Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being lauded as a radical force disrupting education. Increasingly, students are relying on AI for studying and schoolwork while schools are adopting generative AI to automate the creation of lesson plans, study materials, and even grade assignments. This process of pedagogic automatization is not some innovative frontier of a new and improved education system, but rather is the perfection of a worldview that treats education like a business, sacrificing genuine human learning and the environment for the advent of ‘efficiency’, all the while lining the pockets of billionaires at the expense of everyone else.

AI has no place in a model of education that values student growth and human dignity. Therefore, it should be banned in school and its use actively discouraged.

Broad access to AI tools by students to do things like generate essays, solve math problems, and summarize readings has been hailed for its ability to make learning more ‘efficient’. The problem with automating those tasks is that it risks de-skilling students by occluding opportunities for critical thinking, analysis, and problem-solving. Instead, students are encouraged to seek quick-fix solutions to problems that undermine their ability to synthesize and apply knowledge, ultimately impeding comprehension and the development of skills.

Successful education relies on interaction, understanding between teachers and students, and meaningful feedback informed by human experience. Replacing traditional tasks with AI-based systems redirects attention away from the relationships that support successful learning. Automated systems cannot reproduce the empathy, subtle understanding, or professional judgment educators provide. Excessive automation risks making classrooms impersonal and disconnected from students’ needs.

These two factors taken together indicate a complete automatization of learning, where teachers and students are merely acting out their roles with little in real engagement. While test scores and GPAs may go up, what is being measured is not a student’s ability to apply knowledge demonstrated through their academic performance, but rather their capacity to look as if that is the case. This is actively incentivized by a standardized model of education that prioritizes numerical metrics over the intrinsic value of human learning, treating school like a business while simultaneously undermining its very purpose.

Supporters of AI argue that it makes tasks easier and offers immediate assistance to students. While this is true, efficiency does not guarantee a greater understanding. Automated guidance lacks the context, clarity, and flexibility of human instruction. Heavy reliance on AI risks favoring speed over meaningful learning, reducing education to shortcuts rather than genuine development.

This problem is amplified by the fact that AI is often inaccurate in the responses it generates. AI can ‘hallucinate’ information by creating fictitious articles, statistics, and even historical events to prove its point, which contributes to the spread of misinformation and can be lethal for any educational environment. This also demonstrates that the ‘efficiency’ AI supporters hail is often fraught with errors that impeded the value of whatever knowledge it imparts.

Independent of education, AI has major environmental consequences. Supporting AI models requires large data centers that consume significant amounts of energy and water, contributing to climate change, drought and pollution. By increasing their AI use, schools will also contribute to this environmental harm. The distribution of this harm is not equal either since data centers are often located in poor areas, which exacerbates inequalities by transforming regions into environmental sacrifice zones where those who are already most disadvantaged are made to deal with the debilitating consequences of ‘increased efficiency’.

What also must be considered is who wants schools to use AI. The companies running these large language models are multi-billion dollar tech enterprises with economic and political stakes in hooking the next generation on their products. The clear ties of major tech CEOs such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Cook to right-wing and authoritarian ideologies and movements, notably the Trump presidency, is no coincidence. Accordingly, Trump has given billions of dollars in subsidies to AI firms and encouraged the expansion of data centers. The AI industry and the tech giants that run it have a vested interest in expanding their market share and political power by influencing the ways people get information and the type of information they see. The consequences of this may seem meager, but the growing use of AI by the Department of Defense and military point to a concerning connection between the mind-molding power of technology with its instrumentalization in warfare and racial discrimination through things like AI-operated drone strikes and surveillance technology used by ICE to track protestors. Every dollar that goes to these companies or attempts to normalize the technology they produce is necessarily complicit with the violence they have become infused with.

There is a real cost to the use of AI in education. While students and teachers become depersonalized as they automate the very process of learning, necessarily becoming de-skilled along the way, the environmental and political consequences of AI use continue to accumulate. Therefore, there is no ethical basis for its integration into schools, which necessitates that it also be banned at every level. This looks like interpersonal discouragement from within the classroom by students and teachers all the way up to significant policy change. It is not too late to change this rising tide. A better world is possible.