A Massachusetts couple claims that their son’s high school attempted to derail his future by giving him detention and a bad grade on an assignment he wrote using generative AI.
An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.
In what appears to be the first case of its kind, at least in Massachusetts, a couple has sued their local school district after it disciplined their son for using generative AI tools on a history project. Dale and Jennifer Harris allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments and that the punishment visited upon their son for using an AI tool—he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment—has harmed his chances of getting into Stanford University and other elite schools.
Yeah, I’m 100% with the school on this one.
As a survivor of homeschooling, this is the one thing I wish more people understood: school is not about cramming enough data into a kid until they magically evolve into an adult. School is supposed to teach you how to think.
Not in an Orwellian sense, but in a “here’s how to approach a problem, here’s how to get the data you need, here’s how to keep track of it all, here’s how to articulate your thoughts, here’s how to ask useful questions…” sense. More broadly, it should also teach you how to handle failure and remind you that you’ll never know everything.
Abstracting that away, either by giving kids AI crutches or – in my case – the teacher’s textbook and telling them to figure it out, causes a lot of damage once they’re out of the school bubble and have to solve big, knotty problems.