An Oakland high school teacher is making waves with a bold stance: she actively discourages her students from using generative AI in their studies. Her argument? The breathless urgency around AI adoption in schools smells like a con.

"Imposed urgency is one of the most compelling tools of the con artist," she writes, pushing back against the edtech cheerleaders who insist every classroom needs a ChatGPT integration yesterday. Instead, she wants her students to understand that "their own brains are beautiful, powerful and useful."

Here's where we give credit: she's right that the panic-driven "adopt AI or your kids will be left behind" narrative is overwrought. Schools have a long, expensive history of chasing tech fads — remember when every student needed an iPad? — and the results rarely justify the spending. Taxpayers in Oakland, a district that has lurched from one fiscal crisis to another, should be especially skeptical of anyone demanding they invest heavily in the shiny new thing.

But full avoidance? That's where the argument starts to wobble.

One commenter offered a compelling counterpoint: a community college English professor who tells his students to have AI write their assignments, then makes them take a red pen to the output and find every inaccuracy and error. "It teaches them to be more critical and to not blindly accept it at face value," the commenter noted, "which is more valuable than full avoidance."

That's the real skill worth teaching — not blind adoption, not blanket prohibition, but critical thinking. The ability to look at a piece of text, whether it was written by a machine or a politician or a school board budget report, and ask: Is this actually true?

The teacher is absolutely correct that we shouldn't let Silicon Valley's marketing department set the curriculum. But banning a tool doesn't teach students how to evaluate it. And in a world where AI-generated content is already flooding every corner of the internet, the students who learn to interrogate it — not just ignore it — will be the ones who are genuinely prepared.

Teach kids their brains are powerful? Yes. Teach them those powerful brains can outsmart a chatbot? Even better.