Should schools allow AI? A practical answer

Most schools have already made this decision twice. First they blocked AI, because it appeared suddenly and the risks were obvious before the uses were. Then they discovered the block had changed where students used it rather than whether they used it.

That is the honest starting point. A prohibition a school cannot enforce is not a policy; it is a statement of preference. The useful question is what a school can actually control.

What a ban does and does not do

A ban does real work. It sets an expectation, it keeps AI out of lessons where it would undermine the point of the exercise, and it gives staff a clear line to hold. None of that is nothing.

What a ban does not do is prevent use. Students have phones and home computers. The measurable effect of a ban is that use moves to tools the school cannot see, on devices it does not control, with no filtering appropriate to its community — and with a strong incentive for students not to mention it.

A ban relocates the behaviour. It does not remove it, and it removes the school's visibility of it.

The three questions worth settling first

1. Where is AI genuinely inappropriate?

Some assessments measure whether a student can do a thing unaided. AI use there defeats the purpose, and no filtering setting fixes that — it is a matter of assessment design and supervision. Decide which work is meant to be unaided and say so plainly, per assignment rather than as a blanket rule.

2. Where is it obviously useful?

Explaining a concept a different way, drafting and critiquing, practice questions, translation, summarising a long text. These are the cases where refusing to engage puts your talmidim behind peers who have the tool at home anyway.

3. What must never appear, in any context?

This is the part a general-purpose assistant will not do for you. Every community has content it will not have in front of its children, and that list is more specific than any vendor's default safety policy. It only becomes enforceable if the tool lets you state it and applies it everywhere.

A workable middle position

1. Permit one AI tool that filters on the server, so the rules follow students home rather than stopping at the school gate.
2. Write the school's own blocked topics into it, rather than relying on a vendor's global defaults.
3. Say per assignment whether AI is permitted, expected, or forbidden — not once, as a blanket rule.
4. Teach students to check what it tells them. This is a skill, and it is the one that transfers.
5. Review what was blocked periodically. Patterns are more useful than individual incidents.
6. Tell parents what you have done. A parent who knows the school provides a filtered option is far less likely to hand a child an unfiltered one.

On honesty with students

Students know when a rule is unenforceable, and a rule everyone knows is unenforceable costs the school credibility on the rules that matter. A school that says "here is the tool we permit, here is what it will not do, and here is where you must work unaided" is describing something true. That is a stronger position than a prohibition that quietly does not hold.