Six hundred thousand children will learn without chatbots this year. The nation's largest district is betting on an old conviction about how a mind is formed, and how slowly.
Solid food is for those who are full grown, who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern good and evil.
Hebrews 5:14
On September 2, New York City announced that the nation's largest school district will bar student-facing AI from its earliest grades through eighth for the coming school year. Roughly 600,000 children will learn without chatbots. Mayor Zohran Mamdani rejected the industry's claim that AI in early education is inevitable. Chancellor Kamar Samuels gave the reason: protect students' ability to think critically "without a tool doing it for them."
A country that agrees on nothing about AI mostly agreed on this. Parents petitioned for it. More than half the City Council urged it. Behind them sits growing research linking heavy chatbot use to lazier thinking, what researchers call cognitive offloading. Thinking you hand away stops being thinking you can do.
The line above was aimed at adults who had stopped growing. By now you should be teachers, the writer complains in verse 12, and you still need milk. Maturity, in his picture, has exactly one door: practice. The word he uses for exercised is a gym word, borrowed from athletes. Judgment gets built the way strength does, repetition by repetition, in a mind doing its own lifting.
Christianity pushes the claim further than any district memo would dare.
Luke 2:52And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men.
That is the Son of God as a child, and the verb is increased. Wisdom came to him the human way: twelve years old, asking questions in the temple (Luke 2:46), three decades before a public word. The slow years were the point.
The critics deserve a straight hearing. AI-literacy advocates warn that students who never touch the tools could graduate unprepared for an economy built on them. The city's answer is sequence: high schoolers keep five supervised pilots, plus lessons on bias and error. Apprenticeship has always worked this way. The sharpest instrument goes to trained hands.
The machines will wait. Childhood will not.