Add The New York Post on Google Silicon Valley parents are puzzled by New York City’s landmark ban on schoolkids using Artificial Intelligence, because they are all-in on the tech.
Most Bay Area parents have no problem with their kids using AI from a young age — as long as they’re using it correctly.
“You can’t make children live in the past. Let them live in the present — or, better still, the future,” tech founder Qinghua Zhao told the Post. “Blocking their path to the future is definitely not a good thing.”
Zhao’s 11-year-old son, Lucas Zhang, already uses Claude Code, which he’s set up to reserve library books from his school reading list.
A fan of physical copies, he made it so AI won’t select eBooks and added a tracking column to mark books already requested, so there are no duplicates.
“The wonderful thing about children is they have no fear. They don’t know what’s difficult and what isn’t,” Zhao added.
She thinks the logic Lucas is learning through AI will matter more than the mechanics of coding, in the long run.
New York City’s ban prevents kids in preschool through 8th grade using any sort of generative AI and high schoolers are only able to use it in limited supervised contexts.
It’s a sharp contrast to Alpha School’s K–8 campus in Palo Alto. The $75,000-a-year institution has an academic timetable of just two hours a day, all spent interacting with AI. The rest of the day is workshops in leadership, financial literacy and how to be an entrepreneur.
“I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time to be a 5-year-old than there is right now,” school co-founder MacKenzie Price told the Post in an interview earlier this year.
One parent who considered the school told The Post: “I do not see the principal value as the AI. I see the potential value in giving motivated young people more time to explore different areas of interest, before education and career paths begin forcing them to narrow and specialize.”
Others remain somewhat skeptical, preferring their kids to have a more traditional education, citing how AI chatbots can make things too easy.
“You can’t prompt your way through many of life’s challenges,” said Leor Melamedov, a tech marketer with two sons in public school.
“I want my children to experience the fulfillment that comes from wrestling with complexity, reaching an insight, and overcoming a hump.”
There is also a difference between those who can afford the fees of a private school and everyone else.
At public-schools in California, kids get five hours of instruction a day over 180-days a year by state law. Palo Alto Unified School District’s total spending was about $37,800 per student in the 2022–23 year, roughly half Alpha’s tuition.
If public schools were to opt out of AI, a technology gap is sure to open up. Affluent, tech-savvy families will teach their kids the tech at home. Families of lesser means would be locked out.
“One group learns how to use AI as a tutor, research partner, creative tool, and productivity enhancer. Another group simply learns that AI is prohibited. Those are very different forms of preparation for the future,” Amy D. Love, a parent and founder of Discovering AI, told the Post.
“At one point, my child was doing extra math work that was not for school and took the shortcut of using AI to help answer the problems,” Love said.
“The work was completed quickly, and then came the realization essentially nothing had been learned. That was a valuable lesson for my child. Efficiency and learning are not the same thing.
“A child who has never learned to construct an argument cannot meaningfully evaluate whether AI has constructed a good one,” Love pointed out.
The other thing that worries parents isn’t the AI itself.
Friendships formed at school matter as much as the promise of faster learning, one parent pointed out. They had considered transferring their daughter to self-directed learning, but she wanted to finish middle school with her longtime friends, and realized it wouldn’t be a fit for her to go it alone, even if her test scores rose.
When passing the New York ban, schools chancellor Kamar Samuels reached for the same words as a big part of their reasoning: “Human connection.”
Regardless of the classroom, US children are turning to AI in large numbers. A Common Sense Media survey of 1,204 US children ages 9 to 17, taken in March, found that 67% had used AI chatbots. Among kids who use AI for schoolwork every day, 28% said it’s hard to get homework started or finished without it.
But where should the line be drawn? One Palo Alto mother recalled her older daughter loved reading. Then she discovered the iPhone.
“She never touched the books again,” the mother, who asked not to be named, lamented.
Love, whose daughter is 13-years-old, tries to strike a balance with how AI is used in her house.
Her rule: try it. Try again. Ask for help. If the parent and kid are both still stuck, they can use AI together — then her daughter starts the next task alone.
“The goal is not to get the answer,” Love said. “The goal is to get the student back to the point where they can do the thinking themselves.”
She says there are two aims she hopes to fulfil: “What skills should my child develop to have options as the world changes, and what does my child genuinely enjoy?”
