America’s first AI school:Despite high-tech labs, the focus is on encouraging children to think

First-grade children in the library of Harmony Elementary School in the state of Georgia are busy building houses with colorful plastic blocks. Teacher Shanaz Lakhani points to a plastic toy and asks, ‘This is our ‘user’. We need to build a strong house for it that won’t collapse even in an earthquake.’ Here, the teacher is teaching children weighty technical terms like ‘User Experience’ and ‘AI Applications’. Colorful triangles of data science and programming are drawn on the whiteboard. But these innocent 7-year-olds don’t care what its connection to AI is; they are simply enjoying building toy houses with their friends, sitting on their teacher’s lap.

Why this ‘AI School’ still relies on teachers In futuristic imaginations, schools often appear where robots are teaching, and children are talking to chatbots. However, in reality, this school relies more on human connection than technology. True education is where teachers’ personal guidance, children’s mutual interaction, and the ability to think for themselves are important. This high school was designed after reviewing the World Economic Forum’s ‘Jobs Transforming’ report.
Former students Mohammed Rizwan and Joseph Schrag stated that the claim of ‘AI School’ was different from reality. They said that they do not use AI that much. Except for a few classes like robotics, the rest of the studies are conducted traditionally. In language and history, teachers make children write essays by hand so that they cannot take help from AI. When a student, who was making a large spinning game out of cardboard in the school’s mechanical engineering room, was asked if he had used any AI tool or chatbot for it, his answer was, ‘No, I’m just using my brain.’ In history class, when children ask questions to chatbots, teacher Casey Holycross guides them.
Parent Lydia Clark says, ‘Our children are progressing not because of technology, but because of the school’s safe environment and the human connection provided by excellent teachers.’ Salman Khan, head of ‘Khan Academy’, a company that develops AI software, has admitted that studying with AI tools has been very frustrating for many students, because machines cannot understand children’s mental confusion like humans can. School officials also finally acknowledged that for them, AI doesn’t just mean teaching coding, but preserving ‘durable skills’ (such as ethical thinking, mutual cooperation, and creativity) that machines can never learn. Emphasis on mutual discussion, activities to preserve original thinking Stanford University, after studying over 800 research papers, has warned that while AI tools help complete tasks quickly, in the long run, children’s ability to think for themselves is diminishing. Scientists have called this ‘Cognitive Surrender,’ where humans leave their decisions to machines.
Harmony School, sensing this danger, is emphasizing the ‘human touch’. Here, AI is used only as a tool, while the main focus is on mutual discussion, physical activity, and teachers’ guidance so that children’s original thinking remains intact.