AI Is Inevitable, So Let's Teach Kids to Use It Well

Australian schools are tightening the screws on AI at the moment, and honestly, I understand why. The ABC has been covering it closely, with education departments across the country cracking down on students using AI to cheat, and NSW going as far as pausing take-home assessments while it reviews what AI is doing to student learning. Behind all of that sits a genuine fear of cheating, of over-reliance, of kids outsourcing the very thinking that school exists to build.

Those fears aren't imaginary. I've stood in classrooms and I know exactly what it looks like when a student uses a tool to avoid thinking rather than to extend it. If kids use AI to dodge the writing, the reasoning and the problem-solving, then learning is genuinely weakened, and no amount of tech enthusiasm changes that. I'd add that the crackdown has its own casualties too, because the AI detectors schools are leaning on keep wrongly accusing students who did nothing at all, which is its own kind of damage.

But here's where I part ways with the ban-first instinct. Banning AI cannot be the whole solution, because the technology is already woven into search engines, workplaces, creative tools and the everyday software these kids will grow up inside. They will encounter it whether schools embrace it or not, on the bus home if not in the classroom. So the real question was never whether students will use AI. It's whether anyone will actually teach them to use it well.

The frustrating part is that Australia has already answered this on paper. Our national framework for generative AI in schools says students should learn how these tools work, where they're useful, where they mislead, and how to think about privacy, bias, misinformation and the limits of AI-generated content. The values are sitting right there in the document. What I kept seeing in classrooms, and what started PrimarAI in the first place, was how rarely any of it reaches an actual child on an actual school day.

This is where PrimarAI fits. The whole model is built around the idea that AI should support thinking, not replace it. I want students who question AI outputs rather than copy them, who verify information out of habit, who protect their personal data, and who can recognise when reaching for AI is appropriate and when it absolutely isn't. The aim was never to create children who are dependent on AI. It's to create children who are confident enough to challenge it.

And to be clear, schools should protect authentic learning fiercely. There will be times when AI should be restricted or removed entirely, and pen and paper will always have its place in my classroom. But avoidance is not preparation, and there's a big difference between the two. We didn't respond to the internet by pretending it didn't exist. We taught kids to search well, to spot dodgy sources, to think about what they read. AI literacy is simply the next chapter of that same digital literacy, arriving faster than anyone would like.