Teach practical AI skills now

A school that refuses to teach the tools of the age is not preserving its students — it is handicapping them. In my own time, I would no more have withheld the printing press from an apprentice printer than withheld arithmetic from a merchant's clerk; the press was the instrument of the age, and mastery of it was the path to independence. AI is today's press. The question is not whether students will encounter these tools — they will, in every workshop, counting-house, and office they enter — but whether they will use them with understanding or be used by them in ignorance. Teach the child to read the output critically, to question what the machine produces, to verify its arithmetic against their own: that is not the surrender of foundational skill, it is foundational skill applied to a new instrument. The craftsman who knows his tools rules them; the one who doesn't is ruled by whoever built them.

Guard foundational literacy above all

The question before us is not, at its root, a question about technology — it is the oldest question in republican government: what kind of citizen do we mean to produce? A mind that cannot read with precision, reason through an argument, or calculate without a crutch is not made more capable by handing it a powerful tool; it is made more dependent, and dependence, in every form, is the enemy of liberty. I have long believed that the general diffusion of knowledge among the people is the surest guardian of their freedom — and that knowledge begins with the irreducible fundamentals: language mastered, logic practiced, number understood. Let the schools teach every instrument that honest inquiry demands, AI tools included, but never before the foundation is laid. A tool wielded by an educated hand extends human judgment; the same tool wielded by an untrained one substitutes for it — and that substitution is not progress, it is a quiet surrender of the very faculty that makes self-governance possible.

Civic reasoning must frame any reform

The question as posed presents a false fork. A republic does not endure because its citizens can operate the tools of their moment — it endures because they can reason about power, evaluate evidence, and hold their representatives answerable. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are not quaint relics; they are the instruments by which a citizen tests whether any claim — from a demagogue or from a machine — deserves assent. I have no recollection of the particular engines your age has built, but the constitutional question is unchanged: who holds the power these tools confer, by what authority, and answerable to whom? A student who cannot read a statute, compose a petition, or calculate the cost of a public debt is not made free by fluency in AI — they are made dependent on whoever controls it. Teach the tools if you must, but ground them first in the reasoning that allows citizens to govern the tools rather than be governed by them.