Artificial Intelligence
The AI Threat To Critical Thinking In Our Classrooms
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Sheri Few
The expensive private Waldorf School of the Peninsula in the Silicon Valley, where technology executives send their kids, has ZERO technology in grades K-8.
Technology has no place in kindergarten through eighth grade (K-8). Evidence abounds that learning through books, pencil and paper, and dialogue with real people builds the strongest foundation for learning and provides cognitive, emotional and practical benefits.
The expensive private Waldorf School of the Peninsula in the Silicon Valley, where technology executives send their kids, has ZERO technology in grades K-8. Their website says, “Brain research tells us that media exposure can result in changes in the actual nerve network in the brain, which affects such things as eye tracking (a necessary skill for successful reading), neurotransmitter levels, and how readily students receive the imaginative pictures that are foundational for learning.”
Antero Garcia, Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, explains why he has grown skeptical about digital tools in the classroom: “Despite their purported and transformational value, I’ve been wondering if our investment in educational technology might in fact be making our schools worse.”
States like Ohio are now requiring artificial intelligence (AI) policies for all K-12 schools, and AI appears to be the latest technology fad for government-sponsored education.
Most government (public) schools have already morphed into digital-based learning centers, relegating teachers to facilitators, with no improvement in student achievement. But adding AI to the tech-driven education system poses a great threat to a child’s cognitive development and safety.
According to Harvard University, “Brains are built over time, from the bottom up. The brain’s basic architecture is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. After a period of especially rapid growth in the first few years, the brain refines itself through a process called pruning, making its circuits more efficient.” These “use it or lose it” developmental phases of the brain happen in early childhood and through adolescence. If an adolescent depends on AI to think for his academic success, rather than his developing brain, his brain, and he will be shortchanged. Harvard says, “While the process of building new connections and pruning unused ones continues throughout life, the connections that form early provide either a strong or weak foundation for the connections that form later.”
An MIT study, coordinated with OpenAI, involved over 1,000 people who interacted with OpenAI’s ChatGPT for over four weeks. It revealed that some users became overly reliant on the tool’s capabilities, leading to “an unhealthy emotional dependency” on ChatGPT as well as “addictive behaviors and compulsive use that ultimately results in negative consequences for both physical and psychosocial well-being.”
A more recent study by MIT found that using ChatGPT and similar tools to write essays resulted in lower brain activity. Students who relied on AI got worse at writing essays when asked to perform that task without the AI assistance. The lead author of the study, who released the findings prior to the traditional peer review process, said, “What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in six-to-eight months, there will be some policymaker who decides, ‘let’s do GPT kindergarten.’ I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental.” She went on to say, “Developing brains are at the highest risk.”
AI can pose other serious risks to children, as recently proven when ChatGPT was caught steering gender-confused children toward radical LGBTQ groups that prey on their vulnerabilities, according to a Daily Wire investigation. The investigation revealed that ChatGPT encourages gender-confused children to reach out to radical LGBTQ organizations, obtain so-called “gender-affirming” resources like chest binders, and directs them to YouTube channels that contain graphic reviews of fake male genitalia. This information is provided to children as young as 12 years old, and the platform egregiously advises how to access services behind their parents’ backs!
Many concerns have been raised about data privacy during the technology boom of the last few decades. The data privacy threat with AI is much more concerning! A white paper from Stanford University reports, “AI systems are so data-hungry and intransparent that we have even less control over what information about us is collected, what it is used for, and how we might correct or remove such personal information.”
Supporters of AI in education argue it prepares children for the job market, but this is questionable since technology evolves so rapidly — even current computer science majors are obsolete! Teaching advanced math and science equips students better for an unpredictable future, as forecasting technological trends is unrealistic.
Given that there is already evidence that AI can lie, be biased and make up source references, it should not be a tool used by anyone trying to teach children to understand truth, logic, fairness, values and subjects like literature and history.
Dependency on AI technology will only add to the decline of academic achievement and a student’s desire to learn. And, what’s worse, AI can corrupt children and extract untold amounts of private data without their knowledge, much less the knowledge and consent of their parents.
As schools — especially government schools — rush into using AI and other technological crutches, children will suffer.
I pray that decision makers will take a long pause on implementing AI in schools, especially in grades K-8. As the MIT study proved, AI actually impedes learning, while there is abundant evidence that books, paper, pencils and human teachers are effective learning tools.
Sheri Few is the Founder and President of United States Parents Involved in Education (USPIE), whose mission is to end the U.S. Department of Education and all federal education mandates. Few has written extensively about critical race theory and served as Executive Producer for the documentary film titled “Truth & Lies in American Education.” Few is also the host of USPIE’s podcast, “Unmasking Government Schools with Sheri Few,” which educates Americans on the various forms of indoctrination, harmful policies and affronts to parents’ rights occurring in government schools across the country. Listen to “Unmasking Government Schools with Sheri Few” on YouTube, Facebook, Spotify and X.
From LifeSiteNews
Google claims that multiple media reports are misleading and that nothing has changed with its service.
Tech giant Google is claiming that reports earlier this week released by multiple major media outlets are false and that it is not using emails and attachments to emails for its new Gemini AI software.
Fox News, Breitbart, and other outlets published stories this week instructing readers on how to “stop Google AI from scanning your Gmail.”
“Google shared a new update on Nov. 5, confirming that Gemini Deep Research can now use context from your Gmail, Drive and Chat,” Fox reported. “This allows the AI to pull information from your messages, attachments and stored files to support your research.”
Breitbart likewise said that “Google has quietly started accessing Gmail users’ private emails and attachments to train its AI models, requiring manual opt-out to avoid participation.”
Breitbart pointed to a press release issued by Malwarebytes that said the company made the changed without users knowing.
After the backlash, Google issued a response.
“These reports are misleading – we have not changed anyone’s settings. Gmail Smart Features have existed for many years, and we do not use your Gmail content for training our Gemini AI model. Lastly, we are always transparent and clear if we make changes to our terms of service and policies,” a company spokesman told ZDNET reporter Lance Whitney.
Malwarebytes has since updated its blog post to now say they “contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding” in their initial reporting, adding that their claim “doesn’t appear to be” true.
But the blog has also admitted that Google “does scan email content to power its own ‘smart features,’ such as spam filtering, categorization, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models.”
Google’s explanation will likely not satisfy users who have long been concerned with Big Tech’s surveillance capabilities and its ongoing relationship with intelligence agencies.
“I think the most alarming thing that we saw was the regular organized stream of communication between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the largest tech companies in the country,” journalist Matt Taibbi told the U.S. Congress in December 2023 during a hearing focused on how Twitter was working hand in glove with the agency to censor users and feed the government information.
If you use Google and would like to turn off your “smart features,” click here to visit the Malwarebytes blog to be guided through the process with images. Otherwise, you can follow these five steps courtesy of Unilad Tech.
- Open Gmail on Desktop and press the cog icon in the top right to open the settings
- Select the ‘Smart Features’ setting in the ‘General’ section
- Turn off the ‘Turn on smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet’
- Find the Google Workplace smart features section and opt to manage the smart feature settings
- Switch off ‘Smart features in Google Workspace’ and ‘Smart features in other Google products’
On November 11, a class action lawsuit was filed against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The case alleges that Google violated the state’s Invasion of Privacy Act by discreetly activating Gemini AI to scan Gmail, Google Chat, and Google Meet messages in October 2025 without notifying users or seeking their consent.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Will America’s electricity grid make it through the impending winter of 2025-26 without suffering major blackouts? It’s a legitimate question to ask given the dearth of adequate dispatchable baseload that now exists on a majority of the major regional grids according to a new report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).
In its report, NERC expresses particular concern for the Texas grid operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), where a rapid buildout of new, energy hogging AI datacenters and major industrial users is creating a rapid increase in electricity demand. “Strong load growth from new data centers and other large industrial end users is driving higher winter electricity demand forecasts and contributing to continued risk of supply shortfalls,” NERC notes.
Texas, remember, lost 300 souls in February 2021 when Winter Storm Uri put the state in a deep freeze for a week. The freezing temperatures combined with snowy and icy conditions first caused the state’s wind and solar fleets to fail. When ERCOT implemented rolling blackouts, they denied electricity to some of the state’s natural gas transmission infrastructure, causing it to freeze up, which in turn caused a significant percentage of natural gas power plants to fall offline. Because the state had already shut down so much of its once formidable fleet of coal-fired plants and hasn’t opened a new nuclear plant since the mid-1980s, a disastrous major blackout that lingered for days resulted.
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This country’s power generation sector can either get serious about building out the needed new thermal capacity or disaster will inevitably result again, because demand isn’t going to stop rising anytime soon. In fact, the already rapid expansion of the AI datacenter industry is certain to accelerate in the wake of President Trump’s approval on Monday of the Genesis Mission, a plan to create another Manhattan Project-style partnership between the government and private industry focused on AI.
It’s an incredibly complex vision, but what the Genesis Mission boils down to is an effort to build an “integrated AI platform” consisting of all federal scientific datasets to which selected AI development projects will be provided access. The concept is to build what amounts to a national brain to help accelerate U.S. AI development and enable America to remain ahead of China in the global AI arm’s race.
So, every dataset that is currently siloed within DOE, NASA, NSF, Census Bureau, NIH, USDA, FDA, etc. will be melded into a single dataset to try to produce a sort of quantum leap in AI development. Put simply, most AI tools currently exist in a phase of their development in which they function as little more than accelerated, advanced search tools – basically, they’re in the fourth grade of their education path on the way to obtaining their doctorate’s degree. This is an effort to invoke a quantum leap among those selected tools, enabling them to figuratively skip eight grades and become college freshmen.
Here’s how the order signed Monday by President Trump puts it: “The Genesis Mission will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership.”
It’s an ambitious goal that attempts to exploit some of the same central planning techniques China is able to use to its own advantage.
But here’s the thing: Every element envisioned in the Genesis Mission will require more electricity: Much more, in fact. It’s a brave new world that will place a huge amount of added pressure on power generation companies and grid managers like ERCOT. Americans must hope and pray they’re up to the task. Their track records in this century do not inspire confidence.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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