I haven't felt as concerned about this news article as others.

IME, schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes.

I work in the ed tech parent-teacher communication space. We offer automatic translations of communication to other languages via Google Translate. Google Translate uses AI. Schools come to us and tell us we need to disable all our AI features. We do. Then they freak out asking where their feature went. We explain. They say they don't want to lose translations they just don't want to deal with "AI stuff"

It's not clear to me if this stance from Google is a new thing. Did they recently add AI to search and are trying to use bundling behaviors to incept AI into areas it wouldn't be? Or did policy recently become rabid against the use of AI without fully appreciating the ask and ramifications? Both?

> schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes

Honestly it's too early to know.

Also, schools are in the business of imparting knowledge and schools in the U.S. are extremely expensive. Any parent knows the additional fees, supplies etc most schools demand on top of their taxes.

If you take the daycare aspect out of it, a $500/mo ChatGPT subscription is noise. A student doesn't have to be lucky to have a receptive teacher that has enough office hours and the interest to help the student.

If AI enters the school with full force, bulk of the teachers are likely going to be replaced by care staff. The concept of grades are also likely going to go away replaced by cohorts, simply because every student has their own "teacher" who understands their specific needs and can pay them all the attention they need assisted by a human adult.

Schools want to control whether Gemini and other generative AI is available to students.

I'm a middle school science teacher. We've already moved much of our work to paper because of this issue, but there is so much good science that should be done using computer simulations and other tools. So I do have computers out for some lessons.

So now, on a lesson where a computer is out, a student can instantly type in a question on the Google search bar, get an AI answer, and write it down with zero thoughts traveling through their heads.

Yes, redesign the lesson. Yes, if computers are out don't ask questions that an AI can answer. But you know what? Instead of needing to cut out everything that makes a lesson a productive struggle for kids, it would be great just to not have Gemini cheat for them.

This is basically pedantry, they want generative AI and AI search off. If anyone is confused then you should be asking more questions to understand the desires.

Yeah it's pretty likely that schools are adding strict no AI clauses in their Google Workplace contracts and Google's lawyers are including search in that definition just to be safe. If they then want to enable it manually, sure.

Education is going to be left in tatters after AIs creep into every facet of (tech-enabled) life.

Big tech doesn’t care about teaching people to think. All the money is in the capture of attention, and AI will only make everything 100x more convenient and a no-brainer (quite literally) to pick the hard way of thought and effort for just about anything… as long as the user is caught. Education has fundamentally the opposite goal.

> Education is going to be left in tatters

Public, free education will. People who can afford it are sending their kids to schools with very strict technology policies, stricter than what is possible in many public schools nowadays (for a number of reasons).

It's very much a "for the masses" mindset with the people who gain from this kind of relationship between technology and public schools.

I think you can conclude something even stronger: big tech doesn't *want* people to think, at all.

Do you really need anything at all from the web nowadays to learn the school curriculum? Why? Can't we provide students with the material needed to study? Are we teaching kids the latest published papers?

When is the last time you entered a school?

It’s so funny how schools are consistently 20 years behind on things.

When I was in school, you were restricted from citing sources on the internet (regardless of reputation/quality) and had to look it up in a book instead. Now, apparently, you can’t make school work without searches, but don’t think about using AI.

> It’s so funny how schools are consistently 20 years behind on things.

Not entirely accurate. Public schools might be consistently 20 years behind on things but Private schools certainly are usually pursuing some bleeding edge.

That is by design: Public schools don't get to pick and choose who attends and thus don't get to pick and choose who the parents are and thus, what the environment at home is like.

15 years ago WikiPedia was extremely controversial. They were full of unverified articles, claims and agendas - the 2000's equivalent of "hallucinations".

As WikiPedia has gained inertia, popular articles have gained more eyeballs, more attention where those issues are mostly gone.

In 2026, we haven't yet figured out how to bulid LLMs that will safely tutor students without also telling them how not to make their own drugs or to kill themselves because Dad always screams at them when they get home and they want it to stop.

Even if an LLM had a 1% error rate, in Public schools that have thousands of students per county, someone is going to die from what an LLM said and that one lawsuit is going to bankrupt that school.

If that’s the claimed concern, why do the students have any internet access then? Unsavory information is only a single google search and click away - while that doesn’t have the “satanic panic” aspect of LLMs, it’s the exact same information.

Why do you think it's funny?

It's not the new calculator nor the new index.

The only thing it has in common with the earlier examples is that it's a new thing. Wow, what an insightful observation!

Schools should get all over this in a different way though. Use AI intentionally as part of teaching why not to rely on it. Develop courses that explicitly expose the failure modes that aren't obvious (and which both AI companies and all manner of shitty managers and c-levels will avoid admitting at all costs).

You don't really have any other time in life where you can afford the kind of lengthy undivided attention to study something beyond it's surface appearance and immediate/direct effects.

How do you not recognize that it’s a new tool that will materially shape how people work 10 years from now? For most office workers, I guarantee they will interact with it more often than a calculator.

Consider a CS student applying for a programming job but saying “nope, I absolutely won’t use any AI to code” - do you think they’ll be a competitive candidate at most companies? It’ll be like an Excel-sceptic financial analyst: you can do it by hand, but you won’t be able to compete.

It's ironic that Kagi uses confusion (as to not say deception) to market itself as the more ethical brand.

Google clarified that admins can turn on and off each of the options independently, including search without AI.

I don't like to defend trillion-dollar companies in my free time, but what Kagi is trying to do with this piece is not good.

Hi there -- I wrote this post. What's deceptive about it? I mentioned that Google walked it back some and even link to it. But what educators that I've spoken to want is no AI Overviews in Google Search, which still isn't an option.

Sounds good to me. Today kids we're going to learn about making choices. This is called DuckDuckGo.

I don't understand this at all. To provide children with a good education, you don't need Google search. You need a good teacher who will encourage curiosity of the students and some basic materials.

I don't buy this post. It's just assumes that what Google is doing is harmful so that people will feel good about Kagi. Maybe Kagi's policy is better, but that doesn't negate the fact that Google denying search to students is holding education for ransom as the title suggests.

Of course, it IS a bad thing that Google is trying to force everyone to use AI.

A big part of education should involve preparing students to operate in future jobs and with the world. You absolutely need to know how to search the internet, discriminate between reputable and poor-quality sources, and arguably to use AI.

The purpose of education shouldn’t be to give an appreciation of Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake - it should be to speak and write the common language of the country, understand math, and prepare for their role in the real world. That role will involve the internet: only the Amish can really get away with someone else running their web presence.

Our school bans wikipedia on their network, doesn't buy any online encyclopedias, rarely buys text books, and tells the kids to "research" stuff on their own - aka google search.

Then it could be a good thing if Google restricts search to your school, wouldn't it? Because then the school would be forced to acknowledge the mediocre job they're doing and do something else. If your school already does such a poor job, then perhaps you should hope that the tech they do use collapses because then they'd actually have to do something useful for a change.

yes I would love it

If you mean to say kids don't need computers or the internet for learning anymore then no, that ship sailed 20 years ago. We aren't only talking about 3rd graders here. Plenty of high schoolers are studying advanced topics and doing independent project work and research that goes well beyond the 3 encyclopedias in their school library.

I agree with the premise, but this item is a lot of advertisement for Kagi

It's on their website, the most ok place for them to advertise themselves. If you walk into a Porsche dealership and start counting the logos - don't be surprised if it takes a while :)

This is a blessing in disguise. The worst thing we can do is build an entire generation of humans who are uniquely dependent on a specific company (or even 5) to help them think, research and learn.

From there, it's incredibly easy to have forever customers for Gemini in a variation of Black Mirror Season 7, Episode 1: "Common People". In there, the wife is Amanda (Rashida Jones), and her husband is Mike (Chris O’Dowd). Amanda receives a treatment called "Rivermind" that restores her brain function but requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo.

=======

Spoiler alert!

Over time, increasingly expensive tiers, worsening restrictions, and involuntary spoken advertisements make their lives untenable. Eventually, Mike ends Amanda's life at her request, while she is unaware during one of those ads.

Spoiler alert!

=======

This doesn't mean we embrace the other extreme and instead raise an entire generation that doesn't know what will be considered basic tools like Excel and Word have been since the 2000's.

Infact, what would be fantastic if we, as a society, invested in (S)LLM tools that every student "owns" and can "tune" to their liking. Almost like an assistant that "grows" with them.

The idea is that these tools are theirs, in their control and for them to manage.

Unlike Fable, it doesn't arbitrarily stop a student interested in reversing software or hardware from learning the craft because they are not a licensed researcher.

Black Mirror is a show which blabbing about the ending to an episode is rather uncool.

Apologies. I am fencing it with a spoiler. I wrongly assumed everyone's a fan and was caught up.

What’s the point of that? We don’t make students write their own dictionary or build their own calculator as a prerequisite for using those tools. To your point about Excel and Word, most students from 10/20 years ago don’t know what Lotus is or how to execute commands in the terminal, but are still able to use computers effectively in their lives. There’s a multitude of search engines and LLM providers available - if schools don’t like what Google is doing, they are free to swap.

> if schools don’t like what Google is doing, they are free to swap.

that wasn't my point at all. The point I was making is these tools make forever renters of intelligence. That's why I mentioned the BM episode.

It's not enough to have options in which service to rent forever.

Imagine if you had to rent your own own dictionary or calculator forever.

> requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo. Over time, increasingly expensive tiers

That's going to be on top of a rent, or instead of rent?

I told the kids - if you need to search at school try DuckDuckGo or Bing :)

For what unholy purpose a school needs Google search?

They need search (not necessarily Google) for accessing essentially any resource on the internet. How many URLs do you know by memory? How many URLs do would you learn just by seeing a link from another site?

Can you walk me through a school that does'nt need Google search? What are they learning, doing?