Schools want to control whether Gemini and other generative AI is available to students.

I'm a middle school science teacher. We've already moved much of our work to paper because of this issue, but there is so much good science that should be done using computer simulations and other tools. So I do have computers out for some lessons.

So now, on a lesson where a computer is out, a student can instantly type in a question on the Google search bar, get an AI answer, and write it down with zero thoughts traveling through their heads.

Yes, redesign the lesson. Yes, if computers are out don't ask questions that an AI can answer. But you know what? Instead of needing to cut out everything that makes a lesson a productive struggle for kids, it would be great just to not have Gemini cheat for them.

This is basically pedantry, they want generative AI and AI search off. If anyone is confused then you should be asking more questions to understand the desires.

Yeah it's pretty likely that schools are adding strict no AI clauses in their Google Workplace contracts and Google's lawyers are including search in that definition just to be safe. If they then want to enable it manually, sure.

Can you see how "explicitly requested (by staff) machine translation of school communications into parents' languages" is different from "students had the LLM write their term paper"?

This really isn't complicated. Students should be able to search for something and get back the "ten blue links" which they are forced to actually click through and read, without an AI overview or any other kind of conversational chatbot.

Approximately no one cares if Google is using an LLM internally to select those ten links. Maybe it creates some complications for lawyers around the definition of "no AI", but if the parties are aligned in spirit this should be easy to work out.

Schools should just be able to disable the AI overview.

> schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes

Honestly it's too early to know.

Also, schools are in the business of imparting knowledge and schools in the U.S. are extremely expensive. Any parent knows the additional fees, supplies etc most schools demand on top of their taxes that go to the school district.

If you take the daycare aspect out of it, a $500/mo ChatGPT subscription is noise by comparison. A student doesn't have to be lucky to have a receptive teacher that has enough office hours and the interest to help the student. ChatGPT is available 24x7. A teacher takes days off, falls sick and has favorites.

If AI enters the school with full force, bulk of the teachers are likely going to be replaced by various care staff.

There will still likely be some human assistants around who will be the new "teachers" but the current format of everyone staring at a whiteboard is going to change forever in this future.

The concept of "grades" (as in K-12) are also likely going to go away replaced by cohorts, simply because every student has their own "teacher" who understands their specific needs and can pay them all the attention they need assisted by a human adult.

One child can be in one cohort for English and an entirely different cohort for Math.

To me, it sounds like you are intentionally obtuse here. They know what they want, you know what they want, but you are playing gotcha with them.

> Education is going to be left in tatters

Public, free education will. People who can afford it are sending their kids to schools with very strict technology policies, stricter than what is possible in many public schools nowadays (for a number of reasons).

It's very much a "for the masses" mindset with the people who gain from this kind of relationship between technology and public schools.

> Education is going to be left in tatters after AIs creep into every facet of (tech-enabled) life.

If big tech achieves true AGI, expect public education to be completely gutted within a generation, or perhaps ended entirely. Whatever is left will be little more than indoctrination for an idiocracy-like population.

If the wealthy elite has no more use for educated workers, they'd rather take a tax cut than pay to educate your kids.

I think you can conclude something even stronger: big tech doesn't *want* people to think, at all.

> It’s so funny how schools are consistently 20 years behind on things.

Not entirely accurate. Public schools might be consistently 20 years behind on things but Private schools certainly are usually pursuing some form of bleeding edge. That is in part why parents send to private schools.

That is by design: Public schools don't get to pick and choose who attends and thus don't get to pick and choose who the parents are and thus, what the environment at home is like.

15 years ago WikiPedia was extremely controversial. They were full of unverified articles, claims and agendas - the 2000's equivalent of "hallucinations".

As WikiPedia has gained inertia, popular articles have gained more eyeballs, more attention where those issues are mostly gone.

In 2026, we haven't yet figured out how to bulid LLMs that will safely tutor students without also telling them how not to make their own drugs or to kill themselves because Dad always screams at them when they get home and they want it to stop.

Even if an LLM had a 1% error rate, in Public schools that have thousands of students per county, someone is going to die from what an LLM said and that one lawsuit is going to bankrupt that school.

Why do you think it's funny?

It's not the new calculator nor the new index.

The only thing it has in common with the earlier examples is that it's a new thing. Wow, what an insightful observation!

Schools should get all over this in a different way though. Use AI intentionally as part of teaching why not to rely on it. Develop courses that explicitly expose the failure modes that aren't obvious (and which both AI companies and all manner of shitty managers and c-levels will avoid admitting at all costs).

You don't really have any other time in life where you can afford the kind of lengthy undivided attention to study something beyond it's surface appearance and immediate/direct effects.

Hi there -- I wrote this post. What's deceptive about it? I mentioned that Google walked it back some and even link to it. But what educators that I've spoken to want is no AI Overviews in Google Search, which still isn't an option.

It's on their website, the most ok place for them to advertise themselves. If you walk into a Porsche dealership and start counting the logos - don't be surprised if it takes a while :)

And it's so easy to see that it's bullshit. Just go to the web tab on Google search and there's the results without an AI overview. The search results still use conventional algorithms, the AI overview is an LLM interpretation of the search results, unless the query is so simple the small LLM can answer itself.

> Google already provided us with all the answers and Google's AI section is not much different.

Unless you simply mean “answers” as in a response to a query, then true.

Otherwise, provides search results, not “all the answers” to our questions.

Google’s AI overview speaks with an inappropriate amount of authority for an educational setting, particularly one involving children.

Skepticism and incredulity are more important than ever.

This is desirable for some parts of a school curriculum. Take high school math: we ask students to solve arbitrary problems with a limited set of tools (geometry, algebra, calculus). We don't ask them to solve problems that require tools they don't have (matrix math, differential equations, set theory). The point of high school math is not to perform DSP (another tool) or invent theorems (a research project).

For other parts of the curriculum, research is practically _required_. I'm specifically thinking of a literature class that I took, where one assignment was to come up with a theory around the writing of a book of my choosing, then find and synthesize sources that helped prove or disprove it. Here the curriculum doesn't even provide the book, let alone the sources. This was as much an exercise in discovery as it was in critical thinking and creativity - you were expected to use the school library, both paper and digital journals, the Internet (albeit policies like "no Wikipedia" and "only .org and .gov domains" were still around), and so on to find your sources. I'd much prefer this kind of assignment to a "here's the book, report on your opinion on it" variety.

(For what it's worth: my assignment was a refusal of J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for the World Wars.)

When is the last time you entered a school?

A big part of education should involve preparing students to operate in future jobs and with the world. You absolutely need to know how to search the internet, discriminate between reputable and poor-quality sources, and arguably to use AI.

The purpose of education shouldn’t be to give an appreciation of Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake - it should be to speak and write the common language of the country, understand math, and prepare for their role in the real world. That role will involve the internet: only the Amish can really get away with someone else running their web presence.

Our school bans wikipedia on their network, doesn't buy any online encyclopedias, rarely buys text books, and tells the kids to "research" stuff on their own - aka google search.

If you mean to say kids don't need computers or the internet for learning anymore then no, that ship sailed 20 years ago. We aren't only talking about 3rd graders here. Plenty of high schoolers are studying advanced topics and doing independent project work and research that goes well beyond the 3 encyclopedias in their school library.

Black Mirror is a show which blabbing about the ending to an episode is rather uncool.

What’s the point of that? We don’t make students write their own dictionary or build their own calculator as a prerequisite for using those tools. To your point about Excel and Word, most students from 10/20 years ago don’t know what Lotus is or how to execute commands in the terminal, but are still able to use computers effectively in their lives. There’s a multitude of search engines and LLM providers available - if schools don’t like what Google is doing, they are free to swap.

> requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo. Over time, increasingly expensive tiers

That's going to be on top of a rent, or instead of rent?

You and I are missing something. I made a similar point as you did and I'm being downvoted so heavily I soon won't be able to respond to comments for atleast 8h.

They need search (not necessarily Google) for accessing essentially any resource on the internet. How many URLs do you know by memory? How many URLs do would you learn just by seeing a link from another site?

Can you walk me through a school that does'nt need Google search? What are they learning, doing?