Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school • Hacker News Board

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#391

Post by cornholio » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:24 AM UTC

truncate wrote: post #149

simonw wrote: post #56

> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said. Sounds right to me. Kids under 13 need to learn to read, write and comprehend text. Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills. They can play with AI at home, and after 13 the…

Totally agree! For anyone who still thinks kids should use AI, another argument to make is we are still figuring out AI (hence the constant debate on it, hype, uncertainty, boundaries of its capabilities etc etc). I don't think anyone with right mind can disagree with that. Keeping that mind, wouldn't it make sense to at-the-very-least tread with caution when it comes to kids.

The counterargument is that kids will live in a world different from our own.

For example, in many countries children lost the ability to write cursive; that used to be a critical skill comparable to literacy itself. But in our current society, that's no longer the case and you can be very successful without it, but there are other skills, such as using technology, that became critical.

Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#392

Post by qsera » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:27 AM UTC

alchemism wrote: post #370

Nux wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Return to pen and paper, particularly for testing. Extend school time for doing supervised "homework" that doesn't involve the Internet. Like that?

Yes, make the teachers on $25-35K annual salaries do /more/ work for no extra money. I'm sure that will fix education.

I am conflicted on this. One part of me think that they deserve a lot more compensation. But I am not really sure if that should be in the form of a salary rise.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#393

Post by cryo32 » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

stackghost wrote: post #195

cryo32 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they can conduct a nuanced debate then? Mine couldn’t until they were much older. And I have more so perhaps that’s more statistically valid?

>So they can conduct a nuanced debate then? Oh, can I move the goalposts too?

Nope. Language is more complicated than you think it is.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#394

Post by qsera » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:32 AM UTC

hparadiz wrote: post #298

tacomagick wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.

I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.

> I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.

I am not sure. It would be like sending a kid to a beautiful garden with full of life and stuff, and then micromanaging what they can do there!

The beauty of the books is that the books talk to you, and you cannot talk back. You have to talk to yourselves, go down some wrong path, and course correct on your own at some point, and that is where true learning happens..

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#395

Post by dpkirchner » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:33 AM UTC

testfrequency wrote: post #281

mattnewton wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because banning smartphones in schools doesn’t affect adults not in those schools, whereas age verification does? How you implement these protections matter.

The rhetoric I often see online is forcing children to identify themselves which, obviously leads to adults being required to identify themselves. How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also? It’s all complicated, but I am exhausted from reading doom articles of how the UK wants adults to not exist online while trying to force children offline for their own existence and lo…

> How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?

It's pretty much impossible, so we should stop trying. It's exhausting seeing politicians et al continue to push for age verification despite it being impossible to be even remotely effective. (I hedge because technically we could demand photo ID for every HTTP request, I guess, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.)

The best we can do is ask parents to raise their children themselves and teach children to be mindful online (as we expect them to be IRL).

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#396

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:48 AM UTC

tacomagick wrote: post #387

WalterBright wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Goof thing about AI is it can throw you many more questions I.e. you need to answer the questions, which means work through them yourself, rather than just watching the video.

I apologize if I'm in the wrong but I do not ever remember claiming you could just lesrn through looking at AI alone. I only defended the fact you can learn by analyzing how an AI model solved an issue. To me whenever I talk about an AI talk it goes back and forth. So in my mind it was always AI talking about a topic, then giving you an example question which you yourself solve. However for topics such as history yes…

Thank you for the clarification.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#397

Post by vixen99 » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:56 AM UTC

darlachaps wrote: post #211

rootusrootus wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Relevance of 'magot - a seated oriental figurine, usually of porcelain or ivory, with a grotesque form' to someone who criticizes the US? The allusion is too esoteric for me I'm afraid.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#398

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:56 AM UTC

FinnLobsien wrote: post #85

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it Whatever AI looks like in 20 years is going to be so different from what it is today as to make distracting from basic skill-building an almost-certainly net negative educational effort.

I agree to some degree. But by that logic, should kids in the 2000s not have learned about the internet because the internet fundamentally changed between then and now? I think that if anything, it’s really good I learned how to operate a computer and the Internet BEFORE what the Internet became. I pity the generation who don’t understand a computer’s folder structure because they grew up with smartphones and TikTok.

> should kids in the 2000s not have learned about the internet

Yes. Emphatically yes. In elementary school? The kids who were online in elementary school—literally in school—who got like how-to-use-AOL lessons?

They almost certainly underperform those who learned about the Internet at home or later in life. This is like those stupid keyboarding classes in the 2000s. It was obviously a waste of time compared with developing basic cognition.

No AI CEO or chief engineer today grew up with AI. The idea that everyone in a ball sack or ovary is currently incurably fucked when it comes to the future is naive beyond silliness.

To be clear, I’m not presently arguing against early technology exposure. I’m arguing against the systematized exposure of nascent technologies to young children.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#399

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:57 AM UTC

wieiw wrote: post #261

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, what do you think a teacher does that an llm can't? If you want to learn you absolutely can ask an llm how to _solve_ x and explain the steps and why. My leaving out the word solve seems to have led some of you astray, I apologize. Again the problem is you have the option to solve your problem and move on without understanding it. That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how…

lol people like this guy prove AI psychosis is legit. If you can’t figure out what the value add of a human teacher is then.. fkin lmao. It’s well beyond simply transmission of information. The best teachers have passion - that passion is infectious. I was lucky enough to experience that and it grew my curiosity. LLM’s provide no such equivalent.

> best teachers have passion

Not everyone has the “best teachers.” And passion is undefined. This is not a real argument.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#400

Post by JumpCrisscross » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 6:00 AM UTC

gpt5 wrote: post #228

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but helps me learn things much more quickly than reading textbooks Have you tested this against an external metric of competence? The research seems to show that AI is great at making you feel you know something. But I think the studies looking at language learning found those using AI extensively tested below peers using traditional methods.

You don't always need the same level of deep knowledge on everything you do. A lot of things in software development requires some basic level understanding of some obscure API you would never use again. LLM definitely speed up that part.

> A lot of things in software development requires some basic level understanding of some obscure API you would never use again

This is glorified look-up. AI is great at this! Learning through look-up doesn’t work.

Elsewhere in this thread is someone arguing they learned linear algebra through AI. I’d love to be surprised by their acing an exam. I’m thoroughly doubtful they could get through one. AI is trained to be a sycophant, not to teach. Maybe one day we will solve this. I have seen zero evidence we have that today.