David Weiss: What students understand about AI that adults miss

New teachers, new classes, new notebooks and, increasingly, new conversations about artificial intelligence. With the school year underway, before we tell students how AI will transform their education and their future, perhaps we should listen to what they are telling us. A few months ago graduation ceremonies carried an undercurrent of tension. Speakers who invoked artificial intelligence as the defining force of the future drew loud boos and jeering from many graduating students. At the Air Force Academy, Vice President JD Vance acknowledged during his commencement speech that he watched clips of these incidents to spare himself a similar fate. It would be easy to read this reaction as the technophobia of a threatened generation. I disagree. I think students are telling us something important about how we talk to them about their futures — and how we often get it wrong. Now we have a chance to listen. I have worked in education for nearly 50 years. I have witnessed wave after wave of technologies arrive with promises to transform learning, from overhead projectors and personal calculators to computer labs, cell phones and now AI. Each sparked the same cycle of excitement, concern, disappointment and recalibration. What strikes me is not that AI is necessarily different, though it may well be. It is that we keep making the same mistake: leading with the tool rather than the purpose. Overconfident forecasts and what the political scientist Henry Farrell has called 'feral thought experiments' treat the AI future as a fait accompli. We often speak as though the destination is known when, in reality, the technology's social, economic and educational consequences remain contested. This resonates in a particular way. When I was a child, I attended the 1964 World's Fair in New York and saw Bell Telephone's groundbreaking Picturephone, which allowed visitors to make video calls decades before the iPhone and Skype. It felt like science fiction. Looking back, that technological trajectory seems obvious. Today's AI revolution feels different. The destination is far less clear. The pace and nature of technological change have made confident predictions increasingly unreliable. That creates a fundamental challenge for education. If we cannot clearly see the future, then education cannot prepare students for a predetermined destination. It must prepare them to navigate uncertainty itself: to evaluate imperfect information, adapt to rapid change, and make sound decisions in conditions of genuine complexity. Critical thinking. Reasoned judgment. Juggling multiple perspectives. The capacity to ask adaptive questions. And the willingness to sit with ambiguity rather than reach for the nearest answer. These are not new ideas. This has been the foundation of International Baccalaureate for almost 60 years, long before chatbots entered the conversation. The IB welcomed AI into its classrooms, working to understand how it can deepen inquiry, support educators and serve students responsibly. The design question we always ask, 'Who do we want students to become,' precedes any discussion about which tools students should use and how they should use them. Students must be part of this conversation. Decades ago, during the Cold War, IB students and I debated the promises and dangers of nuclear technology after reading Jacob Bronowski's 'Science and Human Values.' Today's questions about AI are different, but the principle is the same: powerful technologies demand thoughtful human judgment. Education must prepare students not just to use these tools but to question how they should shape society. Schools should foster resilience for the challenges AI will bring by cultivating students who are curious, principled, open-minded, caring, and capable of reflection and positive action. Preparing students for the future has never been about teaching them to uncritically master the latest technology. It is about giving them the tools, confidence, and judgment to think independently, adapt to uncertainty, and shape the world ahead on their own terms.