The High Cost of Silent Classrooms

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The cost of this silence is both cognitive and social. When artificial intelligence anticipates every step before a student even recognizes a hurdle, it strips away the productive struggle on which learning depends. Students need to wrestle with confusion to build their own understanding. The neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and her colleagues have shown that deep learning, the kind that sticks, happens when students connect what they are learning to bigger ideas and to their own lives. Replace dialogue and struggle with isolated screen time, and we disrupt the neural circuits that allow students to build knowledge.

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Doubling down on isolation is dangerous. We are already witnessing a collapse in teen mental health, as Jonathan Haidt has warned us, driven by a “rewiring of childhood” that replaced play and community with screen time. If schools embrace one-to-one A.I. tutoring as the norm, they will deepen that crisis, exchanging the in-person interactions children need for yet another screen.

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