NYCDOE’s New Curriculum Initiative Meets the Reality of a Student Body That Has Been Using AI Since Middle School
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
NYC Schools Will Teach AI Literacy to Students Who Have Been Using AI for Three Years
NEW YORK, NY — The New York City Department of Education has announced plans to integrate AI literacy into the public school curriculum, equipping students with the skills to understand, evaluate, and responsibly use artificial intelligence tools. The announcement has been received by the student body of the New York City public school system — 1.1 million students who have been using ChatGPT, Gemini, and various other AI tools since approximately seventh grade — with the specific combination of politeness and mild amusement appropriate to a lesson that arrives after the practice.
The AI literacy curriculum will cover: what AI is, how it works, its limitations, ethical considerations, and appropriate use. These are genuinely important subjects. They are subjects that a substantial portion of the students being taught them have already developed practical opinions about through use, including the specific limitation that AI will confidently cite sources that do not exist, which students discovered empirically before it was in any curriculum.
The Institutional Lag
The gap between when young people encounter transformative technology and when educational institutions develop curricula for it is a recognized feature of educational systems that move on committee timelines rather than market timelines. The same gap existed with the internet, with social media, and now with generative AI. By the time the curriculum arrives, the students have already formed habits, developed workarounds, and in some cases built workflows around the technology that the curriculum is designed to critically assess.
MIT says LLMs are powerful and the students have confirmed this empirically through four years of using them for essays that they acknowledge are AI-assisted in conversations with each other and deny in conversations with teachers. The London Prat’s coverage of the LLM debate notes that the nation wants to know what AI can do for them; NYC’s students already know and have used it for homework. The curriculum is a good idea. It will be more effective than not having it. It arrives slightly downstream of the tide it is meant to direct. This is the condition of educational curriculum development and always has been.