AI is a Homeschooling Tool
How I stopped worrying and learned to (mostly) love artificial intelligence
By Ivana Greco, a homemaker and homeschooling mother of four, as well as a writer.
Last month, my homeschooled sons (ages nine and seven) were playing around on the computer. As they cackled, I heard one of them yell: “Add an explosion!” Curious—and very suspicious—I stopped cooking to ask what they were doing.
“We’re using ChatGPT to create a picture of a dog setting off a nuclear bomb!” the younger one enthusiastically told me. Anyone with elementary school-aged boys will immediately understand: all others must either remember their own childhoods or ask a friend to explain.
The dog setting off a nuclear explosion, credit Ivana Greco.
There are many positives. I’ve used AI to help select and create learning material for my children. When preparing to teach fifth-grade science next year, I turned to ChatGPT to help compare various published homeschool curricula. The AI gathered different choices and presented me with recommendations and considerations for choosing the best fit. The results were very insightful. I’m now familiar with many of the secular science curricula for elementary homeschoolers in the United States and found AI to be both able to pick out good options and evaluate the benefits (and negatives) of each. While I had a baseline understanding to sort through the AI results competently and already had favorite options, even I learned a thing or two.
Other parents agree. Noelle Daly, a homeschooling mom from North Idaho, told me that she’s talked with other moms about using AI in even more proactive ways than I do, including “to generate lesson plans, flash cards, quizzes, and educational activities.” But the limits to the technology soon followed. She noted that it “seems like everyone agrees that [AI] shouldn’t be used as a substitute for thinking or writing but as a time saver that helps [parents] focus more on research and teaching.”
I’ve used AI to quickly and thoroughly answer all manner of kid questions, from “what makes a spray bottle work?” to “who killed JFK’s assassin and what happened to him?” These are inquiries I might once have turned to Google to answer—or ignored if I was busy cleaning, cooking, or doing any of the other million things that occupy my days. AI is easy to use and does a more comprehensive job than Google of sorting the facts—especially in allowing for the many, many inevitable follow-up questions.
Another helpful application of the technology is using ChatGPT to generate reading lists for our second and fourth graders. This has the added advantage of being able to refine and expand book recommendations based on a child’s specific abilities and interests. We pay our kids to read books we’ve chosen for them, finding it a good motivation to tackle something besides graphic novels and Harry Potter.
For my older son, who is an advanced reader with a strong interest in science, ChatGPT had good suggestions for contemporary and classic fiction, as well as books at a fourth-grade level that explore science and engineering—much to his delight. I dropped what the tool came up with into a spreadsheet (with some additions of my own), and he’s slowly working his way through it, earning money as he goes. Likewise, for my second grader, I wanted books that would challenge him to grow as a reader while also aligning with his interests. At age seven, these include pirates, sharks, swords, and fighting. ChatGPT provided thoughtful recommendations that matched both his reading level and preferred topics, amid the vast universe of children’s books on offer.
Beyond helping homeschoolers choose and design curricula or build reading lists—which are, to be clear, fundamental to homeschooling—there are also learning apps that become more (or less) challenging according to the student’s ability. Not having experience with this myself, I reached out to Pamela Hobart, who has two children enrolled at a school that relies heavily on AI-powered adaptive apps. She told me that, “the model where students use adaptive apps under the coaching of guides, rather than receiving lectures from teachers, is the most feasible way of differentiating education.” According to Ms. Hobart, her children’s school features a very low staff-student ratio—far from being run by the robots.
These human “guides” help children stay motivated on the apps during morning “Core Skills” time, while significant hands-on and project-based learning plus outside play fill the afternoons. She notes that “students are automatically placed by the apps and guides onto their own individualized tracks without any need for separate classes, books, or teachers.” Thus, there is “little student-to-student, rank order or letter grade-type comparison and more emphasis on whether you put in enough focused app time each day or week.” The potential applications of these apps—which include well-known programs like IXL and Rocketmath—to homeschoolers are obvious. For parents concerned about their own teaching abilities, being able to instead act as a “guide,” helping their child to use an app powerful enough to adjust to the user’s math or reading abilities may offer a needed confidence boost in homeschooling. No longer do homeschooling parents have to come up with their own lesson plans or implement a curriculum—instead there’s an AI app for that!
But parents should remember the downsides to AI which, unfortunately, remain considerable. First, AI is sometimes just factually wrong. For example, my sons and husband work through a challenging online math curriculum together each morning. Every now and then, a problem is assigned that simply calls for the brute force of long-hand math. If no one feels like dedicating 45 minutes to considering every permutation of the problem, my husband sometimes shows the kids how to prompt AI to solve it, refining the question and offering it potential solutions to come up with the answer. Even with this guidance, though, AI sometimes loses something in translation and gets the answer incorrect. Thus, although there is the potential for AI to one day to be a kind of effective private tutor, that day has not arrived. Using ChatGPT effectively for us still requires an adult to supervise and make sure the AI isn’t spitting out incorrect information to our children, who are too young to spot the difference.
Further, in schools, AI has become a tool for rampant cheating. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal interviewed teachers and students who discussed the widespread use of AI to write essays and complete take-home tests. This, of course, defeats the pedagogical purpose of assigning essays or quizzes in the first place. The objective isn’t to generate more essays or perfectly answered test questions—it’s to develop a student’s mind and critical thinking skills. As homeschoolers, we test at home, and I can easily supervise enough to prevent cheating, but the problem is much more complex for those with students in traditional schools.
It’s clear, therefore, that the question of AI use isn’t exclusive to homeschooling families, and it’s vital that all parents grapple with the technology. Some questions for parents to consider: How should I teach my child to think about AI? Should I introduce them to it? If so, what boundaries should I set?
The answers will vary from family to family. In our household, we are curious and engaged with this new technology. Other families may thrive with a more limited approach, especially in early childhood. A child’s school may take a particular stance—or have no stance at all—on AI use, but that doesn’t mean a parent’s perspective should be dictated by the school’s approach. After all, consider how much more quickly parents were able to react to the evidence—presented in books like Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation—about the dangers of social media for kids than large school systems, where change involves turning the Titanic of school boards, administrative bureaucracy, and more
Parents need to determine their own family’s answers to these questions now, as AI is only likely to grow in impact and application, shaping education and the world in ways we can’t fully predict. One of our most important responsibilities as parents is to prepare our children to function as competent, adaptable adults. At a basic level, this means teaching them life skills—how to do laundry, cook, manage money, and maintain a car. But just as essential is teaching them how to navigate new and emerging technologies.
Ideally, this family conversation should start early so that children have time to refine their thinking as they mature (with the benefit of parental guidance), rather than scrambling to make sense of it all in their late teens. Parents everywhere will need to seriously consider how AI is changing the world and, assuming its impact will be significant, ask: How can I, as a parent, regardless of what schools may or may not do, best prepare my child for the future AI will shape? Meanwhile, I think it’s also ok to let them make silly pictures. But your household might be different. You should think about it—and soon.