The Real AI Problem in Schools Isn’t What You Think
- Kirra Pendergast
- Apr 26
- 5 min read
The conversation we are having about artificial intelligence in our schools is not where it needs to be yet, and I think most of us already sense it. We are talking about policies and platforms and what to ban, while our kids are already living it and quietly working it out for themselves.
The truth is, AI is not coming to our classrooms. It is already there. I do not think the question is whether our young people should be using AI. That ship has well and truly sailed. The question I keep coming back to is whether they understand what it is doing to them when they do and do their educators?
Here is what worries me, and I suspect it worries you too. Most are not being taught how to use AI. They are just using it, quietly and inconsistently, and often without anyone in their world having a proper conversation with them about what it is doing to their thinking, their confidence, and the way they are learning to make decisions when no one is watching.
I have been around long enough to know that this is not the first time technology has arrived in faster than we could keep up with it. AI is not simply another tool to add to the lesson plan. It is an environment, and it is already shaping how our young people are coming to understand themselves, their capabilities, and their place in the world. That is not a small thing, and we should not pretend that it is.
And depending on where a child lives, their experience of technology, and now of AI, looks completely different. We talk about digital natives as though all our young people are on the same playing field, when really they are not, not even close. In parts of metro Sydney, Melbourne and The Gold Coast, kids have fast connections, multiple devices, and schools already experimenting with AI in real time, but move outside those bubbles and the picture changes quickly. Across regional and remote New South Wales, Queensland, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia, connectivity drops and access drops with it, and in Tasmania and parts of South Australia there are schools doing extraordinary work despite their infrastructure rather than because of it. There are also communities where digital access exists, but digital literacy does not, where young people are online constantly without anyone in their world ever sitting down with them to talk about how to navigate it safely or critically. Only this past week I watched a Minister for Education posting videos featuring children on their own social media, in a way that genuinely put those young people at risk, because in an age of AI tools, footage of a child is no longer just footage. It can be lifted, altered, and reused in ways most of us are only beginning to imagine. When the adults making decisions about our children's education are still working out what safe looks like in this new environment, we cannot fairly expect our kids, or the families around them, to already be ahead of us.
