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Back-to-school night at the middle school is always something of a sensory riot. Adolescent hallways always smell a certain way, even hours after dismissal, even on a night when more than half of the pedestrians are adults with (presumably) advanced hygiene proficiencies. 

It’s just the way of things. 

Blithely noisy families are chattering their way — with wrinkled noses — from class to class, grabbing syllabi and weathering the shrieks of friends spotting each other for the first time since … debate practice wrapped up half an hour ago. 

The volleyball team’s selling snacks in one corner of the lobby; a nearby station has information about free public transit cards for students, though the bored senior behind the table keeps squirming her eyes out of the rays of sunset streaming through the windows. 

But if back-to-school night offers an overload of sights, sounds, and smells, this year it’s also saturated with questions about children sinking into the uncanny quietude of screens. In every class, most parents wonder it under their breath until some brave soul asks: “What’s your AI policy?”

Over and over, the teacher’s eyes flicker just a little as they absorb the question. It’s clear they expect it, because that hesitation marks the beginning of a rehearsed answer that’s a little too polished and careful to be extemporaneous. “Well, on a personal level, I have deep concerns about AI in schools,” they’ll say. “But the school’s policy is that students may only use AI in these specific, narrowly circumscribed ways.” 

The room mostly nods along. A few parents murmur appreciative agreement. One dad pumps his fist and sort of cackles. His kid blushes and stares desperately out the window. 

But at least one parent looks around nervously at this sea of peer pressure and social norming and pipes up, “So, uh, can they use it here in class, though? Where you could supervise?” Or perhaps, if that comes back negative, they say, “OK, got it, but they can use it to practice, right? Or to brainstorm? Or — I’m just curious, I swear — to research?”

And the room tenses back up as the teacher pulls their face tight into something that might be a grimace before diving back into the breach. 

We’re all circling this thing with ample nerves. Is AI an essential tool? A drug? Another in the long list of ed-tech overpromises? A distraction? Only for adults? Urgent for kids?

Yes?

Here’s a hint at a workable answer for this school year (at least). The coaches are also around on back-to-school night, but down in the gym, no one is asking if student-athletes are allowed to use AI during cross-country races. No one is nervously checking the crowd and trepidatiously following up to see if kids can, at the very least, have AI do the hill sprints. No one asks if coaches — or kids — should at least consult AI about their training plans. 

Why not? Partly it’s because ChatGPT runs a lousy mile and Gemini’s hill sprints are pathetic. But it’s also because of a secret about education and child development: the indirect elements of most of the tasks we present to kids matter at least as much as the direct elements. We mostly don’t have kids run 5Ks in middle school cross-country so that they can win Olympic medals, college scholarships, the local meet at the end of the season, or even a varsity spot in high school.

No. We have kids run those races because those help them learn how to set goals and then grind out the (often boring) work it takes to pursue them. We want them to know how to care for their bodies to avoid injury while also persisting through the healthy pain of building stronger lungs and muscles. 

It’s the same with everything else on (and off) campus. It’s not, believe it or not, urgent for kids to retain the particulars of or the full breadth of heroism at Gettysburg in American history. Kids don’t need to hold close The Grapes of Wrath or Invisible Man for their entire lifetimes.

We don’t make every student study these things so that they’ll all become chemists or Civil War reenactors or great American writers. We make them learn and explore a wide range of academic subjects — and undertake a variety of assignments within those topics — for indirect reasons. We hope they will build some facility with each subject, but also that they’ll develop the attention span, focus, memory, and confidence that come through difficult, sometimes tedious study. 

Parenting and teaching are both versions of preparing kids for thriving adulthood. At a granular, fundamental level, that means teaching them a bunch of adult skills, everything from potty training and holding a conversation to reading, cooperating and financial planning.

The indirect element in child-raising is even more important as kids age and take more full control of their independence and selves. By adolescence, the adults in their lives aren’t reminding (most) of them to do basic hygiene stuff just because basic hygiene matters. Instead, the adults in their lives are helping them learn to persevere through complex projects, particularly the boring ones. 

These are years where they learn that, with some training and practice, they can nail that 4×100 relay handoff, write a compelling argument about an idea that’s genuinely their own and figure out what’s wrong with the science experiment on the table in front of them. 

“Can’t AI help them find the problem?” the parents ask. “Or, well, can’t AI at least talk them through the challenges?” 

It can. It absolutely can. And they probably don’t strictly need to know whatever the specific knowledge that they’re missing is when they take that shortcut. But as the years go on and the back-to-school nights pile up, all the shortcuts add up, until — research — the costs of skipping all those (academic) hill sprints become evident.

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