> 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.

Spend a few minutes on the teacher subreddits: /r/teachers and /r/professors, specifically. AI has been a disaster for student outcomes and educator performance, more or less across the board. It should be banned in education, but there's no way to enforce that without increasing educator workload substantially (eliminating homework and re-working lesson plans around that; moving tests and projects back into the classroom; etc.)

I think this is basically right. You don’t hand out calculators before kids understand arithmetic. LLM version is sneakier because skipping the work still produces something that looks finished.

Completely understandable.

My 6yo kiddo recently realized that smart speaker (Google home) can not only play her favorite songs, but answer her homework questions. And it was something not that trivial, like “which animal from the list changes color of its fur when seasons change: tiger, arctic fox, something else”.

And now I need to either disable everything or figure out how to turn that off for her.

Im confused, are there tasks given to 6 to 13 year old to use AI?

In the classroom, are they just throwing gpt in front of them? Is that the modern equivalent of watching a vhs?

Or do they have homework to vibe code something or given some prompts to ask at home and save somewhere?

Serious question, what does this mean?

AI used to write homework should be banned.

AI in 1:1 tutor mode with proper hardware (live scanning pen and paper), harness and guardrails should be wildly successful (in terms of education outcomes) especially in elementary school.

I'm glad this is the case. It is the correct outcome.

I've heard students actually discussing that they will just use an LLM to shortcut work. I even have friends in their 50s who can barely think for themselves now without having to refer to "AI". And at least two of them are teachers.

Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.

No one taught anything of value. No one learned anything of value. I am very worried we'll see a lost generation at some point rippling through the ages.

The fundemental problem is motivation not AI and this is simply the result of a larger societal shift that happened to correlate with the advent of AI.

Personally I've never done any homework or assignments, when I was outside school it was over. However, this motivated me to do really well in tests which in-turn made me extremely active during the limited time I had in school and I became pretty damn efficient at absorbing information and picking things up. So on the surface at minimum it appears that we should stop grading on activities outside school.

To be honest, what worked the best for me was what my history teacher did, 5 minute tests at the start of the lesson, then 10-20 minutes of teaching + self study assignments, remaining time is grading + answering any questions and if grading goes fast they usually had time to continue teaching for a few more minutes before the lesson ended. Group study was also heavily utilized as a form to take the load off themselves when they were overwhelmed from work due to 12th grade students especially right before exams, most of our classes became group study. All the students from their class always performed exceptionally well in nationals even though it was a mid tier public school. I will recognize that I am a bit special and that students are extremely varied I picked up on this when I discovered that someone in 11th grade still couldn't grasp the pythagorean theorem.

I don't really have a solution to the motivation problem when phones are just so addicting and have an atmosphere of their own, the best way I can put it is that your child becomes an outcast if they can't play roblox because everyone in their school does which is a very real thing my friend experienced with their kids.

Education right now has basically become a giant AI echo chamber, and it's happening nationwide. It’s this bizarre setup where teachers use AI to make assignments, students use AI to do them, teachers use AI to grade them, and principals use AI to watch over the teachers.

Good, wholeheartedly agree with this. Too bad US legislators are impotent.

The number of people--adults included--who, when don't know something they could easily think about, resort to some AI bot rather than thinking, and developing their mind and intelligence, is staggering. Giving kids a reason not to think and develop their intelligence seems a pathway to even further declines in intelligence. Seems a quick route to dementia in old age too: if you fail to exercise and maintain something it eventually stops working.

What about teachers using it to generate learning material that is just fabricated?

I'd ban all technology in the classroom.

What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.

You'll never get strong by watching a video of people lifting weights. Similarly, you'll never understand math by watching a video or having an AI do the work for you. And, somehow, writing out the words and equations by hand is very effective for learning.

https://www.holdenluntz.com/artists/keystone-press-agency/al...

Nothing mentioned about the use of AI by elementary school teachers who may well be using it to generate sub-par worksheets or to rapidly, and potentially inaccurately, mark work.

Every special event flyer I get from my kids' school now seems to be AI generated. I'd be surprised if quizzes and worksheets don't head the same way.

I'm pretty certain the execs who run the large AI companies would limit their children's AI usage also.

Surprised to read this as Norway also has Sikt AI for schools, where teachers can monitor how AI systems are used. Seems like it has both embraced AI and banned it.

This feels so obvious I’m surprised it needed to be news.

Wouldn't it matter a lot how AI is being used?

I would assume if children are allowed to use AI without rails as a shortcut it will undermine their learning, and it's used for feedback and as a patient tutor it would accelerate their learning?

It seems like the problem is that they don't have the science and tooling to use it constructively at scale, so the desperate solution is to ban it outright until a scalable constructive approach is understood?

The article doesn't explain any of this directly...

It's frustrating to me when bold statements are directed at "AI" holistically and vaguely, completely ignoring any nuance.

There is a massive gap between letting elementary students free reign use chatGPT 3.5 (hallucinations and all) to do whatever, vs using a very guard-railed pedagogically optimized app powered by a SOTA model to support students in a specific way that accelerates good outcomes.

Most respectful interpretation is that the leaders know this and have a plan to figure it out, but for some reason it's not making it's way into this article. Is the absence representative of the truth of the situation, or some editors choice to pile on to a holistic anti-ai narrative?

Social media execs are already known for keeping their children off their platforms* and even phones so my question is: Do the leading ML/AI people let their children interact with LLMs yes or no?

[*] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/13/youtubes-ceo-is-latest-tech-...

The problem is they were two decades late digitizing the classroom. Now we're dealing with the aftermath with the educational system still not being capable of keeping up with societal progress.

I think it’s quite tricky. On one side, writing is a form of thinking and cognitive training.

Just NOT doing that work by having AI simulate it is not good for anyone’s cognitive development.

At the same time, anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it.

I really feel for teachers/educators right now. It must be hard to remain demanding and insist on educating kids well while also preparing them for the future they’ll actually live in.

I already saw it in my life: a ban on calculators, a ban on computers. But after a short period of rejection, everybody starts to embrace the new tech. Instead of bans we were getting computer classes in schools.

You can straight-up bypass AI mania in schooling altogether by just keeping pen-and-paper as the primary medium, as most Asian countries do. Digitization is a meaningless overcomplication.

>"The most important thing in school is that our children learn to read, write and do mathematics," Stoere

Language is not a tool for thought. It's a tool for communication. This has been known for decades. People routinely lose all language related faculties and remain competent in other skills. Their only value is in creating an artifact that a teacher can then look over and update their mental model of the students knowledge. This is no longer the case since students can now easily create those artifact without having a mental model. You are entirely swapping the test for the goal when you say language is the most important thing we much teach them. You are optimizing for a large noise to signal ratio.

The EU's general obsession with deprecated tech is mindboggling. Teach you're kids these skills and you won't have to worry about getting sent to a nursing home, I guess.

"..ban on smart phones.." "..ban on gen AI.." "..ban on social media.."

yes YES YASSSSSSSSSSSS

Ban all the things for kids. I don't want to be interviewing people in 10 years and decline every candidate because they can't correctly answer the question "You are 50ft away from the car wash. Do you walk or drive?"

I love how data driven and fast acting these European countries are. It takes forever for anything to happen in the US even with 80% support.

just ban everyone from using ai completely lets go back to how it used to be

Fuck yeah go to hell AI. Kids shouldn't be touching that IP infringement slop producer with a 10 foot pole.

Am I imagining things, or are all of the "vaguely pro-AI" comments being brigaded into oblivion?

I can't remember ever seeing this many reasonable posts being downvoted to the point of greying out.

The traditional schooling system can't stand that they are being outcompeted by AI and are trying to use the government to maintain their monopoly and keep those tax dollars flowing.

It's absolutely the right move. We're already seeing declines in cognitive capabilities among adults using AI. We're going to wind up with future generations of ignorants if we let them start as kids.

We are seriously in danger of "we need AI" becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as humanity becomes too stupid to do anything without AI, and we end up with a few companies essentially holding the keys to our collective ability to produce anything of value. Am I the only one freaked out about that?

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Buddhism identifies three stages of wisdom:

1. Wisdom through dogma. 2. Wisdom through reasoning. 3. Wisdom through experience.

AI is just stage 1. Instant and easily digestible. Traditional learning forces you to go to Stage 2, because you are often given too much information and you need to compress it to memorise it. And the best way to compress it, is by finding some kind of logical structure in the information.

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Great, yet another "no child and no teacher left behind!"

I was gifted kid, bored to death at basic school. I was reading books under the table, and was lucky to have tolerant teacher. Total ban would just push me to misbehaving and disrupting the class.

AI is amazing tool for learning, if Norway can not harness it, there is something deeply wrong with the educational system. Perhaps teachers unions?

Norway has a big problem with young immigrant kids at school not speaking Norwegian. Right now other kids are expected to teach them basic language, holding back their own development (like learning reading and writing)! Again, AI could provide amazing help here!

I wonder if at some point we will look back on stuff like this as back in the 1990s schools banning internet research and search engines. Obviously that seems ridiculous now, but the internet was big and scary back then too.