History shows attempts to ban AI in classrooms will backfire: David Richards

The oldest version of this argument goes back to ancient Greece. Socrates believed the written word itself was dangerous. In Plato’s Phaedrus, he warns that writing would implant forgetfulness in the soul, that people would stop exercising memory and instead settle for the appearance of wisdom rather than the real thing. Outsourcing thought to marks on a page, he argued, would weaken the mind.

It is hard to read that now without smiling. Writing did not rot thinking. It made civilisation scalable. It allowed ideas to accumulate rather than evaporate with each generation.

Philosophy, science, law, history, democracy all exist because knowledge could finally outlive the person who first had it. Socrates remains one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived. He was also spectacularly wrong about tools.

That mistake did not die with him. It repeats whenever learning becomes easier.

In the early twentieth century, parents worried that fountain pens were an indulgence.

Children, they complained, no longer learned to write properly with a straight pen and nib and were being softened for the realities of the business world. A few decades later, the target shifted again. Ballpoint pens were condemned as careless devices. Students used them, threw them away, and supposedly abandoned thrift, discipline and moral fibre along with them.

Education itself, according to one teacher publication at the time, was heading for ruin. Handwriting survived. Society did too.

The pattern is clearest with calculators. In the 1980s, respected maths educators protested against their use in schools. Children would press buttons instead of thinking. One teacher dismissed the calculator as a “security box”, arguing it removed any reason to learn computation at all. If machines did the work, brains would rot.

What actually happened was far more mundane. Calculators raised the ceiling. Students moved more quickly through arithmetic and spent more time on algebra, modelling and problem solving. Mathematical thinking did not disappear. It shifted. The skill moved from grinding through calculations to understanding what those calculations meant.

Artificial intelligence now sits in exactly the same dock, accused of exactly the same crime.

Strip away the language and the argument is unchanged. AI will make things too easy. Ease will undermine effort. Effort, we quietly assume, is the same thing as intelligence.

It never has been. Intelligence is not about doing everything the hard way. It is about knowing which tools to use, when to trust them, and how to think above them rather than beneath them. We do not ask engineers to abandon simulation, doctors to ignore imaging, or pilots to fly by instinct alone. Yet when children use new tools to think, we panic.

That is why the calmest voices in technology are also the most pragmatic. Mike Cannon-Brookes, the founder and chief executive of Atlassian, put it plainly. AI is not going to replace human beings. It is a force multiplier for human creativity.

He is not worried about being replaced by AI. He is worried about being replaced by someone who is really good at using AI. That distinction matters.

The real danger is not that children will stop thinking. It is that we will refuse to teach them how to think with the tools that now shape the world. History is unforgiving on this point.

Writing did not weaken the mind. Pens did not destroy discipline. Calculators did not kill mathematics. What they did was expose those who clung to old methods while the world accelerated around them.

Banning AI from classrooms does not protect children. It freezes them in a past that no longer exists. It teaches compliance rather than capability. The future will not reward those who can think without tools. It will reward those who can think better because of them.

Socrates feared writing. We built libraries. The lesson is not subtle. The panic never changes. Only the technology does.

David Richards is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs