Raising thinkers in the age of smart machines

YOU can feel the anxiety in classrooms and around dinner tables. A student finishes an essay suspiciously fast. A teenager’s world seems to exist entirely within a screen. The question, whispered with worry, is becoming a shout: Should we just ban this? Ban artificial intelligence (AI), restrict apps, until they’re old enough to handle it? It’s a protective instinct, and it’s understandable. But we're looking in the wrong direction.

The deeper fear isn’t that a young person will use ChatGPT. It’s that they might stop wrestling with a complex idea because an AI can summarise it. It’s not that they’ll scroll on social media, but that they’ll let a feed of hot takes replace the slow, often frustrating work of forming their own judgment. The real danger isn’t the tool – it’s the outsourcing of the very struggle that builds a mind.