Hey everyone,
Think about how you learned to read.
A teacher. A worn textbook. Maybe a parent sitting beside you at the kitchen table, pointing at words with their finger.
You struggled. You failed. You tried again. Eventually something clicked.
That friction shaped more than just your reading. It shaped how you handle difficulty. How you ask for help. How you connect with other people.
Now picture a child born in 2021. Five years old today.
They will never know that world. From the moment they pick up a tablet, there is an AI waiting. Infinitely patient. Available at 2am. Never frustrated. Never tired.
The experiment is already running. On hundreds of millions of children. Right now.
The numbers are genuinely staggering
Student AI usage jumped from 66% in 2024 to 92% in 2025. A Harvard study found that students using AI tutors learned more than twice as much in less time compared to traditional classrooms. Test scores are up 62% in schools using AI instruction.
Twice as much learning. In less time. That is not a small thing.
What this generation gains
The benefits are real and worth saying out loud.
A child in a rural village with no tutors nearby can now get a personalized study plan built entirely around how her brain works. A child with learning differences no longer has to feel embarrassed asking the same question five times. AI never sighs. Never rushes. Never makes a kid feel stupid.
That is a genuine miracle of access and equality.
What this generation loses
Here is the harder conversation.
When help is always instant, children may never develop the muscle of sitting with a hard problem alone. Human tutors can read a student's emotional state with 92% accuracy. The best AI tutoring systems today manage 68%.
That gap is enormous.
A skilled teacher does not just teach the subject. They notice the child who seems fine but is not. They say the right thing at the right moment that a student carries with them for decades.
The Brookings Institution found something else worth sitting with. Privileged students use AI to enhance their thinking. Disadvantaged students use it to replace their thinking. The same tool. Very different outcomes.
The question nobody can answer yet
Education has always done two things. Transfer knowledge. And form a human being.
AI handles knowledge transfer extraordinarily well. But whether it can form a human being, build resilience, teach someone to sit inside confusion, that is still an open question.
And we are answering it right now. Without fully understanding what we are giving up.
Catch you next time,
— Raja Tahoor Ahmad