From Mamdani’s veto to enthusiasm in Estonia: Schools around the world are grappling with the use of AI

Sandra Martinez Roe, a mother in Los Angeles, hopes that her son will never use artificial intelligence (AI) in school. “I’m not going to let my children be guinea pigs,” she tells EL PAÍS over the phone. The city’s school board granted her wish, at least temporarily, a couple of weeks ago: the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has banned AI from public classrooms this school year.

Martinez Roe is a member of Schools Beyond Screens, a parent group that fights against certain technologies in schools. She attended the board meeting where the decision was made. “We went into the meeting prepared, with our demands, some research and a list of experts,” she explains. “When it ended, they had turned off all the AI tools for all grades and age groups. It was a surprise and a huge victory for us,” she sighs.

Similarly, one of the most striking measures implemented in recent days, this one by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, has been to “prioritize student safety and real, human instruction” by imposing “the most expansive student-facing AI moratorium in the nation,” according to city officials.

“The tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary. We do not see it that way,” Mamdani stated.

In contrast to this AI blackout in New York and Los Angeles, however, Estonia — the top-ranked European country and third in the world in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) standings — is turning it on. For a year now, it has been providing 16-year-old students with an adapted version of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, which offers students guidance rather than simply answering their questions.

Estonian Education Minister Kristina Kallas emphasized this distinction via video call: “I don’t think banning AI will prevent young people from using it. AI use will just be more clandestine and more hidden from adult view, but they’ll still try to use it.”

The Baltic country is deploying this specialized model, developed in collaboration with OpenAI, because it believes that “general-purpose AI isn’t designed to learn,” the minister warns. She describes the ministry’s tool as a “Socratic” kind of GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) that helps students “develop their critical thinking skills and [boost] cognitive growth.”

Kallas emphasizes that her office hasn’t received a single complaint from any Estonian family about implementing the adapted model. The only complaint she’s heard came from her own son and for a different reason. The minister recounts: “My son had started 11th grade when the tool was introduced last year. I asked him, ‘How’s it going?’ And he said, ‘It’s really annoying, because [the program] doesn’t give me any answers.’”

Kallas asserts that this is only the first step. “We need to redesign the learning process, recognizing that students are already using AI at home when they’re doing their homework,” she points out. “They understand the technology much better than the teachers.”

Still, the Estonian government doesn’t plan on allowing AI to be used by students under the age of 16, a policy it shares, in one form or another, with New York City (which is prohibiting the use of the technology for children 14 and under), Norway and China. However, they’re still training teachers regarding how to navigate AI when it comes to elementary and middle-school students. “These are the ages when we need to develop self-directed learners. Teachers know that a 12-year-old is using AI for homework… so we have to design the assignment in such a way that students are forced to think and learn,” Kallas explains.

The minister believes that this is “the greatest challenge facing humanity.” She continues: “[AI] is a technology that doesn’t force us to think; it makes us dependent on machines. Everything happens very quickly in an education system. And, if we don’t act, all of thinking and memory will be outsourced.” This may sound apocalyptic, but Kallas says that she’s working to prevent an educational collapse. “A [blanket ban] is an option, but banning the tools doesn’t make them disappear. The risk is even greater: that learning in schools will become obsolete,” she points out.

Her own logic isn’t so far removed from that of Los Angeles. The city will review the ban, which affects some 380,000 students, at the end of the 2026-2027 school year, according to a spokesperson for the LAUSD. “Our policy is to restrict student access to generative AI platforms while the district reviews instructional use and safeguards,” the spokesperson clarified, in a statement sent to EL PAÍS.

A total ban

Even though New York is the first city in the United States to issue a total ban on AI in classrooms, it’s not the first major step that its education department has taken when it comes to this issue. The Big Apple actually banned student and teacher access to ChatGPT back in January of 2023, shortly after the chatbot’s launch. The technology had raised concerns in the educational sector, due to the ease with which students could use it to cheat on exams. However, the city reversed the measure in May of that same year, in order to “embrace [ChatGPT’s] potential” – a quote from then-New York City Chancellor of Education David Banks, who wrote an opinion piece that month to explain the change in policy.

If you put New York City and Los Angeles on one side of a spectrum, while placing Estonia on the other end, it’s clear that most educational systems worldwide currently fall somewhere in between, without such specific policies. This is according to Mark West, a researcher at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). One exception is the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which designates AI as a mandatory subject, starting in preschool. From the age of four, students in the UAE learn to compare machines to humans, taking their first steps when it comes to using AI applications. Meanwhile, those between the ages of 10 and 14 years must learn how to design artificial intelligence systems.

“At first glance, they seem like two opposite poles, but that’s not the case,” West emphasizes. “If you look more closely, the UAE and Estonia actually teach students about AI. We believe that’s important and urgent. But relying on AI for learning is an entirely different matter.”

Spain already relies on it. According to the PISA report published this past September 8, in the developed world, students from Malta and Spain use AI the most for studying. But the five OECD countries where students use it the least for schoolwork achieve better scores on the tests.

The Spanish Ministry of Education has established general rules for the use of AI in schools, but emphasizes in a response to EL PAÍS that education policy rests with regional governments. A guide published on September 8 by the National Institute of Educational Technologies and Teacher Training (INTEF) states that “AI literacy is now a necessary dimension of students’ comprehensive education.” Currently, Catalonia is the only region of Spain that recommends prohibiting the unsupervised use of AI in classrooms, specifically for children under the age of 14.

Schools worldwide are facing this technology without knowing where it will lead their students, at a time when two key figures in the rise of AI — Dario Amodei and Sam Altman — are proposing that the pace of these models’ development be slowed down. Meanwhile, UNESCO is proposing both safeguarding and accelerating the deployment of AI: “We must ensure that these tools help education and children… and that they’re safe,” West emphasizes.

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