Eighty-Six Percent of Students Use AI. The Rule Is Simple. Nobody Asked Me, But Here It Is Anyway.
A report on the 2024-2025 school year found 86% of students and 85% of teachers used AI. The guidance offered is straightforward, perhaps embarrassingly so. Set a ground rule that AI can help learning but cannot do the learning, use it as a coach rather than a ghostwriter, and make verification a routine habit.
This illustrates a principle I would hope is obvious. The concept is cognitive offloading. When you delegate thinking to a machine, you also delegate the neural development that thinking produces. The mechanism is simple. Use AI to brainstorm, build study guides, or get feedback on drafts you wrote yourself. The moment AI generates the answer, you have stopped learning. I should not have to explain this.
The report covers students and teachers in the 2024-2025 school year, with 86% and 85% adoption respectively. The guidance comes from Ivanhoe Newswire out of Orlando, Florida.
- Open any consumer AI chatbot such as ChatGPT or Claude.
- Paste a draft paragraph your child wrote and ask the AI to give feedback on argument strength and clarity. Review the feedback together and discuss whether the suggestions are correct.
- Ask the AI to explain a concept from your child's homework in a different way, then verify the explanation against the textbook. The goal is to treat AI as a tutor that asks questions, not a machine that fills blank pages.