Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school
reuters.com626 points by ilreb 16 hours ago
626 points by ilreb 16 hours ago
> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said.
Sounds right to me. Kids under 13 need to learn to read, write and comprehend text. Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.
They can play with AI at home, and after 13 they can learn how to use AI productively and, ideally, in a way that enhances rather than detracts from their education.
Also from the story:
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
A big hooray for that. Will be interesting to see what impact that has on Norway education - a quick search just now didn't turn up any detailed studies, presumably those will show up eventually.
Totally agree!
For anyone who still thinks kids should use AI, another argument to make is we are still figuring out AI (hence the constant debate on it, hype, uncertainty, boundaries of its capabilities etc etc). I don't think anyone with right mind can disagree with that. Keeping that mind, wouldn't it make sense to at-the-very-least tread with caution when it comes to kids.
The counterargument is that kids will live in a world different from our own.
For example, in many countries children lost the ability to write cursive; that used to be a critical skill comparable to literacy itself. But in our current society, that's no longer the case and you can be very successful without it, but there are other skills, such as using technology, that became critical.
Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
But how do you know that letting kids use AI at a way earlier age is the right way to equip them for the world that they would live in? You don't even know what that world will be like, so you can't even draw the conclusion that teaching them AI today will create career success in the future.
And then there's the other solid supporting arguments:
- Humans today were able to comprehend and use AI as soon as ChatGPT became popular so kids today will be able to pick it up quickly as grown-ups.
- "Using AI" isn't really a skill because there isn't much to learn beyond typing to a chatbot and reading the output (creating agentic workflows are very much for power users).
- The form of AI tech today might not even be the same as its form in the future, so you're already teaching them something obsolete.
Kids won't grow up into a world where it's not beneficial to know how to read or write or think.
> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
I don't think this is as clear as you make it out to be.
There are areas (e.g. personal care as per the impact map released by Anthropic a few months ago) where the impact of AI will be less than in the ones HN often discusses. Communicating with people is important in many of these areas so making sure that kids "should learn" how to communicate is a good investment regardless of how rapidly technology is shifting. There are different time tested ways of doing this and while you can "disrupt" these a little, throwing them out completely is, at least to me, a bad idea.
OTOH, doubling down on learning "skills for the future" which are all bold bets while sacrificing things that have served humanity through multiple moments of change is probably a bad idea.
As for cursive writing (or atleast handwriting) itself, there are several studies of learning it being associated with developing fine motor control, improving memory, improving focus. I can't find them right now but I remember reading them because of my own interest in calligraphy. Many older (especially religious) traditions place emphasis on using written (rather than digitally typeset) books for memorisation because the slight changes in the shapes of the letters act as reinforcements for the process. I know this from experience as well so I think there's definitely value there.
My 6 year olds have been writing cursive at school all year, they have a zero policy about phones until the age ~15, and still use books for everything. Not many schools do this anymore, but there are schools that still do.
>> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
I'm not really sure what point you are making here. We can talk about stuff based on what we know now. AI definitely isn't there yet. Even adults are figuring it out, the limits of its capabilities and shortcomings. Its not even been 5 years, and we want to change everything everywhere.
So if we don't know if we should or should not, and take into account all the hype, marketing, hype, advantages and some potential disadvantages (which are quite serious) why not just go ahead when there is more confidence.
Everybody and their grandma can "use AI". Reading (and understanding what you read), writing (coherently) and calculating (in your head) are those basic skills that need to be trained and will give you an advantage no matter in what kind of world you live.
I went through a Steiner school from pre-school to end of high school. It’s highly opinionated and very controlling initially. When you paint, you start with one colour. Then another day you get the next (there were only primary colours, because of course).
You eat at your desk, then you’re allowed to play. This was dropped after a year or so.
You don’t learn to read until you’re 7, etc etc.
However, by the end of high school it was up to the individual how much they achieved, and there was minimal pressure. As long as you weren’t messing with other kids, you could do a little or much as you please, and consequences were minimal.
Tools and skills were introduced at a developmentally appropriate age - not sure who chose that age though.
There was a lot wrong with the school and the system, but there was a lot more that was right in my opinion.
Yeah, I we considered a Steiner school because I think that extensive play is a super critical part of a good education. The problem is you also need to be able to be part of the mainstream system at some point, and it felt like it didn't necessarily quite meet that goal.
Also worth considering is that it is part of a broader ideology of Anthroposophy which sometimes aproaches semi cult status in how people identify with it. A lot of the principles of Steiner schools are actually pretty cool, but sending your kid there, depending on the school they will also be dealing with the more esoteric bits of all of this that have very little to do with didactic or pedagogic sound principles.
Some if it includes some schools teaching some of the more racists views of Mr Steiner.
You're absolutely right! Joined-up penmanship is exactly the same as our current asymmetry in absorbing reams of soullessly verbose, arrogant pablum shat out by the latest crop of "frontier" LLMs.
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Learn about ads and personalization >Whether they should or not is a moot point. They are using it and we need to figure out how to organise society to deal with it.
We're in like year 2 or 3 of LLMs being serious tools, still with many disadvantages over humans. There's plenty of time to figure things out, we don't need to experiment on children right now.
Return to pen and paper, particularly for testing. Extend school time for doing supervised "homework" that doesn't involve the Internet.
Like that?
Yes, make the teachers on $25-35K annual salaries do /more/ work for no extra money. I'm sure that will fix education.
Just to be accurate, median annual salary is over $62k accross the US for kindergarten and elementary school teachers, with California nearing 100k.
[1] https://www.onetonline.org/link/localwages/25-2021.00?st=CA
I am conflicted on this. One part of me think that they deserve a lot more compensation. But I am not really sure if that should be in the form of a salary rise.
While a bit hyperbolic this is a major issue.
“Workload” has been a constant argument for just about any tech product we acquired at school. I’m very conflicted about this issue to be honest. I’m a member of one of those parent management boards type things, not sure what’s it called in English.
One the one hand I know how busy teachers are, on the other I also know how they never work to 5PM have twice my vacation days, while somehow never being able to meet to talk about issues. We get one ten minute session every few months at best.
If you put pressure on them they call in sick for weeks and good luck finding a replacement. I’m deeply worried that if teaching as a whole doesn’t get it together we will slowly be forced to use AI for everything because of lack of alternatives.
> figure out how to organise society to deal with it.
Yea, need to figure out to form society with participants who are incapable of thinking...
And to make matters worse the LLMs that is causing this cannot even really think!
> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.
I think it's more complex than this.
AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.
The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.)
On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.
There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.
LLMs are able to talk for a very long while now. Have you ever used Gemini as an assistant? It can even put in related images about your query and while it can use an improvement it can spell more or less.
It's far from clear that this helps you to learn anything. More likely it's a way for most people to avoid having to think or learn.
I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.
I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
> I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
I am not sure. It would be like sending a kid to a beautiful garden with full of life and stuff, and then micromanaging what they can do there!
The beauty of the books is that the books talk to you, and you cannot talk back. You have to talk to yourselves, go down some wrong path, and course correct on your own at some point, and that is where true learning happens..
Hallucinations aren't going anywhere. So you're having a conversation with a stochastic parrot that occasionally says something completely wrong but completely viable and in a highly compelling fashion.
The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.
The thing I think is underspoken in this space is that LLMs will always hallucinate a bit. How will you know as a 13 year old that an LLM is not conversing truth at you?
My teachers were frequently wrong too and spoke with authority on subjects in hindsight they were frankly ill equipped to teach. Part of learning is understanding how to reason through these types of issues. It's a common problem solving problem in the work place just the same.