How to ChatGPT

Schools are sleepwalking into an AI crisis.

ChatGPT isn’t a “cheating tool.” It’s far more significant: it’s rewiring how we think.

• Students are outsourcing memory because AI will “just remind them.”
• Writing is being polished into soulless uniformity.
• Reading stamina is collapsing under the weight of instant digests.
• And worst of all, the hidden curriculum of expedience is taking root: get it fast, not get it deep.

This isn’t speculation. Billions of interactions show the truth: people use ChatGPT less like a tool, more like an advisor. That should terrify anyone in education. Because if kids grow up treating AI as their second brain, what happens to their first?

We have a choice. Either schools keep pretending this is “just another tech fad” (like calculators or social media bans)… or we confront the uncomfortable truth: AI is embedding itself into literacy, reasoning, and judgment — the very marrow of education.

Ban it, and you lose relevance. Ignore it, and you lose students. The only path forward is deliberate design: guardrails that force retrieval before revision, questioning before answers, and voice before fluency.

I unpack all of this in my new piece How to ChatGPT.