Don’t Let AI Dumb Down Our Kids

By Michael Ashley

For years, I coached high schoolers to write their college essay. What always surprised me was the gulf between grades and cognitive abilities.

To date, I have worked with over 50 students. Every single one told me they didn’t know what to write about. Even after we brainstormed an idea that could be turned into an essay, they lacked the basic ability to write a strong essay. Their sentences were littered with errors even though Word contains spell check. From an intellectual standpoint, the papers I reviewed were clichéd and shallow, lacking originality and introspection.

And yet all these students had 3.5 GPAs or higher. Some had GPAs topping 4.0—making the whole concept of grades even more meaningless.

Clearly, what’s been happening is academic dishonesty. Schools have been inflating pupils’ grades for a host of reasons: to downplay intellectual decline, to boost self-esteems, and of course, to qualify for academic funding.

It’s a joke.

Even more troubling, most of what I just described happened before ChatGPT’s arrival. Nowadays? Students have limitless AI tools to feign intelligence they don’t possess. Instead of reading books, they can ask AI to summarize what the author wrote, then turn it in to their teacher, pretending they grasp the concepts. They don’t need to learn historical dates or understand history itself. They can Google it.

But what happens to society when an entire generation outsources its thinking to machines? Cognitive diminishment. You may have personal experience with the concept. Most of you graduated high school years ago. You probably don’t have to practice math skills like algebra, trigonometry, or calculus in your daily life.

As a result, you may have grown rusty at math.

Now imagine what would happen if you never learned basic reading, writing, or critical thinking skills in your formative years? Or you outsourced many of these activities to AI?

You’d also grow cognitively rusty. You’d walk around with no concept of history and no ability to reason critically. You’d lack the intellectual powers people once took for granted.

This is where we’re headed if we don’t wake up.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Luddite here to warn you away from AI. That would be unrealistic. AI is here to stay. What must change, though, is our relationship to it. The more we outsource our abilities to AI for everything from navigation to creativity, the less prepared we’ll be to think on our own. If we don’t encourage our young people to use their brains, they will lose them.

Rather than harnessing the immense knowledge at our fingertips, future generations will doom themselves to ignorance and incompetence, accelerating societal decline. The dystopian film Idiocracy prophesied what’s in store for the human race if we continue to be so lazy-minded.

What’s the cure? Self-discipline.

It begins in the home. Parents have a duty to foster intellectual curiosity in their kids. Turn off the TV. Put away the phones. Take out a book and read to your kids. When you’re done, talk to your children. Ask them to tell you their thoughts. Make reading and writing lifelong habits so that by the time they grow up, they cannot imagine a meaningful life without them.

We now live in a culture prizing comfort and immediate gratification. We are the victims of abundance, not privation. Most kids will have never held a real job before graduating college. As a result, they don’t value hard work, let alone the lifelong benefits of continuous learning and growth.

Instead, they are taught from an early age to take the easy route. When problems arise, they come to rely on Mom or Dad to fix them. Or the state—the ultimate parent. This is why so many businesses are loath to hire 20-year-olds. It's also why 1 in 4 Gen Z job applicants now bring parents to job interviews.

If these trends persist, societal collapse may be inevitable. The skills underpinning society—including building, maintenance, and repair—will vanish. Unless Tesla robots—operating with AI brains—replace increasingly stupid people, the world we’ve come to know will cease to exist.

That’s not all. Humans lacking historical knowledge and critical thinking skills can expect to be enslaved by powerful humans who do possess the intellectual wherewithal to decide for them.

The real problem isn’t AI. It’s us. For years, we stood by as our schools harmed our young people through grade inflation and participation trophies.

We adults created a culture that discounted intellectualism and celebrated expediency. Now those chickens have come home to roost.

But it’s not too late to right this ship.

Starting today, we can become a nation that once again encourages our young people to be lifelong learners. Not to win good grades. But to be better humans. Will you embrace the human revolution?

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