Junk food for the brain?

In an AI world, should we even try to make kids consume actual textbooks?

Yes, this is junk food. (Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash)

It only happens once a year at a high school: Curriculum night, also known as parents night.

It’s time to scramble up and down some slippery marble steps built for giants in the 1920s!

During my panic about finding more rooms numbered with no obvious earthly numbering system, I heard a teacher talk about the importance of getting our kids to read their history textbook chapters for real — not just feeding the content into AI so it could feed it back to them in bite-size nuggets of knowledge, completely out of context.

This teacher was taking a noble stance against what sounds like junk-food learning, the Hostess Snoballs of intellectual exploration, if you will.

But isn’t historical content run through a blender exactly the same as its whole food form?

Isn’t learning from AI the same for teenagers?

I wanted an answer to this question, so of course I, um, asked AI.

“No, learning from AI is not the same for teenagers as it is for adults,” said Gemini. “While adults typically use AI with a pre-existing foundation of knowledge, critical thinking skills, and a settled identity, teenagers are still actively…