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

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#561

Post by Nathanba » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

It's just "rock and roll and video games are bad" popular nonsense. AI is the best learning tool you could possibly ask for, it's literally your own personal ultra knowledgeable teacher that has all day to answer questions from you. I remember being in school and the most I could hope for was to raise my hand and ask one (1) question sometimes. The teacher would then already be miffed if I asked another follow up and made sure to quickly keep talking so that I wouldn't ask anything else alongside all kinds of other social cues or just outright tell me to look at it at home. I remember falling behind in understanding some basic math concepts and literally never ending up understanding them fully. When you are a child nobody cares in the slightest, you are alone. How could AI possibly make this situation any worse? Life is already at the near maximum pain for children, you barely get to ask a question before you get shut down and you get to reread the same exact useless textbook explanation 30 times in a row. AI is a 100% net gain, it's like having 50 extra teachers on standby. Is having teachers suddenly a bad thing? Of course not. Especially not if the only reason you dislike the teachers is because you can't tell the child to use the teachers intelligently for maximum, fastest gain in understanding.

In the future we should be getting rid of nearly the entire teaching position and instead be going with a model where human teachers are more like guidance counselors that can offer some extra experience and anecdotes from how things will be in real life, something that AI will inherently have less ability to do. All these restrictions are just made by adults who literally don't care to think about how life is for children and have long forgotten. They just want to give orders from the top without having to think about it. Is there a danger that children will abuse it? Of course, it's a massive danger. Without AI there is also a massive danger that children will never learn something properly because nobody has time to teach them. Does anyone care about that danger? Does anyone care that a child will waste years of its life in schooling that is boring? No because that damage is invisible to people who do not care, the children will become intellectually stunted and stop caring about learning or doing productive things. Life is full of dangers, the goal should be to use all the tools we have in their optimal way and if that includes teaching children how to use AI, when to use it and the value of understanding things then the time for that is as soon as possible. I have a feeling that all these complaints about AI come from people who themselves never learned the value of independent thinking and stopped thinking at some point. They went through schooling but with rote memorization and repetition and little to no curiosity or drive to do anything other than the exact homework that the teacher gave them.

This is especially ridiculous: "In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added.". So when you are already an adult and went through over a decade of schooling you can finally use AI? When you are 14 there are children these days that are already making videogames, there is no reason whatsoever to hold children back. Stop treating children like their time is worthless. This is their life time, you don't get to take it away from them however you like as if they are dumb pets that just need to be taught how to behave.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#562

Post by runarberg » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

mike_hock wrote: post #537

QuesnayJr wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, just use it to learn something. It's obviously true. Everyone uses AI all the time now. People's impressions are not mediated by marketing.

> Ask a question. > Ask two follow-up questions. > Ask about a seeming contradiction between the original answer and the answer to the second follow-up question. > Get congratulated for raising such a great point and get parroted back your objection as a "correction." Useful as a learning aid if applied cautiously but maybe not the "best thing ever."

Useful as in “better than nothing” but lacking as in “inferior to almost anything else”.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#563

Post by theptip » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

mike_hock wrote: post #537

QuesnayJr wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, just use it to learn something. It's obviously true. Everyone uses AI all the time now. People's impressions are not mediated by marketing.

> Ask a question. > Ask two follow-up questions. > Ask about a seeming contradiction between the original answer and the answer to the second follow-up question. > Get congratulated for raising such a great point and get parroted back your objection as a "correction." Useful as a learning aid if applied cautiously but maybe not the "best thing ever."

I thought the dichotomy would make this clear, but the claim was not that however you use AI, it’s the best thing ever. To be more explicit:

_used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities, AI is the best technology ever invented for learning. If you don’t believe this as a technical HN person at the epicenter of this technology’s capability set, I probably can’t persuade you. But you can do a lot better than your transcript.

Used in the default mode, or with a desire to take shortcuts, or a desire to minimize what is perceived (often correctly in the case of many school curriculae) as BS fake work, it is the best technology ever invented to avoid learning.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#564

Post by danny_codes » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:47 PM UTC

tgv wrote: post #504

0xpgm wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without increasing educator workload substantially Isn't this a good thing, employing more educators, building more schools? Any sane society will always invest more into its future well being and incentivize investments into education.

That used to be the case, but it no longer is. Not only are budgets limited, only a few choose for a career in education, leaving schools already understaffed. Expansion is not feasible in the short run.

I mean we have trillionaires now, budget limitations are a political choice. Perhaps instead of giving all our resources to Elon we can, you know, pay teachers instead.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#565

Post by kubb » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:54 PM UTC

rootusrootus wrote: post #544

kubb wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When quoting a factual statistic is "shitting on the US", you're losing the ability to address issues.

It wasn't even a discussion about the US, why did we have to bring the US into it to begin with?

I don't know, but the person who did likely is in the US and by default cares mostly about it.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#566

Post by kubb » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 4:58 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #535

Moomoomoo309 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A notable effect that skews those numbers a bit is that the test for literacy is often given in English only, meaning any people in the US who can read and write Spanish but not English are counted as illiterate. (It's slightly more complex than this, some states let you take it in Spanish, some have the option but still usually give it in English most of the time, but the effect is the same)

That's a really good catch. It looks like that 28% figure is specifically Level 1 or below in English literacy , which makes that number a whole lot less interesting for evaluating education levels. I care about ability to comprehend text in someone's fluent language. The PIAAC figures don't appear to measure that.

Do you care about trends? Like an increase from 19% to 28% between 2017 and 2023?

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#567

Post by etherealG » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

nunez wrote: post #155

Spend a few minutes on the teacher subreddits: /r/teachers and /r/professors, specifically. AI has been a disaster for student outcomes and educator performance, more or less across the board. It should be banned in education, but there's no way to enforce that without increasing educator workload substantially (eliminating homework and re-working lesson plans around that; moving tests and projects back into the clas…

I think like every field this revolution reveals the cracks, good teachers use AI to enhance teaching material and experience for students while weak teachers complaint they can't keep up with student's access to Ai that out-paces them.

AI forces us all in every field to be better at what we do, and coupled with the previous innovation of the internet only reveals the drastic variance in quality of skills. Teaching is no different.

Good teachers use AI. Bad teachers complain AI is ruining their job, but I posit it's only revealing they were never able to excel beyond their students in the first place.

A savant exceeds their teacher fast. Even faster with AI.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#568

Post by theptip » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

habagav wrote: post #495

theptip wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills. I think it's more complex than this. AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning. The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair;…

It’s not complex. One must first learn HOW TO LEARN before they can use any tool to help them learn. There’s no substitution for human connection (social media) and there’s no substitution for traditional learning (robot teachers). Everyone who wants to “disrupt” this fundamental human quality is chasing delusion. If you want to help, pay teachers a couple billion from the hundreds-of-billions going into AI maybe?

I agree that the human touch is valuable.

I disagree that humans are required to bootstrap meta-learning; I think it is quite deeply wired into the human brain and there is no reason that we can’t create digital gyms that give opportunities to learn the same insights.

I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#569

Post by kelseyfrog » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

master-lincoln wrote: post #482

kelseyfrog wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come up with a solution that works instead of a slogan. The last person who divulged any details about what he meant when he said 'parents should parent' went on to reveal that parents should learn to manually configure home routers, a solution that is technologically unattainable for most parents. Again I ask, do you have a solution or a slogan?

maybe do not give your kids self-controlled access to devices with internet access? Of course that isolates them from their peers who have less caring parents that give them access.

Cool. A non-viable solution, We'll keep encroaching on privacy. Have it your way.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#570

Post by johnisgood » Sat, Jun 20, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

fouc wrote: post #517

theptip wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills. I think it's more complex than this. AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning. The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair;…

> take-home essay assignments Typically there's not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7 anyways. Homework levels between elementary school and start of junior might look something like this: Division I / early elementary - no formal assignments should be made, though 5–10 minutes of systematic study or reading was recommended. Division II / upper elementary - formal homework could be assigned at the teacher’s di…

What do you mean there is not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7?

We had a fuckton of homework at every grade, here in Hungary.