The world is pulling AI out of school. We're pushing it in.

Earlier this year Norway did something worth noticing. It barred generative AI for young children in its elementary schools, and put the money into books instead of tablets.

For the youngest kids, roughly ages six to thirteen, it is a straight block. Older teens can use it only under a trained teacher's eye. The trigger was blunt. After years of falling reading and maths results, the government decided the tools were part of the problem, not the fix.

Norway is not an outlier. Sweden spent twenty years as the poster child for the digital classroom, one device per student, textbooks retired, screens everywhere. This year it reversed, hard, bringing back paper, printed books and handwriting, and moving to ban phones in schools. The country that sold the rest of the world on screens is quietly taking them away from its own kids.

Zoom out and it is a wave. By the latest count, 114 education systems, 58% of the countries on earth, now have a national ban on phones in schools. Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, South Korea. The rich world spent a decade putting a screen in front of every child, looked at the results, and started pulling them back.

Now look at where we are heading.

In India the direction is the opposite. Every few months brings a new smart-classroom scheme, a tablet rollout, an AI tutor promising to personalise your child's learning. Edtech is sold to parents as the way to get ahead, and to schools as the way to look modern. We are accelerating into the exact model the countries who tried it first are now backing out of.

We have a habit of importing yesterday's Western fashion right as the West discovers its cost.

But here is the thing. The argument is not really about devices. The device is a stand-in for a question we keep dodging. What is school actually for?

If school exists to fill a child with the right answers, then fine, a machine that produces right answers instantly belongs at the centre of it. But if school exists to build a mind, a mind that can reason, struggle and think when the machine is switched off, then putting the machine in the middle of learning is solving the wrong problem. You are optimising the one thing that was never the point.

We know how a mind gets built, and it is not comfortable. It is built by desirable difficulty, the useful struggle of working a problem you cannot yet solve. The friction is not a bug in learning. The friction is the learning.

A tool that removes the struggle, that hands over the essay, the solved sum, the finished thought, does not lighten the load. It skips the part where the child was supposed to grow.

This is why the scores are falling, not rising, in the places that went furthest. In the US, more than half of teachers now say AI is making critical thinking harder, not easier. The machine did not make kids smarter. It made the hard part optional, and kids, being human, took the option.

So should AI be in school at all?

My answer is not a ban, and it is not a free-for-all. It is a question of where the machine sits.

There is a rule we come back to often here, the 80% rule. A child does 80% of the work themselves, and only then uses AI, and only to critique or pressure-test what they have already made. Never to produce it. That single distinction is the whole game.

AI as a critic at the end of the thinking is a fine thing to have in a classroom. It can mark, question and stretch. AI as the engine in the middle of the thinking, the thing that does the reasoning so the child does not have to, is the thing to keep out.

The country banning it for six-year-olds and the parent handing a ten-year-old ChatGPT for homework are arguing about the same line. Where does the machine sit, before the thinking or after.

The irony that works in India's favour

The thing the West is scrambling to bring back, the effortful, analog, hand-done work, is the thing India has not yet thrown away. Board exams are still written by hand. A child still works a maths problem on paper before anyone checks it.

Rote gets a bad name, and plenty of it earns the name, but the effort underneath it is exactly the muscle Sweden is now paying to rebuild. We are standing on the thing everyone else wants back, and we are being sold a screen to replace it.

What you can actually do

None of this means your child's school will get it right. Many will go device-first because it photographs well and sounds like progress. You cannot control that. You can control three things.

Ask the school one question. Not which tool, which brand, which app. Ask this. Does the tool do the thinking, or check it? A school that cannot answer that has not thought about it.

Protect the struggle at home. When homework comes, the rule is that the child does the 80% first. The wrestle, the wrong turns, the half formed attempt, all of it, before the machine is allowed near it. The messy first draft is not the thing to fix. It is the thing that builds the writer.

Keep one part of learning stubbornly analog. A problem worked on paper. A book read on a page. A thing memorised the slow way. Not because paper is sacred, but because the effort is.

The countries pulling AI out of their classrooms are not being nostalgic. They looked at what a decade of frictionless learning produced, and they did not like the child at the other end of it. We do not have to repeat the mistake to learn from it.

The question was never whether the tool is clever. It clearly is. The question is whether your child still has to think.

Ask your kids this week

• If a machine can answer it for you, how do you know you actually learned it?
• What is one thing you can do that a computer cannot?
• Would you rather get the right answer fast, or work it out slow? Why does it matter?

This is the argument at the heart of my book, Raising Humans. The goal was never to keep AI away from kids. It was to keep the thinking with them.

Sources: Norway's AI policy, Sweden's return to books, UNESCO on phone bans, NPR and Ipsos teacher poll.