It's not a bad point, but the "calculator" metaphor is not the best one. First, schools don't create schoolwork. Teachers in different disciplines do. Second, calculators aren't in pervasive use across disciplines; AI products are. Third, schools provide these AI products for free - teachers don't. So a student in a psych methods class uses a free tier to create lit reviews, or whatever. The asymmetry there creates a problem for most assessments of skill, because students want expediency, and teachers assess skills and memory.
Finally, nobody seems to know what teachers are actually discussing. To your assertion:
>So I can't help but wonder whether schools are going about this all wrong. Rather than banning the use of AI and trying to catch students who are cheating, why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI?
Many teachers do create schoolwork that requires AI. Many teachers ban it. Everybody's trying to work out policy (to the detriment of other policy discussions, particularly the new ADA landscape). Many ED departments are captured by AI vendors - AI is a normal technological competency for ED majors at different levels. It's not that the discussion is not "are students going to work with AI?" The discussion is "how do we teach?" which is what the discussion always is.
But policy is a part of that. Admin will have guidance and policy statements, and each instructor will as well. Students, who get thrown off balance if they have two teachers with different nav bars in the CMS, want clarity of policy: can I use it? is a different question than should I use it? But "should I use it?" is the much more relevant question for instructors. The instructors passed through the 90s/00s/10s blissfully unaware of anything that was happening in these fields.
>These tools are not going to cease to exist.
Which tools, precisely? Because I'd assert your 200-dollar-or-whatever tier that runs out of tokens on Monday does not functionally exist for most students. I don't know what happens at MIT but Penn State satellite campus students aren't whipping up agentic solutions to "I have a summer online course with discussion boards." They're just plugging that shit into whatever chatbot they have on their phone. Honestly, most online courses aren't even worth that effort, but: different discussion.
The only reason there is pervasive student use is because someone made it free. The CoPilot window that comes with the basic tier of 365 and all the other in-app copilots are what my students have; the Google Docs stuff exists, and the Grammarly stuff exists, and the best way to "ban" it (which is just fine as an approach) is to make it even slightly more expensive. If someone does that, yeah, I think some of these products might cease to exist.
>I think we're doing them a disservice by trying to give them the same education that was given to those from previous generations
Students graduate into a world where all kinds of stuff is going on and all sorts of ideological forces shape what they encounter in schools. "AI" more a dominant element in that force than the calculator was because calculators didn't have hundreds of billions of dollars of investments, and I'm not sure I ever knew what the prevailing political project of Texas Instruments was. Maybe TI's CEO had a manifesto; tbf, I do remember IBM's corporate culture being strong enough to drive cultural change. But it would be naive to not recognize that these products are made by people antagonistic to the idea of education as a compulsory and public good.