The Rush to Block That Which Will Be Obsolete

The Future of Learning with AI, Part 2 of 3: AI in middle school. Previous: Part 1: Elementary.

From the card catalog to AI

Many of us may remember fumbling through a card catalog system in a library, looking for an article to support a research paper, only to find after digging through basement journals that it wasn’t what we needed. In the early 2000s, most resources became digital, making library research much easier. Years later, everything was accessible via a web search, making it even simpler to find exactly what you were looking for from anywhere in the world.

Do we long for the card catalog system of the 1990s? Of course we don’t!

That is because it is an obsolete and inefficient system by modern standards. Today, AI is leading the next innovation in research and information processing. We can and should debate the merits of the human-in-the-loop process as this unfolds, but we cannot debate the outcome. Eventually, an LLM will replace web search and be consistently reliable for many use cases involving research and information processing. And this is just one example; there are and will be countlessly more where AI changes how we live, work, and learn.

What this means for AI in middle school

When we consider how AI can and should be used at the middle school level, I think the card catalog analogy is a good one. This isn’t an age group where anyone supports handing unmitigated use of an LLM to a student. However, we must consider the relevance of various processes and skills and ask if they can and should evolve through AI. Does it make sense in 2026 to teach students how to effectively use web search for research when we have a means to use a safe, student-focused LLM to do the same task even better? I don’t think it does.

The conversation about AI in middle school will still be one that favors caution and limits, but it must be balanced against pragmatic cases where the use of an AI tool is reasonable, given the fact that it has become the standard for a given task and made the prior use case obsolete.

Where Curriki stands

At Curriki, we believe AI in middle school should be an approach that, like in elementary schools, allows for the most innovative teacher deployed, AI-driven learning software to be used for student differentiation, adaptation, and teacher support. We also believe it is appropriate for student use when replacing an underlying skill or process that is becoming or will become obsolete, provided the learning of that prior skill adds no other significant value.

Next in the series: Part 3: High School Curriculum, Elevated (coming soon).