It's back-to-school season, and artificial intelligence is the subject on every teacher's mind, according to The Free Press. The outlet says few people have a better vantage point on the debate than teachers themselves, so it asked two of them to make the case from opposite sides.
Deb Eaton, a high school English teacher from Philadelphia, made hers first. In 2023, she banned AI in all of her classes. She still believes other teachers should do the same.
Her reasoning is not technophobia. Eaton writes that the instinct to find the easiest path is universal — 'the perfect detour to avoid morning traffic, a food service to plan our meals, a machine to clean our houses' — and that innovation answering those instincts is something 'we should all be very grateful for.'
School, she argues, is different. For students learning to process information, find their voices, and demonstrate their understanding of the world, 'the ability to cut corners is catastrophic.' Her line: 'Shortcuts are incompatible with learning.'
The ban has a reputation now. 'New students tell me that word is out around school that when I say no AI use, I mean it — and that I will follow through with consequences,' Eaton writes.
The Free Press ran her essay alongside a competing view from Rod Naquin, a high school English teacher from Louisiana, who — according to the outlet's framing — believes teachers who refuse to integrate AI productively are missing a chance to improve education. The two essays were presented as opposing answers to the same question: does AI help or hurt students, and can it be used productively at all.
Eaton's own stated stakes are blunt. She frames the classroom stand not as nostalgia for pen and paper but as preparation for the labor market: students who never develop the capacity to think critically and solve problems, she suggests, will be useless in the workplace.
That is the argument worth sitting with. A generation of students handed a tool that will draft their essays, summarize their reading, and generate their arguments is a generation that may graduate without ever having done the cognitive labor those credentials are supposed to certify. The employer on the other end of that diploma has no way of knowing the difference — until the employee does the job.
Eaton's ban is a bet that friction, not frictionlessness, is what builds a mind capable of independent judgment. It is also, implicitly, a bet on personal responsibility over institutional accommodation: she does not ask the school system to police AI use district-wide: she enforces the standard in her own room, with her own consequences, and lets word travel. That is a smaller claim than a policy mandate, and a more honest one. The record on AI in education is still being written. What is not in dispute is that a diploma is supposed to certify a mind that can think without a machine's help — and that certification, once faked, cannot be faked forever.
