AI in Education · A Project Line
The question is not whether AI belongs in schools, but when.
What is coming — and what the science of learning tells us about how to navigate it.
Research Report · RR-AI-01 · June 2026
The State of AI Use
Who is using artificial intelligence, what for, and what the pattern means for schools.
Adoption is no longer the question. A generation now uses AI daily that no one has taught them to use, and the young increasingly believe it is harming their thinking. The unmet need is not access. It is a structure for using it well.
~700M
ChatGPT weekly users by mid-2025 — near one in ten people on earth.
54.6%
of US working-age adults had used generative AI by August 2025.
77%
of all use is three everyday tasks: practical guidance, writing, and seeking information.
Why we work on this
There is a generation of children in school now. The evidence that would tell us, with any certainty, how AI use shapes a developing mind will not arrive for fifteen or twenty years. A childhood is the unit of measurement, and we are inside one.
Most writing on AI in education either waits for proof it cannot yet have, or proceeds as though the proof were already in. The EdJournal does neither. We work on AI because schools are making decisions now that they cannot defer, and they deserve reasoning that is honest about its own limits. This is not a hopeful position and it is not a fearful one. It is an attempt to act well for the children who are in classrooms today — using what is genuinely known, and staying modest about the rest.
The asymmetry of risk
The cost of getting the timing wrong is not symmetric.
Introducing AI to a learner later than they could have used it carries a real cost, but a recoverable one: some efficiency is lost, a tool is adopted a little after it might have been. Introducing it earlier than a developing mind can absorb carries a different kind of cost. It may fall on the formation of the mind itself, during the years that mind is still being built. That cost may not be recoverable.
A school that has waited has not failed; it has a sound place to begin. A school where AI is already in use — perhaps further and earlier than was ever decided — has something to bring structure to. Our work is built to serve schools wherever they currently stand, and to keep them on the recoverable side of that line.
Being first is the headline. Being right is the foundation.
What the work rests on
Two ideas, each held honestly.
01
Development is staged — so the teaching of AI should be.
Foundational skills — a knowledge base, the automatisation of basic academic skills, the capacity to hold and work with information in mind — consolidate early. Judgment matures late; the brain systems that govern it continue developing into the early twenties. A capacity still being built cannot safely be handed to a tool, because handing it over removes the very effort that builds it. You cannot offload a developing skill and still expect the skill to form.
02
Responsible reasoning is possible before the evidence is settled.
We reason from what is genuinely known — the developmental sequence above, and the behaviour of earlier technologies that changed the cognitive work a learner does. Calculators, search engines and spell-checkers are instructive, and also imperfect analogies; each offloads a narrow, bounded task, where a general-purpose AI can produce the whole artefact across the whole task. We weigh those cases only where they genuinely resemble AI.
We hold a clean distinction throughout. What the science establishes is the sequence — understand before operate, depth before independence, foundations before offloading. What a practitioner decides is the placement of boundaries onto particular school years. The first is grounded, and we defend it. The second is a reasoned, revisable translation — and we name it as such, rather than claim a precision the evidence cannot carry.
Articles in this series
The EdJournal Advisory
When is a child ready for AI?
If that question is live in your school, The EdJournal Advisory helps leaders translate the developmental approach into a framework their own school can run.