AI in the Classroom: The Case for Teaching With the Machine, Not Against It

Key points

• Economist Daniel Susskind's new book argues schools should teach children to use AI tools rather than block them.
• The debate echoes a near-identical panic in 1979, when parents and teachers feared pocket calculators would make children unable to do basic maths.
• A government report commissioned that year concluded calculators belonged in classrooms, not out of them.
• The book, reviewed by The Guardian AI, takes an optimistic view at a moment when most education coverage leans toward alarm.

In 1979, the British government handed a quiet maths lecturer named Wilfred Cockcroft an uncomfortable assignment. A crisis was brewing in how schools taught mathematics. Cockcroft, based at the University of Hull, was asked to investigate and report back.

His report was wide-ranging. One chapter stood out.

It addressed a small plastic device that had recently arrived in high-street shops: the pocket calculator. Parents were frightened. Teachers were suspicious. The fear was specific and felt serious: let children reach for a gadget to do arithmetic, and you produce generations who cannot think for themselves.

Cockcroft disagreed. His report concluded that calculators belonged in education, handled carefully, not banned from it.

Fast-forward 46 years, and the argument is almost word-for-word the same. Swap "calculator" for "AI" and "arithmetic" for "essay-writing", and you have the debate playing out in staffrooms and government offices right now.

What is this book actually arguing?

Daniel Susskind, an economist who studies how technology reshapes work, says schools should lean into AI rather than retreat from it. His book is a deliberate counter to the panic, making the case that the question is not whether children will grow up alongside AI, but whether schools prepare them for that reality or pretend it is not coming.

The calculator parallel is the book's sharpest argument. The children who grew up with calculators did not lose the ability to think mathematically. They were freed from the tedious parts of the task so they could spend more time on the parts that actually required thought: understanding a problem, spotting a mistake, knowing whether an answer made sense.

Susskind's bet is that AI could do the same for writing, research and analysis, if schools treat it as a tool to be understood rather than a threat to be outlawed.

What does this mean for parents and teachers?

For now, no single policy governs AI in schools across the UK or the US. Individual schools are making their own calls, often banning AI-generated work outright without much guidance on what "using AI" actually means in practice.

Susskind's broader point is that those bans may be solving the wrong problem. The goal of education, he argues, has never been to produce children who can perform tasks a machine cannot. It has always been to produce people who can think. If AI handles the mechanical parts of a task, educators need to be clearer about which skills sit above that mechanical layer, and teach those deliberately.

That is a harder conversation than a blanket ban. It is also, if the calculator story is any guide, probably the more honest one.

Common questions

Is AI actually as big a shift as the calculator was?

Calculators replaced one narrow task: arithmetic. AI tools, like large language models (the technology behind chatbots such as ChatGPT), can draft text, summarise documents and answer questions across almost every subject, which makes the scope of the challenge much larger, even if Susskind's core argument still holds.

Should parents be worried about their children using AI for schoolwork?

The honest answer is: it depends how it is used. A child who uses AI to avoid thinking learns little; a child who uses it to check their reasoning, explore a topic further or get feedback on a draft may learn more efficiently. The distinction matters, and it is worth asking schools what their actual guidance is.