As the school year is in full swing, the issue of AI in schools and education keeps coming up everywhere. Teachers share stories in faculty lounges, parents worry at dinner tables, and students find themselves in a challenging environment where the guidelines and expectations are constantly changing. This isn’t a conversation we can postpone or ignore. AI is already present in classrooms, regardless of whether schools have established policies, whether teachers are equipped to address it, or whether we feel prepared. While researching this topic, I spoke with a friend who teaches German to young students. She shared many concerns about how technology, especially artificial intelligence, is affecting her students. One comment she made really stayed with me: ‘Why do we even need this?’ This wasn’t just a dismissive remark; she genuinely felt confused and worried. She noticed her students were losing interest in learning, and their basic reading and writing skills were getting worse. Instead of using tools like AI to help them learn, they were relying on it to avoid their schoolwork. Her fifth and sixth-graders constantly submit essays clearly generated by AI, complete with grammatical structures they haven’t yet been taught. Many can’t be bothered to start sentences with a capital letter or end them with a period. When she points this out, some ask why it even matters. They use AI to complete German homework without learning German, to finish physics assignments without understanding physics. A handful of students, she notes, genuinely use AI to understand difficult material. But mostly, she sees young people who want to get through their assignments as quickly as possible, with as little actual thinking as required. This isn’t just about elementary school. A professor friend teaching media and communications at a university faces strikingly similar challenges. His students question why they need to learn traditional film production techniques or camera work when AI can generate animations and videos with simple prompts. He finds himself putting considerable effort into explaining why understanding the fundamentals matters, why AI-generated videos lack the depth, nuance, and artistry of work created by skilled professionals, and why shortcuts now might lead to limitations later. From elementary schools to universities, from STEM subjects to languages to creative arts, educators are confronting the same unsettling reality: many students are more interested in completing requirements than in learning, and AI has made that easier than ever. But here’s what makes this situation more complex than simple hand-wringing about technology: AI isn’t arriving in a vacuum. My friend, the German teacher, made a crucial observation: these children have grown up in fundamentally different circumstances than previous generations. They’ve never known a world without smartphones, without social media, without instant access to infinite content on TikTok and YouTube, without the constant pull of notifications and the dopamine loops of app-based entertainment. The issue of AI in education cannot be separated from the broader question of what digital technology has done to attention spans, to patience for difficulty, to the capacity for sustained focus. When a child has spent their entire life in an environment optimised for capturing and fragmenting attention, is it surprising that they struggle with the sustained mental effort required for learning? This doesn’t excuse the problems AI creates in education, but it does contextualise them. We’re not just dealing with a new tool being misused. We’re dealing with students whose cognitive development occurred in an entirely different technological environment and who are now encountering an AI that perfectly complements their existing habit of seeking the path of least resistance. Every major technological shift has produced anxiety about its impact on capacity development and thinking. Socrates worried that writing would destroy memory. Educators panicked about calculators eliminating mathematical understanding. The internet was supposed to make us stupid, shallow, and unable to concentrate. And yet humanity adapted. We learned that calculators didn’t eliminate the need to understand mathematics, but they changed what was worth teaching and learning. The internet didn’t destroy research skills; it transformed them. Wikipedia became a starting point rather than a destination. But adaptation didn’t happen automatically or without effort. It required educators to rethink curricula, develop new pedagogies, and help students use new tools thoughtfully. It needed time, experimentation, mistakes, and gradual adjustments to both teaching methods and student expectations. The challenge with AI feels more urgent because its capabilities are more comprehensive. A calculator performs arithmetic; AI can write your essay, solve your physics problems with full explanations, translate your German homework, and even show its reasoning step-by-step. The student’s role can shrink from thinker to prompter, someone who asks the right question and copies the answer. When students can avoid nearly all intellectual effort while still producing acceptable work, the core purpose of education is undermined. My friend’s experience perfectly captures this: her students use AI to generate essays they don’t read closely enough to notice the grammatical structures they haven’t yet learned. They’re producing output without understanding, completing assignments without learning, and getting credentials without education.A teacher’s perspective: watching learning change
The problem is bigger than AI
We’ve been here before (sort of)
The value of difficulty in learning is something educators understand intuitively, but that students often resist. When someone wrestles with a challenging problem, makes mistakes, gets frustrated, and finally has a breakthrough, something happens in that process that goes beyond arriving at the correct answer. The struggle itself is educational.
Cognitive scientists call this ‘desirable difficulty’. Learning that comes too easily often doesn’t stick. The brain builds stronger neural pathways when it has to work for understanding. When students use AI to bypass this productive struggle, they may get correct answers without building the cognitive architecture that enables future learning.
Consider writing, a skill central to education across disciplines. Writing isn’t just about producing text; it’s about organising thoughts, developing arguments, and discovering what you actually think through the process of articulation. When students ask AI to write their essays, they skip the messy, generative process where real learning happens. They get a polished product without having to do the cognitive work that makes writing valuable in the first place.
The same applies to language learning. My friend can spot AI-generated German homework not just by advanced grammar structures, but also because her students who rely on AI assistance can’t hold simple conversations. They can produce translations without developing the intuition of the language, the feel for how it works, the mental flexibility that comes from genuine language acquisition. The tool that seems to make learning easier actually prevents learning.
The risk extends to students’ relationships with difficulty itself. If every challenge can be outsourced to AI, why develop the patience, persistence, and problem-solving skills that come from working through hard things? Why learn to tolerate frustration and confusion as standard parts of learning? A generation that grows up avoiding intellectual difficulty may struggle when they eventually encounter problems that AI cannot solve for them.
Perhaps most concerning is the erosion of curiosity. When students see education purely as a series of requirements to complete rather than opportunities to understand, when they’re more interested in efficiency than insight, something essential about learning dies. My friend’s students asking why capitalisation and punctuation matter is not just ignorance of grammar rules. It reflects a deeper disengagement from the idea that these things might be worth knowing, that understanding how language works might have value beyond passing assignments.
These risks are real and deserve serious attention. At the same time, the presence of AI in education is not inherently a tragedy or a threat. If we approach it intentionally, it might offer opportunities we haven’t yet fully explored.
This article is the first instalment in a two-part series examining how AI is reshaping education. Part two will focus on solutions and new roles for teachers and students.
Author: Slobodan Kovrlija
