Connected at Brookwood: Why Your Child Shouldn't Use AI the Way You Do

Why Your Child Shouldn't Use AI the Way You Do

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The Most Important Question About AI in Schools As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly present in education and daily life, parents understandably have questions about how Brookwood approaches AI with students. But before we discuss policies and guidelines, there's a more fundamental question we need to address: What are elementary and middle school years actually for?

These developmental stages are when young people build crucial intellectual capacities—critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem-solving, persistence through difficulty, and the ability to organize and express complex ideas. These aren't skills you're born with or can download. They develop through repeated practice, struggle, and gradual mastery.

Why Your Relationship with AI Differs from Your Child's: As adults who have already developed these cognitive capabilities, our relationship with AI can be productively collaborative. When I use AI to help draft a communication or organize ideas, I'm leveraging a tool to enhance work I already know how to do. I can evaluate its output critically, recognize its limitations, and make informed judgments about when to accept, modify, or reject its suggestions.

Your child is still building those very capabilities. They're learning how to construct an argument, organize a narrative, analyze a problem, or persist through a challenging math concept. When AI does that cognitive work for them, it's not just completing an assignment—it's removing the developmental opportunity that assignment was designed to provide.

The Gym Analogy: If you want to build physical strength, you need to go to the gym and do the work. You can't program a robot to lift weights for you and expect to get stronger. The same principle applies to cognitive development. The friction, the struggle, the effort of working through challenging problems—that's not an unfortunate side effect of learning. That's where the learning actually happens.

AI can remove that friction entirely. It can write the essay, solve the problem, generate the ideas. But in doing so, it also removes the very exercise that builds your child's intellectual capabilities. This is fundamentally different from tools like calculators or spell-check, which handle routine tasks while students focus on higher-order thinking. AI can do the higher-order thinking itself.

Brookwood's Approach: This developmental reality shapes everything about how we approach AI at Brookwood. We're not against AI - we recognize it will be an important tool throughout our students' lives. But we're deeply committed to ensuring that students develop robust intellectual capabilities before becoming dependent on AI to do their thinking for them.

Our AI policy creates a spectrum of use, from assignments where AI is prohibited (because students need to demonstrate independent mastery) to assignments where AI collaboration is appropriate (because we're explicitly teaching AI literacy and evaluation skills). Teachers will clearly communicate expectations for each assignment, helping students understand not just whether they can use AI, but why those boundaries exist.

What This Means for Families: Over the coming weeks, we'll share practical guidance about supporting AI-assisted learning at home and helping your child develop critical AI literacy. But the foundation is understanding that your elementary or middle school student is in a fundamentally different developmental place than you are as an adult.

The question isn't "Should my child use AI?" It's "Is this use of AI supporting my child's development of essential cognitive skills, or is it bypassing that development entirely?"

We're navigating this together as a community, and your partnership in maintaining appropriate boundaries is essential for your child's long-term intellectual growth.

Coming Next Week: We'll explore Brookwood's AI Use Spectrum—the five levels of AI integration we use across different assignments—and how to help your child determine appropriate AI use for their homework.

What I'm Reading: I'm continuing to work my way through "The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life," by Lowry Pressly, which explores themes around digital memory, privacy, and our relationship with permanent online records, arguing that true privacy isn't about controlling our data but about protecting the unmeasurable, ambiguous parts of life that resist capture, what the author calls “oblivion”. Pressly suggests that when everything becomes data, we lose not just privacy but the very possibility of trust, reinvention, and becoming someone new—reminding us how we might approach digital permanence with our children by preserving spaces where life remains untracked, unaccountable, and open to possibility.

David Saunders
Director of Leadership, Technology, & Changemaking