. I would never say that private company should replace teachers with the chatbot, AI is "not a private company" in general and there are many ways to use AI which is not tied to some one (or two or three) private companies. But not using AI as a tool in this day/age I think is quite silly
Ai, is not a private company but the providers that would get the contract are. If open source or even open wieght llms are likely then I would be willing to concede a tiny bit more. The only nonprofit I can think of making genAi hid the weights and went for profit as soon as it was viable, you can see how this is cause for skepticism.
> If open source or even open wieght llms are likely then I would be willing to concede a tiny bit more
And this is exactly the argument I make on this thread. You might be unable to see it though because apparently it's a deeply unpopular take.
Agreed wholeheatedly. Unfortunately, school administrators, teachers and a lot of parents are absolutely opposed to this insight.
I made a main comment to this very post with a similar perspective that's downvoted so heavily I can't even see it while logged out.
Can you see how "explicitly requested (by staff) machine translation of school communications into parents' languages" is different from "students had the LLM write their term paper"?
This really isn't complicated. Students should be able to search for something and get back the "ten blue links" which they are forced to actually click through and read, without an AI overview or any other kind of conversational chatbot.
Approximately no one cares if Google is using an LLM internally to select those ten links. Maybe it creates some complications for lawyers around the definition of "no AI", but if the parties are aligned in spirit this should be easy to work out.
Schools should just be able to disable the AI overview.
Okay but the internet isn’t really a series of searchable documents anymore. Even when it is, what use is searching through 50 web pages to research other than tedium? If you want to practice manual research, restrict the kids to physical books only. Otherwise you’re just teaching them how much better AI is than Google search.
To me, it sounds like you are intentionally obtuse here. They know what they want, you know what they want, but you are playing gotcha with them.
Education is going to be left in tatters after AIs creep into every facet of (tech-enabled) life.
Big tech doesn’t care about teaching people to think. All the money is in the capture of attention, and AI will only make everything 100x more convenient and a no-brainer (quite literally) to pick the hard way of thought and effort for just about anything… as long as the user is caught. Education has fundamentally the opposite goal.
> Education is going to be left in tatters
Public, free education will. People who can afford it are sending their kids to schools with very strict technology policies, stricter than what is possible in many public schools nowadays (for a number of reasons).
It's very much a "for the masses" mindset with the people who gain from this kind of relationship between technology and public schools.
Public free education is already in tatters in many neighborhoods and has been for many decades. People already pay a lot of money to live in a neighborhood with expensive housing prices in order to price out from living there people whose children would make the local public school worse (by e.g. getting into physical fights). People sometimes pay for a private school to avoid this because it is cheaper than a house in a neighborhood with people whose children make good students to spend time in close physical proximity with.
> Education is going to be left in tatters after AIs creep into every facet of (tech-enabled) life.
If big tech achieves true AGI, expect public education to be completely gutted within a generation, or perhaps ended entirely. Whatever is left will be little more than indoctrination for an idiocracy-like population.
If the wealthy elite has no more use for educated workers, they'd rather take a tax cut than pay to educate your kids.
I think you can conclude something even stronger: big tech doesn't *want* people to think, at all.
It’s so funny how schools are consistently 20 years behind on things.
When I was in school, you were restricted from citing sources on the internet (regardless of reputation/quality) and had to look it up in a book instead. Now, apparently, you can’t make school work without searches, but don’t think about using AI.
> It’s so funny how schools are consistently 20 years behind on things.
Not entirely accurate. Public schools might be consistently 20 years behind on things but Private schools certainly are usually pursuing some form of bleeding edge. That is in part why parents send to private schools.
That is by design: Public schools don't get to pick and choose who attends and thus don't get to pick and choose who the parents are and thus, what the environment at home is like.
15 years ago WikiPedia was extremely controversial. They were full of unverified articles, claims and agendas - the 2000's equivalent of "hallucinations".
As WikiPedia has gained inertia, popular articles have gained more eyeballs, more attention where those issues are mostly gone.
In 2026, we haven't yet figured out how to bulid LLMs that will safely tutor students without also telling them how not to make their own drugs or to kill themselves because Dad always screams at them when they get home and they want it to stop.
Even if an LLM had a 1% error rate, in Public schools that have thousands of students per county, someone is going to die from what an LLM said and that one lawsuit is going to bankrupt that school.
If that’s the claimed concern, why do the students have any internet access then? Unsavory information is only a single google search and click away - while that doesn’t have the “satanic panic” aspect of LLMs, it’s the exact same information.
> Unsavory information is only a single google search and click away
I encourage you to try and access the internet through a school's firewall. If you think Fable restricts you from looking controversial topics up, a typical public school's firewall is likely even more restrictive than the Great Firewall of China.
Why do you think it's funny?
It's not the new calculator nor the new index.
The only thing it has in common with the earlier examples is that it's a new thing. Wow, what an insightful observation!
Schools should get all over this in a different way though. Use AI intentionally as part of teaching why not to rely on it. Develop courses that explicitly expose the failure modes that aren't obvious (and which both AI companies and all manner of shitty managers and c-levels will avoid admitting at all costs).
You don't really have any other time in life where you can afford the kind of lengthy undivided attention to study something beyond it's surface appearance and immediate/direct effects.
How do you not recognize that it’s a new tool that will materially shape how people work 10 years from now? For most office workers, I guarantee they will interact with it more often than a calculator.
Consider a CS student applying for a programming job but saying “nope, I absolutely won’t use any AI to code” - do you think they’ll be a competitive candidate at most companies? It’ll be like an Excel-sceptic financial analyst: you can do it by hand, but you won’t be able to compete.
In the context of child education, it doesn't matter at all if it will "materially shape how people work in 10 years".
The skills needed to keep up with those "material changes" fit in one thrice-a-week elective in one semester, akin to a touch typing or Microsoft Office class. It does not need to saturate every class on every topic for every year.
But what happens when it does saturate education that way is that students no longer absorb the foundational knowledge and process skills that we need them to bring with them as they become our colleagues and neighbors some day. That's very troubling.
Childhood education is not a checklist over generating history papers and trigonometry proofs by whatever means possible. It's a means of inducting young people into a functional society by conveying them civic, art, and technical knowledge and inspiring them to discover that learning is something they can do throughout their lives and that it makes them more capable.
Indisciminately letting them skip that process by asking the magic blathering box for all the answers as soon as they're asked gets in the way of that.
"In the context of child education, it doesn't matter at all if it will "materially shape how people work in 10 years"." is fundamentally wrong.
It absolutely matters. That's the entire justification for why society spends what it does on education: to enable individuals to contribute to society when they grow up.
K-12 education is not supposed to be a liberal arts education in the classics. It's already drifted too far away from imparting useful life and employment skills.
I recognize that many people will treat it as such.
It's ironic that Kagi uses confusion (as to not say deception) to market itself as the more ethical brand.
Google clarified that admins can turn on and off each of the options independently, including search without AI.
I don't like to defend trillion-dollar companies in my free time, but what Kagi is trying to do with this piece is not good.
Hi there -- I wrote this post. What's deceptive about it? I mentioned that Google walked it back some and even link to it. But what educators that I've spoken to want is no AI Overviews in Google Search, which still isn't an option.
Agree with what they are saying but no school district in America is adding a $10 per month per user subscription to do internet searches.
I'm sympathetic to the message, but surely somewhere on the Kagi stairs we should see the "share holders" that we see on Google's stairs?
> Google's explanation, from Chris Phillips, its vice president for education, speaking to The New York Times, is that "Search and AI are deeply integrated," so one cannot be switched off without the other.
Reminds me of when a certain Redmond company tied its browser into every aspect of its OS to prevent decoupling. History rhymes.
And it's so easy to see that it's bullshit. Just go to the web tab on Google search and there's the results without an AI overview. The search results still use conventional algorithms, the AI overview is an LLM interpretation of the search results, unless the query is so simple the small LLM can answer itself.
I like Kagi and I agree with the sentiment in this post, but having worked in EdTech, I'd be very surprised if any school or school group found budget, or even understood the need, for de-googled search. I would love to be proven wrong though.
I agree with the premise, but this item is a lot of advertisement for Kagi
It's on their website, the most ok place for them to advertise themselves. If you walk into a Porsche dealership and start counting the logos - don't be surprised if it takes a while :)
It's more like: the message being pushed hard is immediately undercut by the fact that this is just an unapologetic ad. Ironically, that deflates the whole point of the ad itself. It's hard to take Kagi's ethical position seriously when it basically boils down to, "Listen, all we want is whatever is best for kids- and hey! Turns out we offer just that for $5 per month per student :D"
I think that's a bit reductive - their product has always been a more pro-privacy/pro-user search engine and as a business they have to charge for it. I don't think that means because they talk about ethics they can't also mention that's essentially their mission - even if that means they hope you'll give them money.
>even if that means they hope you'll give them money
Now this is a reductive statement. This is a for-profit business we're talking about. They don't just "hope" you'll give them money; they actively try to get you to buy their products. And they do so, primarily, through advertisements, which is what this is.
We're probably just arguing semantics, but the point I'm trying to make is that there's plenty to discuss when it comes to using products like search engines in school and there's plenty of people having those discussions. We don't need to be having that discussion in the form of a company's advertisement.
If they wanted to make a post discussing these issues without awkwardly and forwardly promoting themselves, then I'd have much less to say about it. But this page is ridiculous in how it is trying to present this stuff.
I think the effect of AI on education is transformative, not destructive, despite what the public vibe seems to be.
Google already provided us with all the answers and Google's AI section is not much different. It just gives you the result faster.
> Google already provided us with all the answers and Google's AI section is not much different.
Unless you simply mean “answers” as in a response to a query, then true.
Otherwise, provides search results, not “all the answers” to our questions.
Google’s AI overview speaks with an inappropriate amount of authority for an educational setting, particularly one involving children.
Skepticism and incredulity are more important than ever.
The AI response also doesn't really provide you effective answers unless you have a decent understanding and critical thinking capability.
Same holds true for when we were learning about how Google works. My generation had to learn about how to sift through the results in order to actually understand whether the information is accurate. Similarly, you still have to do this when you receive an AI response from Google.
Sort of. Maybe the answer is 100% accurate 85% of the time. So if you trust this one source, you will do pretty well most of the time. That seems completely different from having different sources each time and having to decide which are accurate.
> The AI response also doesn't really provide you effective answers unless you have a decent understanding and critical thinking capability.
Neither does any book used in schools. Neither does the teacher.
That’s my point. It presents something that has the shape of an answer, but quite often isn’t.
Do you really need anything at all from the web nowadays to learn the school curriculum? Why? Can't we provide students with the material needed to study? Are we teaching kids the latest published papers?
This is desirable for some parts of a school curriculum. Take high school math: we ask students to solve arbitrary problems with a limited set of tools (geometry, algebra, calculus). We don't ask them to solve problems that require tools they don't have (matrix math, differential equations, set theory). The point of high school math is not to perform DSP (another tool) or invent theorems (a research project).
For other parts of the curriculum, research is practically _required_. I'm specifically thinking of a literature class that I took, where one assignment was to come up with a theory around the writing of a book of my choosing, then find and synthesize sources that helped prove or disprove it. Here the curriculum doesn't even provide the book, let alone the sources. This was as much an exercise in discovery as it was in critical thinking and creativity - you were expected to use the school library, both paper and digital journals, the Internet (albeit policies like "no Wikipedia" and "only .org and .gov domains" were still around), and so on to find your sources. I'd much prefer this kind of assignment to a "here's the book, report on your opinion on it" variety.
(For what it's worth: my assignment was a refusal of J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for the World Wars.)
When is the last time you entered a school?
Finished in 2010 and I'm completely out of the loop, I know. Yes I used the web and wikipedia to copy and paste for the usual group project/powerpoint, computer class where we play around with gimp etc but that was a very very minor part, specially during the mandatory school years in my country, before age 16, 17.
But my point is: I absolutely could have learnt all that the school curriculum mandates with pre Microsoft Encarta tech and I don't think current curriculum gets outdated so fast that a book can't hold the needed information for a school year... It's great that students have internet and AI and do whatever they want after school, but why does the school needs to provide/use so much of it that this news is even an issue?
I don't understand this at all. To provide children with a good education, you don't need Google search. You need a good teacher who will encourage curiosity of the students and some basic materials.
I don't buy this post. It's just assumes that what Google is doing is harmful so that people will feel good about Kagi. Maybe Kagi's policy is better, but that doesn't negate the fact that Google denying search to students is holding education for ransom as the title suggests.
Of course, it IS a bad thing that Google is trying to force everyone to use AI.
A big part of education should involve preparing students to operate in future jobs and with the world. You absolutely need to know how to search the internet, discriminate between reputable and poor-quality sources, and arguably to use AI.
The purpose of education shouldn’t be to give an appreciation of Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake - it should be to speak and write the common language of the country, understand math, and prepare for their role in the real world. That role will involve the internet: only the Amish can really get away with someone else running their web presence.
Our school bans wikipedia on their network, doesn't buy any online encyclopedias, rarely buys text books, and tells the kids to "research" stuff on their own - aka google search.
Then it could be a good thing if Google restricts search to your school, wouldn't it? Because then the school would be forced to acknowledge the mediocre job they're doing and do something else. If your school already does such a poor job, then perhaps you should hope that the tech they do use collapses because then they'd actually have to do something useful for a change.
yes I would love it
If you mean to say kids don't need computers or the internet for learning anymore then no, that ship sailed 20 years ago. We aren't only talking about 3rd graders here. Plenty of high schoolers are studying advanced topics and doing independent project work and research that goes well beyond the 3 encyclopedias in their school library.
I'm not particularly pro-Google, but I think it's worth giving them the benefit of the doubt here.
Google Search is currently atrocious. Their "Gemini-assisted" search is not without problems but is at least an order of magnitude more useful. Google has basically admitted defeat on their legacy search indexing and is more or less all-in on the using Gemini. If they legitimately believe it's the best version of the product, giving students the inferior legacy version was not their first thought.
Part of the issue here is Google's own self-imposed branding problems. They want to call everything Gemini, but in reality their search product is very different use case than their person assistant, which is different than their standalone Gemini experience.
EDIT: Downvote ALERT: I'm being downvoted so heavily I soon won't be able to respond to comments for atleast 8h. Sorry if I don't respond until tomorrow, I read every comment!
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This is a blessing in disguise. The worst thing we can do is build an entire generation of humans who are uniquely dependent on a specific company (or even 5) to help them think, research and learn.
From there, it's incredibly easy to have forever customers for Gemini in a variation of Black Mirror Season 7, Episode 1: "Common People". In there, the wife is Amanda (Rashida Jones), and her husband is Mike (Chris O’Dowd). Amanda receives a treatment called "Rivermind" that restores her brain function but requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo.
=======
Spoiler alert!
Over time, increasingly expensive tiers, worsening restrictions, and involuntary spoken advertisements make their lives untenable. Eventually, Mike ends Amanda's life at her request, while she is unaware during one of those ads.
Spoiler alert!
=======
This doesn't mean we embrace the other extreme and instead raise an entire generation that doesn't know what will be considered basic tools like Excel and Word have been since the 2000's.
Infact, what would be fantastic if we, as a society, invested in (S)LLM tools that every student "owns" and can "tune" to their liking. Almost like an assistant that "grows" with them.
The idea is that these tools are theirs, in their control and for them to manage.
Unlike Fable, it doesn't arbitrarily stop a student interested in reversing software or hardware from learning the craft because they are not a licensed researcher.
Black Mirror is a show which blabbing about the ending to an episode is rather uncool.
Apologies. I am fencing it with a spoiler. I wrongly assumed anyone who's a fan was caught up with the episode released on April, 2025, nearly 2 years ago.
What’s the point of that? We don’t make students write their own dictionary or build their own calculator as a prerequisite for using those tools. To your point about Excel and Word, most students from 10/20 years ago don’t know what Lotus is or how to execute commands in the terminal, but are still able to use computers effectively in their lives. There’s a multitude of search engines and LLM providers available - if schools don’t like what Google is doing, they are free to swap.
> if schools don’t like what Google is doing, they are free to swap.
that wasn't my point at all. The point I was making is these tools make forever renters of intelligence. That's why I mentioned the Black Mirror episode.
It's not enough to have options in which service to rent forever.
Imagine if you had to rent your own own dictionary or calculator forever.
How useful is a set of encyclopedias from 1930? How useful is a set of encyclopedias from 1989 to answer a question about Russia today? How useful is a front end UI textbook from 2005, today?
You can choose to lock in a choice now: download a list of the top 10,000 websites or grab a local LLM. But realize that you will have to pay again as it ages out of relevance, or be left with a worthless out of date tool. The reality is you have to pay, forever (ooh, scary) for services. That’s what you’re renting: knowledge as a service. Whether it’s an LLM, continued program updates, or just an up-to-date encyclopedia.
If you're making the argument that knowledge has a shelf life and so you're always paying to update that knowledge, I urge you to consider if those payments are onetime or recurring.
It also seems you are overindexing on current, volatile events. Unless you're in Quantum space, Newton's laws haven't changed in a while. Sorting algorithms still function the same as does the x86 instruction set or how the human body reacts to ibuprofen.
Did I get your point, or am I missing something?
> requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo. Over time, increasingly expensive tiers
That's going to be on top of a rent, or instead of rent?
Related:
Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50353192
Regardless of how much Google walks back, the real dystopian atrocity IMO is that your kids using Google Search at school get ads in their results that cannot be disabled.
Your 13 year old researching in their school library sees more ads than you do (assuming you use an ad blocker).
You and I are missing something. I made a similar point as you did and I'm being downvoted so heavily I soon won't be able to respond to comments for atleast 8h.
For what unholy purpose a school needs Google search?
They need search (not necessarily Google) for accessing essentially any resource on the internet. How many URLs do you know by memory? How many URLs do would you learn just by seeing a link from another site?
Can you walk me through a school that does'nt need Google search? What are they learning, doing?
Sounds good to me. Today kids we're going to learn about making choices. This is called DuckDuckGo.