As you stroll through Los Altos, the first thing you notice is how unremarkable it appears for a place perched atop such wealth. Oak trees, a Peet’s, a CVS, and low ranch houses. These are the public schools that parents quietly relocate to in order to attend. And last fall, on a weekday afternoon in one of those buildings, a group of teenagers got together to write the guidelines for how artificial intelligence should be used in classrooms. This is something that the majority of school districts across the nation have been struggling mightily to accomplish on their own.
When you think about it, it’s an odd inversion. Superintendents and curriculum directors have been holding emergency meetings, writing memos, and hiring consultants for the past three years in an attempt to figure out what to do about a chatbot that their students picked up in about an afternoon. Los Altos went in a different direction. The children were asked by the district. Not as window dressing, not as a focus group. as drafters.
There are two ways to interpret this, and both are probably accurate. One interpretation is that it’s a clever pedagogical move to allow teenagers to participate in the creation of rules if you want them to take responsibility for them. The other is that adults have actually run out of options. The adults in the room realized at some point that the children might actually be more familiar with the area because technology advanced more quickly than the institutions designed to handle it.
I can’t stop thinking about the teacher Dave Hallmon described in his essay, who was sitting at his kitchen table the morning after Thanksgiving when his entire family learned about ChatGPT over pie. His syllabus seemed to have aged into a museum piece overnight when he looked at it. There was a sense that the unwritten agreement between the teacher and the student, which presumed that the student would be the one thinking, had quietly broken. In the past two years, every educator I’ve spoken to has told me about that morning in some way.
According to reports, the Los Altos students produced a set of conditions rather than a ban. When AI is useful, when it isn’t, and when disclosure is required or not. The posture is more important than the details. It views AI as a tool whose use must be honest rather than as a moral panic, much like previous generations of educators eventually treated calculators and Wikipedia. It’s unclear if that stance will persist throughout the upcoming academic year.
It’s okay for skeptics to resist. In a recent article for the Guardian, author Wendy Liu argued against using these tools at all, claiming that thinking is meant to be difficult and that the friction is what makes them useful. Regarding cognitive offloading, she makes a valid point. Witnessing a fourteen-year-old transfer the messy middle of an essay—the part where you truly discover your beliefs—to a machine that costs twenty dollars a month is unsettling. That concern is real in the classroom. It’s also a concern that if we pretend that technology doesn’t exist, we’ll raise a generation that doesn’t know how to use it properly.
In a tiny and most likely flawed way, Los Altos is attempting to determine whether the solution lies in the middle of those extremes. When a Silicon Valley district is testing a Silicon Valley solution to a Silicon Valley issue, it’s easy to become pessimistic. They might have discovered something that most districts will eventually steal, covertly, and without acknowledgment. In a few years, we’ll find out. The first people to know will be the students who are currently writing the rules.
