AI Will Stupefy Our Students Unless We Do These Six Things

Note: this article was first published at the online magazine Educate AI (edu-ai.org)  at https://edu-ai.org/ai-will-stupefy-our-students-unless-we-do-these-six-things/

Artificial Intelligence both terrifies and fascinates me. I have been an educator for 39 years, and as a classroom teacher, I, like all teachers, am navigating the new world of AI. This year, I have been experimenting with AI tools to help my students and me learn more deeply. I know AI is here to stay whether I like it or not. So, what is the future of AI? Will it numb or enhance learning? For me, the jury is still out.

A Bleak Prediction: AI Foolishness

Let me start by painting a bleak picture—something that woke me up last night. Arran Hamilton, Dylan Wiliam, and John Hattie wrote a haunting paper/article (The Future of AI in Education: 13 Things We Can Do to Minimize the Damage) which warns us that there is a significant “risk and reality of mass downgrading human skills and abilities.” (Wiliam, 2023). The premise goes something like this:

• AI is becoming exponentially more powerful and will exceed human capabilities for most cognitively demanding tasks.
• It will be too easy for students to take shortcuts to learning.
• AI will have devastating impacts on future generations of learners.

They even predict that illiteracy could rise since AI bots can talk to us, and there will be less need to read text. This stupefaction of students and, consequently, the world is frightening.

The learning process is incredibly challenging today because teachers compete with social media and other distractions for attention. A typical school curriculum often does not seem relevant to many students as they observe and experience their world. Still, most learning has always taken work and required concerted effort and grit. I have recently been reading an author’s works from the 16th century. The level of concentration I bring to the table is helping me learn difficult things through effort and determination. I could ask an AI agent to summarize the book/passage, but I don’t! It would be more efficient, but that would shortchange my learning. There is something about doing hard cognitive work that helps us grow as thinkers. It isn’t just about the facts. It is also about the process. More than anything else, we must teach students how to learn: How to hunker down, concentrate, and extract meaning from our world.

Learning is similar to how an athlete trains. As a former competitive triathlete, I knew that to be competitive, I needed to master swimming, biking, and running. When I first started doing triathlons, I was self-coached. And though I got better, I didn’t see breakthrough performances until I hired a coach. Even though the coach guided me and fine-tuned my skills, I HAD to do the work. I had to go out daily and swim, bike, and run. Similarly, students will learn best if they do the heavy lifting of learning in the context of an excellent teacher (coach). They need more repetitions to achieve mastery, and if AI answers all their questions, their learning muscles won’t grow.

Hamilton, Wiliam, and Hattie continue by saying:

“But when we see the (ever-increasing) gap between our capabilities and those of the machines, it will take gargantuan reserves of willpower and grit (emphasis mine) to acquire this multi-disciplinary learning one step at a time. This brings us back to that ‘what’s the point?’ question and the risk and reality of mass downgrading human skills and abilities.”

Did you catch that? They believe that we are in danger of mass downgrading of human skills. This consequence is truly the opposite of what we want as educators.

As a veteran teacher (this is year 39), I, too, fear that our students will not be prepared for the future. Many students lack the grit and willpower to resist the temptation to take the easy way out. If I may be so bold. Many current students will be downgraded by AI, and that future might be inevitable without a radical change in how we do school.

If you are an educator, you know that students need to struggle. But it’s a fine line. Too much struggle, and students give up. Too much help, and they become dependent on the teacher. In my classes, I have seen some of our top students shift too quickly to AI tools instead of struggling with learning. I get it: they are trying to be more efficient, but as I watch them learn this way, I am concerned that they are shortchanging their learning experiences. They are missing the necessary struggle. For some learners, AI isn’t just used to help them learn; it is a means to skip the learning and get a higher grade. In an article in The New Yorker, Ted Chiang recently wrote:

“Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.”

In a recent study, Michael Girlich studied the impact of cognitive offloading and critical thinking.

“The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading. Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.” (Girlich, 2025)

In other words, when students offload cognitive tasks to AI, their critical thinking skills diminish. Most frightening to me as a high school teacher is that this result is exacerbated when the students are younger. Joe Dispenza, a biochemist, writes, “Neurons that fire together wire together.” Neural networks, a key source of learning, will not expand but break down if they are not used. Again, I return to the notion that cognitive struggle is essential for learning.

This dumbing down of our students will have devastating consequences. Some have called this AI Foolishness (Durta, 2023). The world is an ever-complex place where we need highly creative problem solvers who can tackle many issues. That means we need our young people to learn by wrestling with their learning so that they can tackle problems that we haven’t even considered yet.

Another concern about AI is that it may lead to diminished opportunities for our students in the future. This is illustrated by a recent conversation with a parent at our school who is the CFO of a major company. When talking to him about how he got to his position, he told me he started with an accounting degree, then an accounting job at a small company, and then moved to a larger company. Eventually, he got to the point where he is today. Over many years, he got jobs with ever-increasing responsibility and expectations, leading him to succeed. But what happens when the beginning accounting jobs don’t exist? What path must a young person take to get a CFO job? I fear AI will supplant these career pathways by taking over many of these stepping-stone jobs. This will create great upheaval in the job market, with fewer winners and more losers.

So, is there a path forward? Is there a way to harness AI that doesn’t stupefy our students and sets our world up for a promising future?

The Path Forward

If there is hope to prevent the stupefaction of our students, we need to change how we teach and do education radically. When I started teaching in 1986, I lectured in front of the class. I then sent home challenging homework, and students struggled, so I helped them the next day. That method was not particularly effective in 1986, and it is bankrupt in 2025. Today, if I were to send the “hard stuff” home, most students would simply have AI do the work for them. This may be a pessimistic take, but I have spent almost forty years with students, and I don’t have the confidence that most will do the hard work if AI does it so quickly. Without the opportunity to truly appreciate the results of their learning, students will naturally resort to the path of least resistance.

So how do we change? I propose that we do the following:

1. Reimagine what happens IN the classroom. Cognitively complex tasks must be done IN the classroom (the fundamental premise of flipping the classroom). Significant chunks of class time should no longer be used for information transfer. Instead, we need to recognize the value of class time as sacred and use it for students to process with their minds, not AI. The flipped classroom approach is ideally suited for this. In this approach, students read or watch a short video introducing a specific topic. Then, class time is used for more complex cognitive tasks that can be modeled by the teacher. The key question you should ask is: “What is the best use of my face-to-face class time?” My guess is it is not information transfer.
2. Deemphasize inappropriate use of technology in the classroom. The temptation to jump on phones and ask the AI agent or Google the assignment is too big for many students. Let them write papers with pens and papers, do experiments, or simply do math assignments. AI can do a lot of that work for students, but it’s about the struggle—the process of learning that will help our students become the leaders of tomorrow. Students can enjoy their technology at home and, when appropriate, at school.
3. Use AI as a tutor when in class. It is too easy to let AI do the work. But when AI is deployed correctly, it can be a powerful assistant and collaborator. Our school has started to use FlintK12 with the AI tutor platform. Teachers can create custom tutors that help students walk through complex concepts. It can, for example, allow for real-time conversations with students in a second language. The tutor can then analyze their weaknesses and suggest areas of improvement. In the future, I plan to use AI tutors in class to focus on kids most in need of my support.
4. Teach students how to use AI as a collaborator to enhance learning. Our students use Version 1 of Generative AI, a primitive assistant to human learners. When AI is used effectively over time, it has the potential to amplify human creativity and help students develop higher-order thinking skills. Today, the trick is to focus more on the process of learning development rather than workload efficiencies.
5. Implement the Mastery Learning model at scale. This model is often called Competency-Based Education (CBE). It is a proven method in which students develop skills within a curriculum. When they reach a level of competency, they are asked to demonstrate the skill in the context of the course. If they succeed, they move to the next level. If they don’t, they continue practicing the skill until they feel confident they can demonstrate it to an external audience. In short, mastery replaces seat time. If you want to learn more about this method, I encourage you to check out CBE Ignited.
6. Expect More. When we assign out-of-class work, we should assume that students will use AI. So, avoid assigning homework that is quickly addressed by an AI bot. Ensure students understand the school’s AI policy and tell them that their work in class will reflect what they learned out of class. Their appreciation of effective learning should emphasize that they will feel more confident and prepared for what they will do in class if they exercise their brain, not the chips in their computer. Let them know that you understand them as learners, and their work will look very different than that of an AI bot, which operates on probabilities rather than passion.

An example of these six suggestions came when my cousin asked me to help his son in his high school physics course. I pointed him to videos I had created on the topics he needed help with. My cousin also found an adaptive learning site that asked him increasingly challenging questions. This site used machine learning, a type of AI, to improve his mastery of these physics concepts. Essentially, my cousin’s son went through a flipped mastery cycle where he got some quality instruction on a topic. AI helped him incrementally improve his mastery of the subject.

So, will AI stupefy our students? Will literacy rates plummet, and will we enter a new dark age? Or will AI usher in a new era of meaning, prosperity, and peace? I know that AI is here to stay. The cat is out of the bag, and I don’t see us dialing back AI. The forces are just too great. I think a spectrum of learners will emerge, ranging from those who do the hard work of learning to those who let AI do the job. Many students have tried to find easier ways to pass classes, do projects, and write papers. But in the age of AI, the temptation to let AI do the work, I believe, will be too tempting to vast swaths of students. And they will be stupefied! This scares me because I foresee dire consequences if too many take this route.

Thus, it comes down to each individual. Students must choose if they are going to be learners. Those who prefer the challenging learning path will be the “winners” in the new age of AI. I am telling my students that they must make hard decisions. They must decide if they want to be leaders. The next generation’s leaders will be those willing to work hard to become creative problem solvers and problem finders and resist the temptation to allow AI to do the work they need to do. We are living in the most distracted generation in the history of the world, and the coin of this new realm will be focus and determination. Those who can focus and learn independently will be the world’s leaders.