Politically Unstable: AI's impact on our youth and education

Video

Saturday, January 24, 2026

OPINION:

In our increasingly online and technological world, artificial intelligence has become more and more prominent. However, this doesn’t come without a cost, one that our youth are paying heavily.

Katie O’Toole, Vice President for K-12 education at Hillsdale College, joins Washington Times Commentary Editor Kelly Sadler on Politically Unstable to explore the impact of AI on young people, particularly within the realm of education.

[SADLER] You wrote a column for us talking about the need for classical education, especially in the K-12 levels, because of AI. Tell me what you mean, and tell me why you think this is important.

[O’TOOLE] I think we’re living in a time of great upheaval in all kinds of areas of life, including education, and there’s this very tempting idea out there that if we can only harness the power of AI to teach our children, we’ll be able to provide them with more individualized education, more efficient educatio,n and more successful education. And as exciting as those things would be, I think AI is exactly the wrong way to go about achieving those ends. American education is in need of reform. The results that we’re getting from our typical schools are not what we would like to see. Our children are way behind in reading, way behind in math, especially if they are minority children. And I know we’re looking for solutions, but I think AI is actually going to compound the problem rather than solve it.

[SADLER] I’ve got three boys. I’ve got two 14-year-old twins and a 12-year-old. And it feels as though they’re using AI as a crutch, as a way to find the quick and easy answer to do their homework. And they’re not learning how to think for themselves, how to figure out these problems for themselves. A lot of times they’re in the classroom in public education. I’m in Fairfax County. And they’re there with their computer. And the teacher is just sitting behind the desk reading as they have an AI tutor guide guiding them through these problems.

The other thing that I’m seeing and that I’m worried about with our youth is, when I was growing up, we had to go to the library, we had to go look up how to find books, we had to read the books. Answers weren’t just at our fingertips. If there was a question that we had, we had to do some actual research to find it. And now in the world with AI, even when I’m researching articles for the Washington Times, I type in a question and boom, there just pops up the answer. And I’m worried, just the availability of this and the convenience of it, the ease and the effortlessness of it, is not teaching our children how to think themselves, and problem-solve themselves.

[O’TOOLE] Yeah, I think you’re exactly right about that. It is very quick and efficient to use AI, but there’s an important part of the process that’s missing if you just type in a question and immediately get an answer. And that’s your own wondering, your own going back and forth about what the answer might be, your own feeling of perplexity and frustration at not having the answer. And we don’t need to feel that every time that we are looking for something as adults. But as children, that process of wondering and searching and deliberating and choosing what the right answer is, is a really important part of getting educated.

The danger is that we are treating education merely as the delivery of content into the minds of young people. And education is much more than that. Education is the shaping of the person’s character and the person’s intellect. And that shaping takes work and time and careful attention by parents and teachers together. And if we merely just import info into their brains, we’re not ensuring that it will actually stay there for very long. And we’re not teaching them what to do with that information other than just repeat it back.

[SADLER] Reading and writing are essential tools. And I’ve read so many articles out there, and we have the example here at The Washington Times. People don’t like to sit down and read 2- to 3-thousand words. They like to get their information in short, little TikTok 20-second bites. But those bites have been developed by somebody else. You don’t know where they are coming from. You don’t have the full context. You don’t have the full argument. And reading and writing have become a lost art. Can you talk to me about the dangers of that?

[O’TOOLE] I think that if you prefer to receive your information in short bites rather than long bites, you run the risk of receiving different information or having a different experience. What you get on TikTok, what you get in a short headline is a lot different than what you get from reading the entire article, not only in the quantity of it, but in the effect that it has on you by taking the time to digest and think about that thing.

We’re seeing a similar problem in reading education. In response to declining reading scores, a lot of schools in our nation decided to teach children the skill of reading by giving them short passages to dissect and teaching them the skill of reading with short passages. And there were some articles out recently by professors at top universities, you know, Harvard, other Ivy League schools, and they’re lamenting the fact that the students who are coming into these colleges can’t read a novel. They don’t have the experience of paying attention to that, something that long, for that period of time. And it’s not merely an attention span issue. It’s also kind of an intelligence issue or a thinking issue.