New York City Public Schools recently announced a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI for students in grades 2–8, while providing limited AI use and AI-literacy instruction at the high-school level. In this Hot Take, I consider an important distinction raised by the policy: having access to AI and developing literacy about AI are not necessarily the same thing.
Sources
NYC Public Schools — Guidance on Artificial Intelligence and Screen
TimeAssociated Press — NYC restricts AI use for students through eighth grade
Transcript
This week, New York City Public Schools announced a one-year plan to limit student-facing generative AI for students through eighth grade, while high school students will have limited access.
As an early-childhood teacher who is interested in the possibilities of using AI in education, this caught my attention.
So, I kind of get the reasoning behind the policy. Students need lots of opportunities to talk to each other in the classroom, struggle with problems, ask questions, create things (not with the computer), and learn how to do things like reason things out, for themselves. Giving students access to generative AI can potentially limit those opportunities.
But I think this issue also raises an important question about digital literacy.
Access to a technology and literacy about that technology aren’t necessarily the same thing.
We sometimes talk about a “digital native” as though growing up surrounded by technology automatically means knowing how to use it. But a student can have access to an AI system without understanding how it works, why and how it might produce an incorrect answer, what biases might affect its output, or how and when relying on it might actually interfere with learning.
The reverse can also be true. We can teach students about a technology without necessarily giving them unrestricted access to it.
That distinction matters because AI is becoming a bigger part of the environment students live in, whether or not they’re directly using a chatbot at school. Search engines, social media, images, videos, and other content are being shaped or generated by AI more and more.
There’s also the issue of unequal access here. Restricting AI at school doesn’t mean every student will have the same relationship with AI outside school. Some students may have all the access they want to devices, paid AI tools, and adults who can help them understand and experiment with the technology. Other students may depend much more heavily on schools for access to technology and, more importantly, instruction about how to understand it.
Interestingly, one day after New York City’s announcement, Google announced new additions to its AI Educator Series, which provides AI training specifically for K–12 teachers. I think putting those two developments next to each other captures the strange moment education is in right now. Schools are trying to decide when students should use AI at the same time that teachers are being encouraged to become more knowledgeable about it.
I don’t think the answer is simply to give younger students access to generative AI. Especially with young children, I think there are very good reasons to protect the human interaction, play, creativity, and productive struggle that are essential to learning.
But keeping a technology out of a classroom doesn’t make the world outside that classroom stop changing. So maybe the question for schools shouldn’t only be, “At what age should students have access to AI?”
We should also be asking: “What should students understand about AI before having access to it becomes educationally useful?” For me, that’s the distinction between simply having access to a digital tool and actually developing digital literacy.
Alan K. Murray 
Leave a comment