Schools must be like gyms

How to stop AI from ruining our kids

We’re going to ruin our kids’ lives with AI. It’s not the first time this has happened, but it has never happened at this scale. And we have all the tools to stop it.

Homework will never come back. Laptops, phones, watches, and goddamn glasses connect anyone to a 300-IQ super intelligence for pennies. All teaching gets disrupted in the presence of digital tools in a way that didn’t happen before.

Drop your educational ideals that only work for a subset of exceptional people. Students are doing worse than ever, everywhere. We’re graduating people from high school who no longer know how a computer works, do long division, or solve for X.

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Education scores in basic math, science and reading are highly correlated with a country’s productivity. It’s in our best interests to force our beautiful children to learn algebra, on a piece of paper, by hand.

“It won’t matter when AI takes all the jobs” is a claim with no real data backing it. Modern AI is already a miracle, and yet employment hasn’t gone down in any meaningful way, anywhere. Human intellect is very much needed.

Humans need movement and physical effort to be healthy. Jobs like farming, construction, or even sales include a lot of natural exercise. The knowledge economy puts us behind a desk, creating the need for a ritual of positive pain.

Sports are not enough. They’re fun, in part, because you do what you want and compete however hard you like. If you’re skilled, you don’t even feel the effort.

The gym always hurts, all the time. If you do it right, it never gets easier. It’s a contract with you for good pain now, so that the bad pain doesn’t come. It gives you the gift of strength and a better quality of life as you age. It demands, in exchange, focus, discipline, consistency and patience.

Being strong is important, but being smart is essential.

Students won’t self-regulate. All data shows that, given the opportunity, they will cheat, skip class and take shortcuts wherever possible. Why wouldn’t they? They’re kids!!

The systems that held in the 2025 PISA test (Like the UK) did it by going back to rigorous ways of teaching basic stuff, like phonics for writing, and replacing homework with supervised exams.

The moment a student is out of the classroom, there’s no way to force them to learn. AI is just too good. They will delegate thinking to the god in their phones. Sure, the best ones will go the extra mile. They’ve always done that. This isn’t about them.

If we’re going to have any chance at leveraging the wonders of AI for human prosperity, we need an educated population whose solid basic skills multiply the machine’s powers. This won’t happen unless educational systems across the world let go of the silly idea that we have time to adapt.

To make this happen in public schools, we have to overcome a lot of pushback.

Phone bans are progressing worldwide. However, if a country tries to change teaching standards, the teachers’ union will strike. No president in the world has the political capital today to change a country’s education system.

Regardless, we must try.

AI is going to erode our capacity to think hard, the way office work atrophied our muscles. And nothing short of the collapse of our civilization will stop it. We must overreact by making our education system unapologetically human.

Gyms are now more popular than ever. It didn’t use to be like this. Being strong is cool now.

Schools, with no AI in sight, must become the norm. Nothing’s better than being smarter.