What AI Is Going to Do to Education — From Elementary School to College, What Could Actually Happen

If you have grandkids, great-grandkids, or kids down the street, this episode is for you. Ginny has been doing a lot of reading on what AI might actually do to our schools — not in a vague, hand-wavy way, but in a real, picture-by-picture way. What could a classroom look like in three to five years? What happens to college? And what does any of this mean for the kids we love? That’s what this episode is about.

Ginny walks through three different age groups — elementary school, middle and high school, and college — and paints multiple scenarios for each. Along the way she shares the story of a $3 million AI chatbot that collapsed in three months, a private school where kids spend just two hours a day on AI-powered lessons, a University of Pennsylvania study showing students learning six to nine months ahead of their peers, and a Princeton professor whose students said something about AI that Ginny hasn’t been able to stop thinking about.

 In the news this week: a New York Times investigation into how accurate Google’s AI Overviews really are (the answer might surprise you — or maybe not), and a brand new Gallup survey of more than 1,500 young Americans that reveals how Gen Z really feels about AI right now. Spoiler: they’re curious, frustrated, and a little bit angry — all at the same time. Ginny also recommends a road trip to the zoo with a three-year-old and makes the case for bringing popcorn back into your life.

If you’ve been nodding along whenever someone says “AI is going to change education” but couldn’t quite picture what that actually means — this episode will help you see it.

SHOW LINKS:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/technology/google-ai-overviews-accuracy.html

https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skepticism-climbs.aspx

CHAPTERS:

00:00 Welcome and Preview

01:22 Google AI Overviews Accuracy

04:24 Gen Z Feelings on AI

07:01 Education in 3 to 5 Years

08:35 Elementary School Scenarios

12:10 Middle and High School Futures

17:54 College and the Future of Degrees

23:05 Key Takeaways on Learning

23:55 Recommendations Zoo Trip Planning

26:27 Wrap Up and Safety Reminders

aiGED: AI for the 65+ crowd

Transcript

Speaker 0:00

Well, hello everybody. Welcome to aiGED, the one, the only podcast that is all about AI for the 65 plus crowd. I am Ginny DeerIn, and I'm your co-host, and we've got a great episode for you today. And we're gonna start in the news. And if you use Google, the first story is one you're really gonna want to hear. Then we've got a brand new survey about a generation that grew up with technology and what they're actually feeling about AI right now. Spoiler, it's complicated. Then we're gonna dig into something I've been thinking about a lot lately, something that matters to almost everyone in this audience, whether you have grandkids, great-grandkids, or kids down the street. We're gonna talk about school, what it might look like in three, four, five years from now, and how AI could change everything from kindergarten classroom to the college campus and what we should be paying attention to. Plus, I'm gonna have a couple of recommendations, including one that involves a road trip and a three-year-old. And since it's spring break, I'm giving you a homework pass today. So let's get into it. We're gonna start with AI in the news. The first story comes from the New York Times, published just this week. It's titled How Accurate Are Google AI Overviews? And it's written by a team of five reporters. Now, if you use Google, which let's be honest, most of us do, you're going to want to hear this one. You know that box that pops up at the very top of Google Search Results now. It gives you that tidy little summary answer before you even get to the actual website links. That's called an AI overview. And Google rolled it out in 2024, so it's been around for a couple years. And billions of people see it every day. So the New York Times asked an AI research company to put it to the test. And here's what they found Google's AI overviews are accurate about 91% of the time, which sounds pretty good until you do the math. Because Google processes more than 5 trillion searches each year. At 91% accuracy, that means tens of millions of wrong answers every single hour. So that's worth paying attention to. So double check for responses. So that's exactly what we say on our show here to every episode is check, check on things, particularly if it's something important. So the bottom line is Google's AI overviews are useful as a starting point, but they are not the final word. Never were and never will be. When something matters, whether it's your health, your money, your family, just scroll past the AI box and go to the actual source. All right, the second story I want to bring to your attention: Gen Z and AI. It fits perfectly with what we're about to dig into for our main topic. So think of it as a little appetizer before the main course. So a brand new survey came out this week, just released on Thursday, from Gallup, the Walton Family Foundation, and an education technology firm called GSV Ventures. They surveyed more than 1,500 young Americans between the ages of 14 and 29. That's Generation Z. I don't know about you, but I have a lot of trouble keeping up with the different generations. But this one is Generation Z, 14 to 29. And they're the generation that grew up with smartphones, social media, and now AI. Here's the headline. More than half of Gen Z is using generative AI regularly. Well, that's not a big surprise. But their feelings about it, they're souring and it's happening very fast. So the percentage who say AI makes them feel excited dropped from 36% last year down to 22% this year. The share who feel hopeful fell from 27 to 18. And nearly a third say AI makes them feel angry. That's up nine points in just one year. Why the anger? Researchers say older Gen Zers, the ones just entering the workforce, are the most upset. They've spent years investing in their education, and now they're watching AI move into the entry-level jobs that they were really counting on for when they got out of school. But here's a detail I want us to hold on to. Out of every emotion measured in this survey, anger, anxiety, excitement, hope, the single most widely reported feeling among Gen Z about AI was curiosity. They're worried, they're frustrated, and they're still curious, which leads us perfectly into today's main topic. Because that mix of feelings, worried, frustrated, and still curious, is pretty much exactly how a lot of people feel when they start thinking about what AI is going to do to education. And that's what we're going to dig into right now. That's the main topic. So let's talk about school. Not the school we remember, but the school our grandkids or our neighbors' grandkids or the kids down the street are going to be sitting in three, four, five years from now. I've been doing a lot of reading on this, and I want to try to paint a picture for all of us of what might be coming. Because I think that's harder than it sounds. I mean, we hear AI is going to change education and we kind of nod along, but most of us can't quite see what that looks like. We just can't picture what a classroom would look like under those circumstances, what a school day would feel like, whether college will still mean what it meant when we went, if we went. So that's what I want to try to do today: paint some pictures. One thing to keep in mind, I may be a little more up to date on AI than most regular folks, and I know a bit about education, but I'm not anywhere close to being an expert on either. So take everything I'm about to share as here's some things that could happen, not predictions, just possibilities worth thinking about. And because school means very different things at different ages, let's go through this in stages. Little kids first, then middle and high school, then college and beyond. So let's start with the youngest learners, five, six, seven years old, learning to read, learning to add and subtract, learning how to sit still and pay attention and get along with people. I want to spend a little extra time here because this is a period of development I know a thing or two about. About 25 years ago, I founded an organization called Wings for Kids, an after-school program built entirely around what's called social and emotional learning, SEL for short. Things like self-awareness, empathy, how to handle your emotions, how to build healthy relationships, how to make good decisions. I mean, don't we all want SEL? Anyway, I started it because I believe these skills matter as much as reading and math and maybe more in terms of life. I tell you all of this not to pat myself on the back, but because it shapes how I see everything happening right now with AI, particularly with young children. The most important things in those early years, the things that predict success in school, in work, and in life, are the social and emotional ones. Now, can non-humans help teach those things? Actually, yes. Think about Miss Rachel on YouTube or Mr. Rogers or Sesame Street. Kids have been learning empathy and emotional vocabulary from screens for decades. So I'm not going to say AI can't play a role in social emotional learning. I think it will. So, what could elementary school look like in three to five years? And at least two different pictures come to my mind. Picture one: AI becomes a genuinely helpful tool in the background. Teachers use it to quickly spot which kids are struggling. Kids with learning disabilities get better, more tailored support. Administrative work gets automated so teachers have more time to actually teach and mentor. And more importantly, more time to connect. The school day still looks recognizable. The human relationships at the center of it are still there. This is the hopeful version, and I think it's possible. Now, picture two. Schools rush to adopt AI before we understand what we're doing. We've already seen what this looks like. In Los Angeles, the second largest school district in the country, officials launched a much publicized AI chatbot called Ed in early 2024. Great fanfare. Time magazine named the company that built it one of the top education technology companies of the year. The superintendent called it an historic game changer. Three months later, it was gone, the company collapsed, the founder was later charged with fraud, and the data of hundreds of thousands of students was potentially at risk. That story tells us something important. Technology moving fast doesn't mean the people implementing it know what they're doing with it. And with little kids, especially, we need to be careful, very careful, because the research is clear on one thing. The skills that predict whether a child will thrive in school, in work, in life are the human ones. All right, so let's talk about middle school and high school. This is where things get very interesting and where I think the changes are going to be most visible most quickly. Let me share three scenarios for what middle and high school could look like in three to five years. And before I do a quick reality check on where things stand right now. According to a Pew research survey conducted last fall, more than half of all American teenagers, 54%, are already using AI chatbots to help with schoolwork. And 59% of teens say AI cheating has become a regular occurrence at their school. It's here and it's everywhere. So let me paint the picture of scenario one. School looks like school, but smarter inside. Kids still ride the bus, they still have lockers and lunch and spring break, but inside that familiar structure, AI is quietly doing something new. Instead of every student getting the same lesson at the same pace, AI tools are beginning to figure out what each individual child actually knows and doesn't know and adjusting in real time. There's a study that just came out from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and National Taiwan University. It tested exactly this with high school students who were learning to code. Students in this system scored the equivalent of six to nine months ahead of the students who learned the traditional way. So in the system, meaning the kind of structure where AI was informing what the students knew, what they didn't know, the pace of their learning, et cetera. Same content, same teachers, just a smarter system underneath. So that's scenario one at its best. AI as a capable assistant to the teacher doesn't replace the human, it gives teachers better information and frees them up to do what humans do best. Connect, inspire, notice the kid in the back row who's quietly falling apart. So scenario two, what does that look like? Well, school is getting genuinely personalized. In this version, the structure of school itself starts to bend. Not break, but bend. The idea that every tenth grader needs to be in the same place at the same time, learning the same thing at the same pace, that starts to erode. Teachers in this world spend less time delivering content and more time mentoring. The content is coming to them through AI and structured system. The risk here is real. I think there's something valuable about learning alongside people who are different from you. About a classroom that doesn't revolve around you. That's a positive, I think. School isn't just about academics, it's also where kids learn to be humans together. Hyper-personalized education maybe could get better progress, but it could accidentally strip some of that human togetherness, that type of learning, out of the education. And we might not notice until it's too late. The third scenario, the picture I want to paint for you, the whole model gets disrupted. What if the physical school building becomes less central? What if a teenager can learn at a level and a pace that no traditional classroom could match? With AI tutors available around the clock, adapting in real time to exactly how that kid thinks. There's actually a school doing something like this right now. It's called Alpha School, a private network currently operating in more than 20 cities with plans to expand to 35 locations this coming fall. Students spend two hours a day on AI-powered lessons. Two hours. And the rest of the day on life skills, all of the social emotional skills we talked about. Wired magazine, very reputable, respected magazine, investigated this school system last fall and found some really troubling stories, including a nine-year-old being told she hadn't earned her snacks until she met her learning metrics. Oh my God. Of course, the school disputes those accounts. But anyway, researchers say that the evidence on whether this system, these alpha schools, actually work is mixed at best. And at up to $75,000 a year in tuition, it's not exactly available to everyone. But it is real. It's a live window into what scenario three might look like. And it's happening right now. So now let's talk about higher education, college and beyond. This is where questions get really big, really fast, and where I think the ground is shifting, maybe fastest, maybe slowest, some of each. Anyway, the big question becomes: is college still worth it? Nobody knows what the future's going to hold for higher ed, but let me share a few different pictures of what could happen. So picture one college evolves but survives. In this version, universities adapt, they stop teaching to a world that no longer exists, and they start building AI fluency into every major. And for medicine, law, engineering, nursing, the credential remains essential. So nothing about that is changing anytime soon. Now, picture two, what does that look like? The degree stops being the ticket it used to be. That's what it looks like. This is already happening in parts of the job market right now. Major employers have been quietly dropping degree requirements for many positions. A recent survey found that 70% of employers are now using skill-based hiring. Show us what you can do, not just what diploma you have. And the World Economic Forum found that AI skills now command a significantly higher wage premium than a bachelor's degree alone. Recent college graduate unemployment in the U.S. hit 9.3% at the end of 2025. AI may be pulling up the ladder that young people have traditionally used to get started in the workplace. All right, picture number three. Something entirely new emerges. This is the picture I find most fascinating and the hardest to wrap my head around. Kevin Roos and Casey Newton, co-hosts of Hard Fork, a podcast I've recommended before, they interviewed a Princeton historian named D. Graham Burnett, who also wrote a piece in The New Yorker called Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? He assigned his students to have a deep conversation with an AI chatbot about the course material, then come back to class and talk about the experience. When they gathered, a student named Diego said he felt crushed. His exact words, quote, I cannot figure out what I'm supposed to do with my life if these things can do anything I can do faster and with way more detail and knowledge. And then another student said something that hits at what I think is the main deal. She said, and I'm quoting here, AI is huge, a tsunami, but it's not me. It can't touch my meanness. So we gotta hold on to our meanness, right? Not meanness, our meanness. Anyway, Professor Burnett thinks that moment in his classroom captured exactly what universities should be wrestling with right now. And mostly they aren't. He says most campuses are in what he calls police mode, professors scrambling to redesign assignments so students can't use AI to cheat. And he thinks that's exactly the wrong response because his point is this if a college College education is mostly about acquiring and demonstrating knowledge, reading the books, writing the essays, passing the tests, then yes, AI is a serious threat. But if the college or university is really about something deeper, learning to think for yourself, developing your own point of view, figuring out exactly what you believe and why, then AI might be the best thing that ever happened to universities because it forces them to stop doing the things a machine can do and get back into the things that only humans can do. He believes that universities that figure that out will survive and thrive. And he believes that those that don't will be replaced by thousands of new kinds of learning communities outside the traditional system. Is that exciting or terrifying? Probably a little bit of both. From kindergarten to graduate school, the picture is complicated. There are reasons to be hopeful and reasons to be worried, often at the same time. Nobody's figured this out. Not the schools, not the researchers, not the people building the AI tools, and certainly not me. But here's the one thing that does seem clear across all of it. The kids who are doing the best in this new world aren't necessarily the ones who know the most. They're the ones who know how to think, how to question, how to work alongside tools, including AI tools, without losing themselves in the process. The Princeton student had it right. AI is a tsunami. All right, let's get to my recommendations. I've got two. The closest zoo to Charleston is in Columbia, South Carolina, which is about a two-hour drive. I decided to take my three-year-old grandson, and I got a lot of help with planning from my AI. I started with the basics, asking Claude to sketch out a plan for my visit. I let it know I'd be there for three or four hours. Claude came up with a great plan. We worked together to integrate some programs that took place at certain times. Claude helped me look into eating options and make a really good plan because, in my view, when you're taking a kid to something like a zoo, the more you have planned, the better the trip's going to work out. I'd hope that Claude could have put the plan onto a map, but that was too much. It was beyond its capability, at least as far as I could tell. Anyway, it's been decades since I've been to the zoo and I was reminded of just how fun it can be, particularly if you're introducing it to a little guy or girl. Highly recommend the experience and highly recommend that you use your AI to help you plan your trip. Alright, my second recommendation is really to bring something else back, bring the zoo back. And here's my second recommendation: bring back popcorn. I used to eat a lot of popcorn in my life, but I've brought it back because of my effort to try to find things that are reasonably healthy to snack on. So I'm recommending that you bring back popcorn. And Claude reminded me how to cook it on the stovetop. I don't have a microwave, and it gave me the top 10 toppings. In case you're curious, here they are. One, classic butter and salt, the OG, the original gangsta. Number two, white cheddar, ranch, kettle corn, caramel, buffalo hot sauce, sriracha or chili lime, everything bagel seasoning, parmesan and garlic, and cinnamon sugar. Ooh, no, not for me. Anyway, those are my two recommendations. And as for homework, well, it's spring break, so no homework. And before we wrap, let me tell you that I'll put links for the news articles, et cetera, in the show notes for this episode. And I want to remind us all that AI is both helpful and hazardous. We live on the helpful side at Aged, but please be sure to protect your information, double check advice, and trust your judgment. If you love listening to this podcast, please leave a review andor a rating and share it with others, especially with your pals in the 65 Plus crowd. Thanks for listening. And remember, it is never too late to learn something new, especially something that might make life easier and especially more fun. Cheers.