New York City just restricted generative AI for nearly 600,000 students. Los Angeles has blocked it on district-issued devices.
That may be wise. It won’t, by itself, make anyone think.
New York’s own announcement says children need to “wrestle with tough problems on their own.” Exactly right. A restriction can protect the chance to struggle. Only the assignment can require it.
Nearly two thousand years ago, Plutarch compared the mind to wood that needs kindling, not a bottle that needs filling. The kindling, he wrote, should create “an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.”
Filling is receiving and repeating. Kindling is what happens when a learner works through what they’ve received: questioning an explanation, making connections, testing what they think they understand.
Students were reciting explanations they couldn’t explain long before ChatGPT — no screen required. AI just made filling available on demand, patiently, at 9pm when the assignment is due.
So here’s the question the bans can’t answer: does the work we assign make kindling unavoidable?
One assignment shape that does — with or without AI in the room:
The student builds the argument first, alone.
Then something pushes back — an AI where it’s allowed, a classmate, a teacher, a parent.
The student decides which objection actually holds, and why.
Then revises — and explains what changed and what didn’t.
The objection can come from anywhere. The judgment has to come from the student.
A school can enforce a ban perfectly and still assign mostly filling. A school can allow AI and still demand kindling.
Whether your school bans AI or embraces it, the test is the same: when the tool is gone, what does the assignment still require the student to think through?
Great learners are built, not born.