How to ChatGPT

Schools are sleepwalking into an AI crisis.ChatGPT isn’t a “cheating tool.” It’s far more significant: it’s rewiring how we think.Students are outsourcing memory because AI will “just remind them.”Writing is being polished into soulless uniformity.Reading stamina is collapsing under the weight of instant digests.And worst of all, the hidden curriculum of expedience is taking root: get it fast, not get it deep.This isn’t speculation. Billions of interactions show the truth: people use ChatGPT less like a tool, more like an advisor. That should terrify anyone in education. Because if kids grow up treating AI as their second brain, what happens to their first?We have a choice. Either schools keep pretending this is “just another tech fad” (like calculators or social media bans)… or we confront the uncomfortable truth: AI is embedding itself into literacy, reasoning, and judgment — the very marrow of education.Ban it, and you lose relevance. Ignore it, and you lose students. The only path forward is deliberate design: guardrails that force retrieval before revision, questioning before answers, and voice before fluency.I unpack all of this in my new piece How to ChatGPT.