The Machines Are Teaching Our Kids to Stop Thinking

Their homework scores went up. Their ability to think went down.

Hey everybody, I hope everybody's having a great day so far. I want to start today with something a teacher told me. It's not a headline, not a study. It was a real conversation that I had with them. They told me their students' aptitude scores are dropping. They were very concerned. They're dropping right now, in their own classroom. And when I asked if the school district was doing anything about it, the answer was barely scratching the surface.

We live in a world where the most powerful technology ever built is being handed to you without instructions, without warnings, and without anyone asking whether it serves you or uses you. That question is at the heart of The Virtuous Machine. I'm Michael Routhier, and this is Tech 4 Grown-Ups, the show that believes technology should answer to human beings, not the other way around. This is the show the tech industry doesn't want you to hear. No corporate talking points, no sponsored opinions, just honest conversation. Let's go.

Why This Conversation Wouldn't Leave Me Alone

That conversation with the teacher really bothered me. Because if you have children, you understand that you would do anything for them. You would lay down your life for them. And you always want to give them the best life possible, better than what you had growing up. When we were growing up, we didn't have all this tech, all this AI, or any of this. So I had to dig into this and look a little bit further at the effects of AI on our school-aged children. I'm not talking about college and above. I'm talking about grade school.

And here's what researchers actually found. This isn't a small study.

The Study That Should Concern Every Parent

Stockholm University and the University of Hong Kong tracked more than 26,000 middle and high school students over 30 months. AI use boosted homework scores by 18 percent. It cut homework time nearly in half. On paper, that looks like success, because I do remember my children having just hours and hours of homework, and AI is making things efficient, right?

But here's what happened next. Within six months, those same students' exam scores dropped 20 percent. And after two years, their entrance exam results collapsed. They were down 24 percent on one national exam and 18 percent on another. Let that sink in. The better their homework looked, the worse they actually understood the material.

And here's the detail that genuinely disturbed me. It wasn't the struggling students who fell the furthest. It was the top performers. Their scores dropped 24 percent, worse than lower-achieving students, because they leaned on AI hardest to chase the perfect answer. Think about that for a moment. Younger students with less oversight fell harder than older ones. Boys fell harder than girls, tied directly to heavier AI use.

Here's my first question for you. If the smartest kids in the room are the ones losing the most ground, what exactly does that tell us about what we're rewarding in our classrooms right now?

"That's Not Us". I Wish That Were True

I know what some of you are thinking. That's a study from overseas. That's not us. I'm not worried about it. And you know what? I wish that were true. RAND Corporation surveyed American students directly, and nearly 7 in 10 middle and high schoolers now say they're worried AI is eroding their own critical thinking. Not adults worrying about kids. It's the kids themselves, surrounding themselves with AI, using it, and now sounding the alarm on their own minds.

That number climbed from 48 percent to 68 percent among middle schoolers in less than a year. And despite knowing this, they keep using it anyway, because the pressure to keep up is stronger than the fear of falling behind in a different way.

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This Isn't New. It's a Hundred Years Old, and We Ignored the Warning

Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the US Senate that test scores suggest something we've never seen before. Gen Z may be the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents. And this pattern isn't new. In 1924, a psychologist named Sidney Pressey built one of the first teaching machines. Students got very good at using it. But the moment you took the machine away, they couldn't do the work anymore. They hadn't learned the subject. They learned the machine itself.

Horvath's own words on this should sit with you; the tools experts use to make their lives easier are not the tools children should use to learn how to become experts. When you use offloading tools as a novice, you don't learn the skill. You simply learn dependency. That is exactly what's happening in classrooms right now, a hundred years later, with far more powerful machines.

This isn't one isolated study either. A separate peer-reviewed study of over 300 students found that 68 percent frequently relied on AI for academic work, and 61 percent reported increased cognitive dependency and decreased problem-solving effort as a direct result. Another study found that increased AI use is directly linked to eroding critical thinking abilities, driven by something researchers call cognitive offloading, essentially letting the machine think so you don't have to.

Here's my second question for you. If we already know this is happening, backed by real research, why is so little being done to stop it?

Why Nobody Noticed Until It Was Too Late

Eighty-four percent of US high school students now report using AI for homework. That number isn't slowing down. And yet the researchers behind the Chinese study asked an important question: why hasn't there been stronger pushback against a decline this significant? Their answer should concern you. The damage builds slowly and invisibly. The average score only fell 3.4 percent in the first two years. It only became fully visible once adoption surged past 80 percent. In other words, by the time the damage is obvious enough for a school district to act, an entire generation has already gone through it.

The Moment of Struggle We're Quietly Removing

Marcus Aurelius wrote that the impediment to action advances action. He believed struggle was where growth happened, and I believe that too. RAND's own researchers describe this exact same idea in modern terms. They call it first draft thinking, that blank page, that math problem with no steps yet, that moment of friction where a student has to reach into their own mind and try. AI removes that moment quietly, without anyone voting on it, without any parent signing a permission slip.

Here's my third and final question for you today. If we remove every moment of struggle from a child's education, what exactly are we left with when that child grows up and struggle finds them anyway? Because it always does.

What You Can Actually Do About This

So here's what I'm asking you to do, because fear without action is just noise.

• If you have children or grandchildren in school, ask their teachers directly what the AI policy actually is, not what it claims to be on paper

• Push your local school board for real limits, not vague guidelines

• Talk to the kids in your life about the difference between using AI as a tool and using it as a replacement for their own thinking

• If you're a teacher listening to this right now, know that your instincts, the ones telling you something is wrong, are backed by real data. You're not imagining this

This is Tech 4 Grown-Ups. I'm not here to tell you AI has no place in the classroom, because that's not true. I'm here to make sure the next generation still knows how to think without it. Stay sharp, stay loud, and I will see you next week.

The Question That Started This Whole Show

Marcus Aurelius asked a question that I think about every time I sit down to record this show. What is it fundamentally that this thing is for? Not what it claims to be for. What is it actually for? That's the Virtuous Machine question, and it applies to every piece of technology being built right now, the AI, the algorithms, the platforms, all of it.

You'll find everything from today's episode at tech4grownups.com. Join the conversation in the community, the link is there. Stay sharp, stay loud, and I'll see you in the next one.

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