Opinion: Our Schools Are Failing the AI Generation
Opinion: Our Schools Are Failing the AI Generation
Dr. James Morrison is a former superintendent and current education policy researcher at Stanford University.
Visit any typical American classroom in 2026, and you’ll find students learning in much the same way their grandparents did: sitting in rows, listening to lectures, and taking standardized tests. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is transforming every industry and eliminating jobs that once seemed secure.
We are failing our children.
The Mismatch
Consider what today’s students will face:
- 65% of elementary students will work in jobs that don’t yet exist
- AI will automate routine cognitive tasks across every sector
- The half-life of professional skills continues to shrink
Yet our schools still emphasize:
- Memorization over critical thinking
- Standardized testing over creativity
- Individual competition over collaboration
- Fixed curricula over adaptive learning
What Needs to Change
1. Embrace AI, Don’t Ban It Schools that prohibit ChatGPT and similar tools are making a grave mistake. Students need to learn to work alongside AI, not pretend it doesn’t exist. The skill of the future is knowing how to leverage AI effectively.
2. Focus on Distinctly Human Skills AI excels at information processing but struggles with:
- Emotional intelligence
- Creative problem-solving
- Ethical reasoning
- Complex interpersonal dynamics
These should be our educational priorities.
3. Personalized Learning Paths The irony is that AI makes truly personalized education possible for the first time. Every student could have an AI tutor adapting to their learning style, pace, and interests. Why aren’t we using this?
4. Real-World Application Abstract knowledge divorced from application is obsolete. Students should be solving real problems in their communities, working in interdisciplinary teams, and creating tangible outcomes.
The Political Reality
Unfortunately, education reform is politically treacherous:
- Teacher unions resist changes to traditional models
- Parents want their children’s experience to mirror their own
- Politicians prefer talking about education to actually changing it
- Testing companies profit from the status quo
A Call to Action
The children entering school today will graduate into a world unimaginably different from our own. Every year we delay fundamental reform, we fail another cohort of students.
We don’t need incremental improvements. We need a complete reimagining of what education means in the AI age.
The question is whether we have the courage to provide it.