School has just started–or is about to start–in many parts of America, and over the next several months we may discover just how deeply artificial intelligence has changed the next generation of students. By virtually every early warning sign, the news is not encouraging.
For the past few years, educators have worried primarily about students using ChatGPT and other AI systems to cheat. Would teenagers have AI write their essays? Would college students use it to complete homework? Could professors determine whether an assignment was actually written by the person whose name appeared at the top?
Those problems haven’t disappeared, but an even more troubling question is emerging: If artificial intelligence increasingly does the work required to earn an education, what exactly does an education certify anymore?
For generations, a diploma theoretically demonstrated that a student had learned how to read difficult material, research a subject, organize information, solve problems, construct an argument and communicate ideas. Artificial intelligence potentially disrupts that entire arrangement.
A student can now ask AI to summarize the book he didn’t read, explain the historical event he didn’t study, solve the problem he didn’t understand, construct the argument he didn’t develop and write the paper he never really thought about. The final product might look excellent, but who was actually educated?
The Struggle Was The Education
This is where the AI revolution is forcing educators to confront an uncomfortable reality: the difficult part of education was never an inconvenience technology needed to eliminate. The difficult part was the education.
Students struggle to find the right words because doing so teaches them how to communicate. They wrestle with conflicting evidence because that teaches them how to evaluate information. They rewrite paragraphs because rewriting forces them to clarify what they actually believe.
Cognitive psychologist Ronald Kellogg has described writing as a technology for thinking. Writing isn’t simply transferring fully formed thoughts onto paper. Very often, we discover what we think while attempting to explain it. Remove that struggle and you may remove part of the thinking.
Research from MIT has provided an unsettling glimpse of what that could mean. Researchers studying essay writers found that participants using large language models demonstrated substantially weaker brain connectivity than those writing without technological assistance. AI users also had greater difficulty accurately recalling or quoting what they had supposedly written.
The researchers cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from one study, but the findings raise an obvious question parents and educators cannot afford to ignore: What happens when millions of children routinely outsource the mental exercises their developing minds are supposed to be practicing?
Imagine sending a teenager to the gym every afternoon but allowing a robot to lift the weights for him. The weights still went up, but nobody would expect the teenager to become stronger. Something remarkably similar may be happening academically.
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Schools Are Already Retreating
Schools and universities increasingly recognize that something has changed. Some educators are returning to handwritten assignments, oral examinations, restricted devices and supervised testing because instructors need some reliable way of determining what students themselves actually know.
Princeton University provides a striking example. For more than a century, its famous Honor Code allowed students to take examinations without faculty proctors. In 2026, faculty voted to begin proctoring in-class examinations amid concerns about modern forms of cheating, including generative AI and electronic devices.
Individual courses are going further. Some professors prohibit AI precisely because they want students to develop the ability to reason through problems themselves. That gets to the heart of the issue: an AI system can produce an impressive answer that a student may be completely incapable of explaining.
And that creates a much bigger problem than cheating.
What Does The Diploma Mean?
