A teacher I deeply respect once told me: "Every fifteen years, some new technology arrives and everyone announces it's going to transform education. It never does, in the way they say. It does, in other ways."
TV was going to replace teachers. Computers were. The internet was. MOOCs were. Now AI is. The pattern is familiar enough to be funny, if education weren't so important.
But: AI in the classroom is doing something. It's just not the thing the headlines say.
What I've seen actually help
I spent some time over the last year with teachers — primary and secondary, public and private, in four countries — who are using AI tools day to day. Here's what they tell me is useful.
Marking, but the slow kind. Not grading tests. Drafting feedback on longer, messier student writing. A good language model can read a student's essay, suggest a first-pass set of comments in the teacher's voice, and save the teacher hours. The teacher reviews, edits, sometimes rewrites. The feedback the student gets is faster and more personal than it would otherwise be — not less, more.
Differentiation. The curriculum is one-size-fits-all; the classroom never is. A teacher I know uses an AI tool to produce three versions of a reading passage — one at grade level, one slightly simplified, one stretched — so every student in her mixed-ability class can engage with the same idea. This used to take her two hours per lesson. Now it takes fifteen minutes.
The quiet co-planner. One maths teacher told me the AI assistant is "the colleague I wish I had — someone I can bounce lesson ideas off at 9pm on a Sunday without feeling guilty." She doesn't use its ideas wholesale. She uses them as a starting point to react to.
Accessibility. Real-time captioning for students with hearing difficulties. Text-to-speech for students with dyslexia. Image description for students with visual impairments. These tools existed before, but the modern versions are transformatively better — and, for the first time, affordable for every classroom.
What hasn't worked
"Adaptive learning platforms" have been promising to personalise education for twenty years. Most still disappoint. The mathematical diagnosis of what a student is struggling with is narrow; the recommendations are narrower. Teachers see them as extra work, not help. The ones that do work are the ones that give teachers better visibility into student understanding — not the ones that try to replace the teacher's judgment.
AI tutors, as a replacement for human tutors, have not delivered on the hype. As supplements — a patient voice to practise French with, a coding copilot for a sixteen-year-old learning Python — they can be genuinely helpful. As replacements — they're not there, and I'm not sure they should be.
Essay graders that claim to score student writing are often worse than a human with ten minutes of training. They reward length, vocabulary, and structural conformity. The things we actually care about in student writing — voice, ideas, argument — they tend to miss. Use with caution.
The quiet worry
Here's what I actually worry about.
Students are, right now, using AI to do their homework. A certain amount of this is fine — tools are tools — but there is a genuine risk that we're raising a generation who never develop the cognitive callouses that come from struggling with a hard problem. The struggle is the point.
I don't think banning AI in schools is the answer. I think the answer is redesigning what we ask students to do. More in-class writing. More oral presentations. More assignments where the AI's involvement is part of the learning — "use a language model to critique your argument, then rewrite to address its critiques" — rather than an unspoken shortcut.
Teachers are already figuring this out, quickly and thoughtfully, without much help from the AI industry. They're the ones we should be listening to.
What we're doing
We've been running hands-on workshops for school-age children that treat AI as a craft object — something you can pick up, examine, laugh at when it gets things wrong, and use as a springboard for real understanding. The kids love it. The teachers love it more, because it's not another thing imposed on them.
If you're an educator thinking about where AI fits in your classroom, or a school leader working out a policy, we'd genuinely love to help. Book a chat — we learn as much from these conversations as we share.
