How is my child actually using AI to do schoolwork? Most parents have no answer, and the teachers watching it up close say the truth would surprise them. The story everyone hears is that AI will personalize every lesson and slowly make the adult in the room optional. A history teacher who spends her days with twelve-year-olds and their chatbots tells it the other way around. A tool that only hands over the finished answer teaches a child almost nothing. The thing no software has replaced is the person who believes in them and knows the moment to push.
FROM THE VIDEO
Key moments from this conversation with Bianca Farthing, a UK history teacher and founder of AI Edify:
- 16:57Options, not answers: the one rule that turns AI from a crutch into a thinking tool.
- 40:18Most parents have no idea how their child uses AI. The fix is a home where a child says, I used it, here is how.
- 56:35AI invents sources with total confidence, so every citation needs checking like a stranger’s website.
Common questions from parents
Will AI replace my child’s teacher?
Is it cheating if my child uses AI for homework?
Is my child falling behind if they are not using AI?
How much should I trust the sources AI gives my child?
A child who asks AI for the answer learns almost nothing. A child who asks AI for options learns to think. One teacher who watches it happen daily explains the whole difference.
The answer button is the part that does not teach
Watch what happens when a child types a homework question into a chatbot and copies the reply. It looks like learning. It is closer to photocopying. The research on teaching software points one clear direction. A tool that only supplies the finished answer moves a child hardly at all. A tool that meets them at the exact step they are stuck on, adjusting as it goes, comes closer to what a patient human tutor does. The open question is how far that gain travels. These tools tend to do more on the narrow material they drill than on reading or thinking in general.
Bianca Farthing, a UK history teacher who founded the training project AI Edify, puts the rule in three words. Options, not answers. She did not become a teacher to save time, she says. A tool worth using stretches a child’s thinking, plays devil’s advocate, and surfaces the angle they missed. Ask it for the answer and it dumbs the work down. Ask it for options and it makes them think. That single distinction, taught at home, does more than any ban or any lecture about cheating.
AI is able to relay content, but it will never believe in your child, cheer them on, or know the exact moment to push. That part was always the teaching.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
Why “it personalizes to your child” deserves a second look
The pitch that sells AI to schools leans hard on one word. Personalized. It taps an old and comfortable instinct, that a child learns best when teaching is matched to their particular type. That instinct has a track record. Researchers tested the idea of teaching to a child’s learning style in 2008 and found no evidence it helps, and a 2024 review reached the same verdict. Yet a 2020 review of educators across 18 countries found nearly nine in ten still believe it (Newton and Salvi). That is not a science problem. It is a systems problem, and it has been running for the better part of two decades.
Here is the distinction that matters, because it is easy to blur. Matching teaching to a supposed style does not work. Meeting a child at the exact skill they have not built yet, and teaching that one next, is a different thing entirely. It is the honest version of what good adaptive tools do. The same line educators draw about active versus passive use of a device applies here. A device used to wrestle with something builds skill. A device used to be handed an outcome does not. So the caution is not against personalization. It is against believing a machine has done the personalizing on its own, with no adult checking whether the child is being stretched or babysat.
There is a second reason to keep an adult close. Farthing is blunt that AI is a prediction machine, not a truth engine. It was built to produce likely-sounding text, not correct text, so it invents sources with total confidence. One English teacher found a perfect supporting quote that turned out to be entirely fictitious. Ask AI for ten articles and some of them will not exist. Children raised on Google learned which websites to trust. With AI, they have not learned that yet, and the gap is where the danger sits. Teaching a child to verify every AI source, the way you would never trust one random website, belongs in the same conversation as your family’s wider digital habits.
Key takeaways
- Answers do not teach: A tool that hands over the finished answer moves a child hardly at all.
- Options, not answers: Teach your child to ask AI for perspectives to weigh, not solutions to copy.
- Verify every source: AI predicts likely text and invents citations, so doubt each one like a stranger's website.
The system is slow, so your role is the fast part
Part of the anxiety around AI comes from a real mismatch. As Farthing points out, many exam boards still reward the memorizing of facts, the one thing AI does in a heartbeat. Meanwhile the frameworks and rules that should guide schools lag far behind the technology. Some schools ban it outright. Others tell pupils to use anything. A child’s whole experience of AI comes down to which building they happen to sit in. That is a fairness problem no single parent controls, and it is our reading of what she describes rather than settled doctrine.
What a parent does control is closer to home, and it is the piece almost everyone misses. Most parents have no idea how their child uses AI, in school or out of it. Farthing’s fix is not surveillance. It is a home where a child feels safe saying, I used it, here is how, and hears, good thinking, try it this way instead. That one exchange does more than any filter. It teaches judgment, which is the skill that outlasts any single app.
If the fear is that every child is racing ahead with AI and yours is behind, take a breath. The teachers who watch it daily say plenty of children barely touch it, unsure where help ends and cheating begins. Your child is not behind. And one part was always going to matter most. It is the relationship where someone believes in your child and knows when to push, the one thing no tool arrived to replace. That is the difference a program built around you, not around a screen, is designed to protect.
A tool that only hands over the answer teaches almost nothing. The teaching lives in the options it makes a child weigh.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
You want your child to trust their own mind, to stay curious, to reach for a hard problem instead of an easy button. The thing standing in the way is not your child, and it is not the technology itself. It is an old and tidy idea, sold first in classrooms and now in software, that a child learns best when the hard parts are smoothed away and the answers arrive on demand. That idea was tested and set aside, and you are the one positioned to see past it, because nobody watches your child think as closely as you do.
Here is the honest part. A child who reaches for the answer shortcut rarely struggles with only that. Often the shortcut is hiding something underneath, reading that stalls, focus that wanders, or confidence that took a knock, and each of those needs building in its own right. That is what the full set of Learning Success tools is for, the whole child rather than one worksheet. Start the seven-day All-Access trial and build the skills the shortcut was covering up.
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Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
Your answers stay yours. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not hand identifiable assessment data to outside AI companies to train their models.
A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
