Eileen

Well, again, Sangeeta, I'll say you are not the first person to notice this, and you are absolutely right to say this.

I think there are many people who are concerned about it.

And there's also, like you say, a huge push towards bringing AI into the classroom.

And the main work in that direction has been on how to help teachers learn how to leverage these technologies effectively.

That's important.

But what is even more important and even more pressing, which is I think the essence of your question, is how are these opportunities shaping the way our young people think and feel, conceptualize a sense of self, build engagement and motivation?

What does it mean to think with these technological mediators as compared to in ways that we did without these mediators?

And how might that be changing the nature of our development as human beings?

We don't know the answers to those questions, but here's what I would say in terms of the second half of your question, which is how should you support the parents and families and children that you're working with?

I think you need to trust and help parents trust that they know

what it means to be a human being.

And they know how to love and care for their children.

They need in this space more than ever to stay deeply connected with their children and with their children's ways of thinking and engaging with their schoolwork and to reflect with those kids about the experiences they have in thinking through these things, to work with them on their work, to notice what kinds of changes are happening in their kids as they're engaging in these technologies and think about

What do we want for our children?

Which kinds of uses are appropriate and effective and are making us more efficient?

And which kinds may be interfering with aspects of the learning or developmental process that kids want and need to grapple with in order to really build for themselves the experience of being an efficacious, agentic learner?

And when we are concretizing and reducing the aims of our educational experiences in school to the output of particular kinds of skills that may be quote unquote relevant to the world today,

Oftentimes, what we're forgetting is how does the learning of that skill change the development of the person?

And those are the questions we need to be asking ourselves.

The example I use to explain this is that giving kids AI to learn to do something basic that they before would have needed to know, but now AI can do it, so why bother teaching them?