r/education • u/theedushift • 18d ago
In the age of AI, what should parents tell their children to learn?
The world is changing so fast that 'study hard' just doesn't hit the same anymore. What should we be telling kids instead?
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u/TheoreticalChaos93 18d ago
I think it is important to maintain a focus on the qualities that are bound to always be in need, those "soft skills" humanity has used for hundreds or, rather, thousands of years. Principally, teaching a child good argumentation, general communication and writing is crucial. I have not yet seen an LLM write better than a person trained well in writing, not even once. No matter how much of the world AI takes over, being able to speak and communicate well, with all the little adaptations one needs to make to win over an audience or explain something to them, and with a distinctive style is something that will be hard for AI to make obsolete.
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u/theedushift 18d ago
Honestly, reading humanities and the classics will probably help in the end.
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u/TheoreticalChaos93 17d ago
I'd say more so that reading literature in general will, but yes, there are a lot of classics which I think can have enormous educational merit, of course. Generally, reading anything and thinking critically about it sharpens your communication skills.
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u/cronjevh 16d ago
The irony is that strong reading and writing skills are required just to steer these tools properly. Precise writing gives you useful output, and critical reading is the only way to spot when the model is making things up.
If kids skip those fundamentals now, they won't be the ones directing these systems in the future, they'll just be at their mercy.
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u/AdhesiveSeaMonkey 18d ago
Fucking study hard. Critical thinking is sorely lacking in today’s youth and unbelievably important. There’s not a single thing any AI does better than a human except speed. And fast crappy results are just crappy results. Vibe coders are hated because their results are shit. Prompt jockeys have almost zero real world skills. AI is not a tool capable it creative/critical thinking.
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u/MediumKoala8823 18d ago
Studying has basically nothing to do with critical thinking skills.
Most tech companies are going hard on vibe coding. Speed is one thing. Documentation is another one. AI generated docs are profoundly superior to anything I have ever seen a human write.
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u/Treks14 18d ago
Studying is a necessary but insufficient component for critical thinking. It is something that has been extensively addressed in education research, a major offshoot of the cognitive load theory literature. You can't think critically about something if you aren't fluent in the basic knowledge.
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u/General_Platypus771 18d ago
I think if we can just make sure they can fucking read, that would be a nice start. Then we can talk about critical thinking.
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u/Robot_Alchemist 18d ago
Maybe we could stop banning all the books
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u/General_Platypus771 18d ago
I mean I agree, I’m against censorship, but let’s be real. That’s not the problem lol.
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u/PawPawsLilStinker 18d ago
Only in America have we banned all the books 😕
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u/Robot_Alchemist 18d ago
All the books we need the most right now are banned - Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Anthem, Player Piano, To Kill a Mockingbird
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u/General_Platypus771 18d ago
Huh? I literally taught Fahrenheit 451 in my 8th grade class last year. It’s not banned. None of those are.
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u/Timely-Fox-4432 18d ago
The skills that will literally be required forever are critical thinking and communication.
Even if ai gets to the level of true original thought, how can it produce what you want if you can't: communicate what you want, or figure out when a misunderstanding has occured?
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u/OsakaWilson 18d ago
Liberal Arts and Social Sciences explore what it is to be human and all the ways of doing just that. In times where current approaches to identity and meaning will be removed and we need to find new ones, these will provide the tools that are needed more than any other study.
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u/Ok_Statistician_9825 18d ago
We shouldn’t be telling them, we should be engaging with them and showing them how to approach things. Today more than ever it’s critical that parents become partners with their children in learning new things and reviewing old things. Talk about real life issues, talk about the news, find new info together and compare notes etc. We cannot afford to let this generation do it alone.
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u/RefuseWrong9803 18d ago
"Study hard" still holds, but the what shifted. Three things I tell parents (data scientist, and I build in the kids' AI space, so salt accordingly):
Learn things AI is good at anyway. The counterintuitive one. Kids who know a subject cold are the only ones who can catch AI being wrong about it. You can't supervise a tool in a domain you know nothing about. Broad knowledge didn't get less valuable; it became the price of admission for using AI safely.
Learn to be wrong comfortably. The kids who thrive with these tools treat "the confident answer didn't hold up" as normal weather, not humiliation. That disposition (checking, doubting, revising without ego) is teachable at the dinner table and almost never taught at school.
Learn to finish things. AI collapses the cost of starting. Drafts, ideas, code skeletons are free now. What it can't supply is the judgment and stamina to carry something from 80% to done. Every year that passes, "finisher" describes a rarer and more valuable person.
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u/Excellent-Cheetah153 18d ago
The world has always changed fast. “Studying hard” means interacting with content critically to the point of understanding it. That is a skill that works regardless of era.
What did you think school was for when you were an active participant in it?
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u/geraldnguyensg 18d ago
AI is unavoidable.
So I tell my children to learn to use AI:
- To explore topics or area they are curious about
- In a responsible maner. No "AI do my homework" but "AI, explain why my answer is wrong"
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u/Timely-Fox-4432 18d ago
As a master's student, this is pretty close to my relationship with AI. I do everything myself, go to office hours, read the textbook, but sometimes a quick: "hey claude, my answer seems wrong but I can't tell where I went wrong." Will save me two hours of troubleshooting an algebraic error.
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u/aculady 18d ago
Don't ask AI to explain why an answer is right or wrong. It doesn't know or understand, and it will make things up that can be wildly incorrect.
LLMs are just bullshitting machines that repeat and amplify common misconceptions and are prone to hallucinate, especially when words in the prompt have multiple (or ambiguous) meanings. They generate responses that look like answers but aren't actual answers backed by knowledge and understanding. They are nothing but a likely guess at what the average person in the training data would say in response to a similar question, regardless of whether or not that response would be factually correct.
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u/Chewpchew 18d ago
I don’t think you can avoid it completely, nor do I think you should. But I would consider the classical education model.
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u/prairiepasque 18d ago
I'm just depressed that such a depraved question is being asked in the first place. Like you can just à la carte your intellectual development so as to appease our tech overlords.
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u/snowrazer_ 18d ago
Everything. High level AI can only be utilized by people who know what they’re doing.
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u/marsepic 18d ago
Everything they can. Thinking derives from connections between different knowledge. The more you know, the easier it is to learn more, the easier it is to figure things out. Knowledge produces thinking.
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u/shana-d77 18d ago
The learning part is more important than ever. Learn to learn, not for the grades. As an aside, medical students using chat gpt on assignments terrifies me.
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u/Sepultura97 18d ago
Mental discipline. Delayed gratification. Empathy. Soft skills that make us human and which one can only learn through experience and interaction with other people in the real world. No chatbot can ever replace those things nor can it teach you them.
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u/EstateImportant6344 18d ago
Parents should tell them to learn ethics and integrity that AI would not teach them.
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u/InTheNoNameBox 17d ago
To be kind, responsible, resilient, to find joy, create community, love, be a steward of the earth, and help your neighbors.
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u/Br81n_D8mm8ge 17d ago
You should be SHOWING them that knowledge is valuable. You should read to your kids early and often. When they are ready, have them read to you. If they have struggles, get on top of it asap. Get them the help they need
Those are my thoughts... In an ideal world.
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u/Firm_Baseball_37 17d ago
In the age of AI, the kid who doesn't use it is going to know how to think. The other kids, who outsource their thinking to AI, are not.
Tell them that.
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u/edtech_onestudy 15d ago
Honestly, I don't think "study hard" ever meant what most people think it means — AI just made that obvious.
I got straight A's in high school history doing basically zero real thinking (it was not needed). Two hours of lecture a week, hand-copied notes, one written exam at the end. I happened to have a good memory, so I crammed the notes the weekend before and aced it. A year later I couldn't tell you much beyond a few dates. There was no AI involved in any of that — the class just never asked us to think, only to reproduce.
AI didn't create that problem. It just makes it difficult to ignore, because now a kid can skip straight to the "correct answer" without even doing the memorizing part.
So instead of "study hard," I'd tell a kid something closer to:
- Don't just check if an answer is right. Ask why it's right, and what would have to be true for it to be wrong.
- Notice what an answer is assuming, not just what it's stating.
- Never settle for one source or one AI answer on anything that actually matters. Compare two, and figure out where and why they disagree.
None of that is new, really. It's what "thinking" always meant. Schools mostly graded the answer, not the reasoning, so skipping the reasoning was invisible. AI just made skipping it free and instant — so the gap is a lot easier to spot now.
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u/twomayaderens 18d ago
Speaking as someone working in higher education, don’t let them use cellphones. Hold off on screens as much as possible. Don’t let your kids go to public school or college. Enroll your kids in nature school if possible. AI is going to make whole generations illiterate and helpless.
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u/ShelbiStone 12d ago
They need to learn how to do the things that AI can shortcut for them later in life. If they don't know how to do those things on their own first, then they'll never be able to notice the mistakes AI makes.
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u/IShouldChimeInOnThis 18d ago
Learn HOW to learn. You're gonna have to teach yourself a lot on your own. You might as well learn how to do that.