Raw LLM Responses

Artificial Intelligence? No Thanks—We’re Trying to Raise Real Children By Carolyn M. Scott Let me put it plainly: I don’t want artificial intelligence in classrooms because I don’t want artificial children. I spent decades teaching in nature-based, play-centered settings—where learning grew out of curiosity like mushrooms after rain, and no one needed an algorithm to know a child was thriving. We trusted the children. We observed them. We spoke to them as if they were whole people, not future productivity units. Enter AI, that shiny, humming solution to a problem no child ever had. The pitch goes something like this: AI will personalize learning! Automate grading! Optimize everything! Well, if you want optimized little robots, maybe that sounds grand. But I’ve yet to meet a child whose deepest yearning was for more personalized screen time or predictive analytics. Most want someone to listen to them, to laugh with them, to let them build something dangerous out of sticks. AI cannot love a child. It cannot be silly. It cannot break into spontaneous song or sit beside a child who’s just discovered worms. It cannot, as good teachers often must, throw out the entire lesson plan because someone asked a question so brilliant, the only proper response is to chase it like your hair’s on fire. What AI can do is reinforce all the worst tendencies in modern education: standardization dressed up as innovation, surveillance disguised as “support,” and emotional flatness in the name of efficiency. If that sounds harsh, remember that AI was not built by educators. It was built by technologists—many of whom wouldn’t last five minutes in a room with twenty seven-year-olds and a box of paint. These tools weren’t designed to serve the child’s inner life, or nourish the mysterious, wobbly, joyful process of becoming human. They were designed to manage, measure, and monetize. And children, bless them, resist being managed. Real education is messy. It’s full of interruptions, tangents, feelings, and disagreements. It is not a tidy system to be optimized. It is a living relationship. And relationships, as any teacher worth their salt knows, do not run on data. I’m not anti-technology. Give a child a hammer and they might build a treehouse. Give them a computer and they might code a game. Fine. But give a corporation control over their learning environment and don’t be surprised when the learning serves the corporation. AI has no business in early childhood education. None. That is the age of mud pies and imaginary dragons, not chatbots and metrics. As for older children—well, even then I’d ask: does this tool serve their freedom? Or does it serve the system’s desire for control? Because I didn’t go into education to produce well-behaved workers. I went into it to help children grow into free-thinking, wild-hearted people. AI may be many things. But it will never be wild. And children should be.