AI in education is creating smarter students but lazier thinkers - and teachers are worried | AI Insights | Lumman.ai

Something’s happening in classrooms right now. And it’s not in your district’s strategic plan.

Students have smarter tools than ever before, from ChatGPT to Midjourney to Khanmigo. They’re generating essays, solving problems, and outlining arguments with tools that write, reason, and summarize like a very confident intern who never sleeps.

At first glance, everything looks great. Grades are up. Essays are more coherent. Kids seem “ahead.”

But here’s the haunting question behind those tidy results: who is doing the thinking?

The Answer Machine Era

Let’s not pretend AI is all bad. It’s fast. It’s helpful. It can fill in gaps, push exploration, and expose blind spots in student work—if used well.

But it's also seductive. AI tempts us to skip the friction entirely. That uncomfortable pause between “I don’t get this” and “Aha!”—the part where actual learning happens? Poof. Gone in a few well-phrased prompts.

A student asks ChatGPT, "What are the causes of World War I?" and gets a neat, accurate-looking rundown—alliances, nationalism, Franz Ferdinand, etc. Sometimes they summarize it. Sometimes they copy and paste. Either way, the hard part is offloaded.

And no one's the wiser.

Because the deliverable sounds smart.

But is it?

Education’s Great Costume Party

This isn’t just about students. It’s about schools pretending they’re still in charge of cognition.

Assignments that once tested understanding are being quietly repurposed as theater. The five-paragraph essay? It’s now a formatting exercise. Short answers? Easily generated. Research papers? More like a copy-edit of machine-drafted thoughts.

We’ve preserved the outer form of learning while gutting its core.

That’s why so many teachers are uncomfortable. It’s not paranoia—it’s pattern recognition. They see students handing in polished work that feels strangely unearned. Voice is lost. Risk-taking vanishes. Everything has the same too-confident, too-clean ring of a language model playing student.

Real learning happens through struggle. Friction. Wrong turns. Looping conversations with the self.

AI removes those all-too-human signals of thinking. And if we’re not careful, it rewards the output without questioning the process.

We’re grading the AI, not the student. And calling it a win.

AI Didn't Kill Learning. It Just Made Our Bad Habits Obvious.

Let’s be honest: the cracks were already there.

Long before ChatGPT, we were teaching kids to memorize, regurgitate, cite sources properly, and slot thesis statements into predictable formats. We trained them to pass tests, not think deeply. Compliance over curiosity.

If students now outsource that process to machines… maybe the machine didn’t break the system. Maybe it exposed what little thinking we were asking for to begin with.

Remember those "compare and contrast" assignments that could be knocked out with a few Wikipedia tabs? AI just automated that tedium. The real emergency is this: if AI can do 80% of schoolwork competently, maybe that schoolwork wasn’t worth doing in the first place.

Lazy Tools Don’t Create Lazy Thinkers. Lazy Prompts Do.

Not all students are slacking. Many are experimenting in ways we didn’t expect—iterating on AI inputs, challenging chatbot conclusions, rewriting essays based on tone, penning critiques of model bias, and using Midjourney to visualize abstract concepts.

In those moments, they're not cheating. They’re co-thinking with a machine.

But for that to happen, they need the right kind of assignment. The right kind of prompt.

Instead of “Write 800 words on Macbeth’s tragic flaws,” we could ask, “This is ChatGPT’s interpretation of Macbeth. What assumptions is it making? Where is it wrong? Do you agree with its analysis of Lady Macbeth’s motives?”

Now the student has to interrogate the model. Understand the play. Form an opinion. Compare interpretations. That’s real thinking.

If your classroom blows up the moment AI enters the scene, it wasn't built for critical thought—it was built for submission.

Teachers: Stop Competing. Start Coaching.

Some educators are reacting as if AI is a competitor. It isn’t. It’s a collaborator—or it can be, if we change the role of the teacher from content dispenser to cognitive coach.

That requires letting go of some sacred cows.

Stop pretending originality lives in MLA format.
Stop using plagiarism checks as learning proxies.
Stop issuing prompts a language model can ace with zero nuance.

Start doing the thing machines still can’t: teach judgment, discernment, and argument.

That means giving students messy problems. Encouraging productive struggle. Asking students to critique AI outputs—show where they’re wrong, biased, or thin. Have them defend their own ideas against the machine’s.

Not “Did they cite sources properly?”

Ask: Did this student engage in a real cognitive act?

If Calculators Were Step One, This Is Step Ten

There was a time when calculators destroyed our sense of math education. Teachers worried kids would never learn multiplication. And some didn’t—for a while.

But then we figured it out. We said: "Let’s teach the concept first. Then introduce the tool to do the labor part faster."

In the best-case scenario, AI is the calculator for thinking. But we blew past the “teach first” phase. We handed out the tool before building the conceptual scaffold.

The result? Students with access to infinite cognition... and no roadmap to use it well.

The Real AI Literacy Is Epistemological

Here’s where it gets existential.

If knowledge is no longer about having the answer, but about learning to interrogate the answer, then we’ve crossed into a totally different model of learning.

The key academic skill of the next decade won’t be essay writing. It will be AI interrogation.

Not just “Can you prompt this tool well?”

But: Can you push back against what it tells you? Can you catch a contradiction? Can you identify bias? Can you tell coherent nonsense from real logic?

Can you argue with the machine—and win?

That’s the future of education. And right now, barely anyone’s teaching it.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

Let’s zoom out.

Yes, students are using AI. Yes, some are cheating. But most are just responding to systems that never asked them to think very hard in the first place. The real opportunity is in rebuilding education itself—not around producing content, but around discerning meaning.

Want to fix this?

Stop treating AI as the enemy. Start treating it as a collaborator students must challenge.
Stop designing assignments for the type of thinking AI can do. Start designing them for the thinking it can’t.
Don’t outlaw struggle. Build it back in.

Because the real danger isn’t that students stop thinking. It’s that our schools stop asking them to try.

Three Final Thoughts That Might Stick

AI isn’t making students lazy. It’s spotlighting how little we were demanding in the first place. If an algorithm can ace your assignment in seconds, maybe you need better assignments.
Automation kills surface work. So stop assigning surface work. Push ambiguity. Reward reflection. Embrace complexity. All the things AI still can’t fake without help.
The most important question for every educator in 2024 isn’t “How do I detect AI use?” It’s “What does it mean to think well in a world of smart machines?” Build your curriculum around that—and you’re not just staying relevant.

You’re teaching students how to be human in the age of AI.

And that might be the most important lesson of all.