Silicon Valley parents think NYC is crazy to ban AI in schools: Cant make children live in the past

Silicon Valley parents are puzzled by New York City’s landmark ban on schoolkids using Artificial Intelligence, because they are all-in on the tech.Most bay area parents have no problem with their kids using AI from a young age — as long as they’re using it correctly. “You can’t make children live in the past.

Let them live in the present — or, better still, the future,” tech founder Qinghua Zhao told the Post.“Blocking their path to the future is definitely not a good thing.”Zhao’s 11-year-old son, Lucas Zhang, already uses Claude Code, which he’s set up to reserve library books from his school reading list.A fan of physical copies, he made it so AI won’t select eBooks and added a tracking column to mark books already requested, so there are no duplicates.“The wonderful thing about children is they have no fear.

They don’t know what’s difficult and what isn’t,” Zhao added.She thinks the logic Lucas is learning through AI will matter more than the mechanics of coding, in the long run.New York City’s ban prevents kids in preschool through 8th grade using any sort of generative AI and high schoolers are only able to use it in limited supervised contexts.It’s a sharp contrast to Alpha School’s K–8 campus in Palo Alto.The $75,000-a-year institution has an academic timetable of just two hours a day, all spent interacting with AI.

The rest of the day is workshops in leadership, financial literacy and how to be an entrepreneur. “I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time to be a 5-year-old than there is right now,” school co-founder MacKenzie Price told the Post in an interview earlier this year.One parent who considered the school told The Post: “I do not see the principal value as the AI.I see the potential value in giving motivated young people more time to explore different areas of interest, before education and career paths begin forcing them to narrow and specialize.”Others remain somewhat skeptical, p...