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Archive for September, 2026

The Scrapbook

Posted in Health, SD45, tagged , on September 15, 2026| 2 Comments »

I still have the scrapbook.

It is filled with newspaper clippings about Terry Fox that I cut out of the Vancouver Sun, among other newspapers and magazines, as he made his way across Canada in 1980. I was an elementary school student, and like so many Canadians of my generation, I became captivated by this young man with an unusual running stride who was somehow trying to run all the way across the country.

At the time, I certainly didn’t understand that I was documenting Canadian history. I just knew there was something about Terry and his Marathon of Hope that mattered. Forty-six years later, it still does.

Terry Fox has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest elementary school memories are of Terry Fox Runs. I also remember his cancer and, eventually, his death in a way that I don’t remember other news from that time. I think Terry’s death was the first death of someone I had never met that really landed. When you are a kid, even famous people somehow seem permanent. Terry wasn’t.

It was also probably my first real encounter with cancer. Now, of course, cancer has touched almost every family in one way or another. But as a child it was new to me. I knew Terry was sick. I knew the whole country wanted him to get better. And then he didn’t. That was difficult to understand, and maybe that is part of why his story stayed with me.

Years later, I had the privilege of serving as principal of Riverside Secondary in Port Coquitlam, Terry’s hometown, and his story was different there. It wasn’t abstract history. The Fox family was part of the community. The streets were the streets Terry trained on for his journey. I remember the 25th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope particularly fondly, with thousands of people gathering in Port Coquitlam, members of the Fox family there, and this sense that the run still belonged to all of us.

The moment I remember most from those years was Bob McGill speaking to our students on Terry Fox Run day. Bob was an Assistant Superintendent in Coquitlam by then, but long before that he had been Terry’s Grade 8 teacher and basketball coach at Mary Hill Junior High.

He didn’t talk about the Marathon of Hope. He talked about a kid who was five feet tall, usually last picked in PE, who barely got off the bench that season and would not quit. That kid went on to play junior varsity basketball at Simon Fraser.

You could feel the room change. Our students had heard about Terry their whole lives. They had never heard anyone say, I taught him.

There are fewer and fewer chances for students to sit in a room with someone who can say that.

I have kept running too. Every September I make a point of finding a Terry Fox Run. It has become one of those markers in my year that I don’t really question, and increasingly I also feel a responsibility to bring someone with me.

Last year that meant one of the most memorable runs I have ever done. I joined two of my kids and thousands of others crossing the Confederation Bridge from Prince Edward Island to New Brunswick as part of the 45th anniversary of the Marathon of Hope.

The best part was looking around. There were people who remembered watching Terry in 1980 and people born years after he died. There were parents with children, grandparents, serious runners and people walking it. Thousands of us were moving across that enormous piece of Canada because of something a 21-year-old from Port Coquitlam decided to do 45 years earlier.

There is also something very Canadian about Terry that is hard to separate from the story. Maybe it is the combination of extraordinary ambition and almost no pretension. He wasn’t trying to become a national hero. He simply thought something needed to be better and decided he was going to do something about it. Somewhere along the way, that very personal decision became part of how Canadians came to understand him, and perhaps a little of how we understand ourselves. Maybe that is why, all these years later, Terry still feels like he belongs to all of us.

For much of my life, Terry Fox was someone I remembered. Now he is someone I feel responsible for helping others remember. For my generation, Terry is memory. We remember adults debating whether he would make it. We remember the hop-step. Many Canadians remember exactly where they were when they learned he had been forced to stop outside Thunder Bay.

I still follow along every year. The Terry Fox Foundation retraces the route through the spring and summer, and I find myself tracking it as though the ending might come out differently this time. The dates are fixed in me: April 12, the morning he dipped his leg into the Atlantic at St. John’s; September 1, the day outside Thunder Bay; June 28, the day he died.

Every year, there are fewer of us who remember it firsthand. For today’s students, Terry Fox is a story, and that changes what happens in our schools every September.

Here is a number that surprised me. Every year, 3.5 million Canadian students take part in the Terry Fox School Run, and the Foundation’s most recent report has them raising close to $14 million. The School Run is now the single largest fundraising program the Terry Fox Foundation has.

Our schools are not a supporting act in this. They are one of the main places where Terry’s story continues.

So the question I keep turning over is not whether we run. We always run. It is what a student actually knows about Terry by the time they cross the line.

That answer looks different in every school, and there is always more any of us could do with it. That isn’t a knock on anyone. It is what happens to any tradition that repeats for decades. It can quietly become the thing we do rather than the thing we mean.

We have been generous with monuments. Terry has schools, fields, statues, a mountain and a highway. I just read that he will be celebrated on the next version of Canada’s 5 dollar bill. All of that matters. But a monument can’t tell a student that Terry was five feet tall and last picked. Bob McGill did. And when people like Bob tell those stories, the rest of us have a responsibility to remember them and tell them again.

Schools don’t only teach history. Schools help decide which stories a society carries forward, and stories need people willing to tell them.

What I want students to understand is fairly simple. Terry saw something he thought should be better and decided to do something about it.

He wasn’t famous when he started out. He wasn’t a professional athlete. There wasn’t a massive campaign waiting for him, and he had no guarantee any of it would work. He was a young person who had been through cancer, had watched others suffer through treatment, and decided that raising money for research was something he could do.

So he started running.

The theme for this year’s Terry Fox Run is Finish It. The obvious meaning is about research. Earlier this year, the Terry Fox Foundation passed $1 billion raised for cancer research. Terry’s dream was never simply that Canadians would remember him. He wanted a cure. The running and the remembering only matter if they continue to serve that.

But Finish It means something else to me this year too. Terry began a story that now belongs to another generation to carry.

This fall, a new feature-length documentary, Run Terry Run, will bring his story back to theatres. It is built around footage and audio from 1980, some of it unseen for decades. I plan to be there opening weekend. For some of us it will be revisiting our own history. For others it will be meeting Terry for the first time.

Bryan Adams has also written a song for the film called The Ballad of Terry Fox. What struck me was where Adams was in 1980. He was 20 years old, a year younger than Terry, touring Canada and playing small clubs. When Terry stopped outside Thunder Bay, Adams had just played a show in Ottawa. He was following the Marathon of Hope the way the rest of us were, through the news.

I was following it with my scissors and the newspaper.

Now Bryan Adams is one of the people passing the story on.

That is how stories survive. Someone tells them to someone else. A parent brings a child to a run. A teacher explains to a Grade 3 class why everyone is heading outside. A principal tells students about growing up watching Terry on the news. A father talks his kids into running across a bridge with him. Eventually, those young people become the ones telling the story.

I still have that scrapbook. Back then, I was clipping Terry’s story out of the newspaper because, for whatever reason, I didn’t want to lose it.

Forty-six years later, I think that instinct still makes sense. I will keep showing up for the run, and I will keep trying to bring someone with me. Not because Terry needs another monument, but because stories like his only last when one generation makes the effort to tell the next.

A Few Resources

  • The Terry Fox School Run resource hub. Start here. Lesson plans from primary through secondary, assembly presentations, morning announcements, videos, playlists and classroom activities. If you only open one link, open this one.
  • Terry’s Timeline. The Marathon of Hope day by day, with Terry’s journal entries and audio woven through it. It ends on September 1 with his final journal entry: “21 miles. 3,339 miles total.”
  • Stories of Hope. First-hand memories from people who saw Terry run, heard him speak or encountered him along the way. For students who can no longer sit in a gym and hear someone say I was there, this may be the next best thing.
  • CBC Archives: Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope. The primary-source video and audio are particularly useful for older students. Terry on television in 1980 is different from watching someone today explain Terry.
  • Hear from Fred Fox or a Terry Fox Ambassador. The School Run program offers free virtual presentations, including opportunities to hear Fred share memories of growing up with Terry and of the Marathon of Hope.
  • Two books worth having. Leslie Scrivener’s Terry Fox: His Story remains the essential biography. Scrivener was a journalist assigned to follow Terry during the Marathon of Hope and built the book from his diaries and interviews with Terry, his family and friends. Douglas Coupland’s Terry is something quite different, a collection of photographs, artifacts and family memorabilia assembled almost like a scrapbook.
  • And two new ways into the story referenced in my post earlier. Sean Menard’s Run Terry Run draws on 96 reels of previously unseen footage and unheard audio from the Fox family archives. Bryan Adams’ The Ballad of Terry Fox, written for the film, offers another entry point from one of Canada’s most famous musicians.

 

Note: AI tools were used for editorial feedback while refining the piece and with collecting the list of resources at the bottom of the post. The arguments and conclusions are my own.

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What Should Change? What Must Endure?

Posted in Change, SD45, tagged , on September 8, 2026| 6 Comments »

I love the first day of school. No matter how long you have been doing this work, there is something about this day that still feels like a beginning.

For the last couple of weeks, our schools have been slowly coming back to life. Leadership teams gathered. Staff returned. Classrooms were organized. Schedules were adjusted. Meetings happened. Plans were made. Last Thursday, we brought everyone in West Vancouver Schools together for our annual Opening Day. And today, the people all of that work is actually for walk through our doors.

The students.

A Kindergarten student is walking into school for the first time. A Grade 8 student is trying to figure out where they fit. A Grade 12 student is beginning their final year with us. Some students have been counting the days until they could see their friends again. Others arrived this morning quietly anxious. That is the work underneath all of the work.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have had several opportunities to talk with people across our district about the year ahead. The audiences have changed and the conversations have ranged from artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum computing to literacy, physical literacy, belonging and wellbeing. But I have found myself circling around the same question:

Where are we going?

I still believe that if we are about everything, we are about nothing. That does not mean schools should only care about three things. We run complicated organizations serving wonderfully complicated human beings, and there will always be hundreds of things requiring our attention. But underneath all of them, I keep coming back to three commitments for the year ahead.

Innovation. Foundational Skills. All Means All.

Increasingly, I do not see these as three separate priorities. I think they depend on each other. And as I think about the year ahead, I keep coming back to three questions. What should change? What must endure? And who gets to be part of it?

What should change?

I have a bit of a history at our Opening Day of finding profound educational wisdom in questionable places, usually involving television programs and movies from the 1980s. Over the years I have somehow managed to work Three’s Company, Newhart and Mr. Belvedere into conversations about education. So after we lost Dolly Parton just before the start of the school year, it probably should not surprise anyone that I found myself rewatching 9 to 5.

For those who have somehow missed it over the last 45 years, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin play three women fed up with a terrible boss who decide their workplace needs to change. Their particular strategy for dealing with management is not one I am recommending for West Vancouver Schools. But there is something surprisingly current in what happens next.

Once the women actually have the opportunity to change their workplace, they begin asking pretty basic questions. Why do we do things this way? Could we organize work differently? Could we create conditions where people actually do their best work? That is not a bad definition of innovation, and it is probably a more useful one than simply chasing whatever is newest.

In one of our leadership sessions before the school year started, we spent time talking about artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum computing. I do not expect our educators to suddenly become quantum computing experts. We talked about these areas because they are windows into a world that is changing incredibly quickly, and our students are going to live and work in that world.

The temptation with something like AI is to define future readiness as knowing how to use the newest tools. Four years into the generative AI conversation, I am less interested in whether students are using AI and far more interested in whether they are thinking deeply about it.

The more important questions are about judgement. When should I use it? When should I not? What should I trust? What should I verify? What is this tool doing for me, and what thinking still belongs to me?

Those are not really technology questions. They are human questions. They are about curiosity, creativity, communication, critical thinking and judgement. They are about encountering something you do not understand and wanting to figure it out. They are about developing enough confidence in your own thinking that you can use powerful technologies without simply surrendering your thinking to them.

Technology changes. Those skills endure.

That is why I hope we think about innovation broadly this year. Innovation might be a new AI application or a completely new program. It might be finding a better way for a student to demonstrate what they know, reaching a learner who has not yet found their place, or changing the way we organize work so a colleague can thrive. And sometimes innovation is finally letting go of something we have done for years because nobody has stopped to ask why.

The question is not simply, what is new? It is, could there be a better way?

What must endure?

Of course, there is a tension here. The more willing we are to change, the clearer we also need to be about what must not be lost. In fact, I increasingly think the faster the world changes, the more our foundations matter.

There is no version of the future where literacy matters less, or numeracy matters less, or where relationships, perseverance, creativity, judgement and the ability to communicate with another human being become obsolete. And there is certainly no version where belonging does not matter.

This brings me back to Dolly Parton. For all the things she became famous for, the songs, the movies, the rhinestones and Dollywood, one of my favourite parts of her legacy has always been the Imagination Library. At its heart, it is an incredibly simple idea. Put books in the hands of children.

A woman who spent her entire career reinventing herself understood something wonderfully basic. Reading changes lives.

I love the tension in that. We can be relentlessly future facing and still recognize that sometimes the most transformative thing we can put in a child’s hands is a book.

Sometimes in education we create a false choice between innovation and the basics. Are we preparing students for the future, or are we focusing on literacy and numeracy? Are we embracing new technologies, or are we protecting human relationships? Are we creating new opportunities, or investing in the fundamentals?

My answer is yes.

We have to be exceptional at both. We should explore AI, cybersecurity, quantum computing and other forces shaping the world our students are entering. We should try things that do not work the first time. We should continue building on the same spirit that took robotics from an idea to something extraordinary in our district, that created Ignite Your Passions and our academy and district programs, and that took physical literacy from an emerging idea a decade ago to something deeply embedded across our schools today.

But none of that replaces the foundations. It builds on them. Foundations are built slowly. On purpose. Over years. They rarely make for the most dramatic announcement, but they are what allow everything else to happen.

Who gets to be part of it?

We use the phrase All Means All a lot in West Vancouver Schools. Like any phrase we use often, there is a danger that it becomes familiar enough that we stop really hearing it. Because All Means All is actually a very difficult commitment.

It means we do not judge an opportunity by whether we offered it. We ask who actually experienced it. We can build remarkable opportunities in AI, athletics, languages, the arts, STEM or anything else, but we still need to ask who sees themselves in those opportunities and who does not. We need to care deeply about the student performing at the very highest level and just as deeply about the student struggling to get through the door in the morning.

It means high expectations for every student, while recognizing that students may need different pathways to reach them. Some students need us to open a door. Some need us to get out of the way. Some need another opportunity. And some need an adult to quietly notice that something is wrong before they are ready to say so themselves.

It means Indigenous learner success is not somebody else’s work. It is our work. And it means safe and welcoming schools are not separate from excellence. They are a condition for it.

All Means All asks us to move past the question, Did we provide it? It asks, Who actually experienced it? Who is thriving? Who is not yet? And what are we prepared to do about it?

That is also why wellbeing belongs in this conversation. A student can be surrounded by extraordinary opportunities and still not be in a place to reach them. They can be sitting in the best lesson we have ever designed and find it almost impossible to learn if they do not feel safe, connected, known or well.

Wellbeing is not separate from learning. It is not the soft thing we get to after the important work is finished. It is one of the conditions that allows the important work to happen.

And the same is true for the adults who work in our schools. Schools only work because of the people in them. A teacher who notices something in a child. An education assistant who helps a student settle and return to class. An administrative assistant who makes a nervous family feel welcome. A custodian whose daily interactions tell students something about whether they belong. A principal who creates the conditions where people want to do their best work. Our facilities, IT, finance, human resources and district teams solving hundreds of problems that students will never know existed.

The student experience is the result of all of us.

There is a second meaning to All Means All. It means every student. And it takes all of us.

Twenty years in

This is my twentieth year in West Vancouver Schools. There are people I work with who have been here for all twenty of those years and some who have been here longer, and there are others beginning their first year with us today. I think there is something valuable in both. Experience should give us perspective without making us cynical. Newness should bring energy without assuming everything that came before needs to be replaced.

What I am proudest of over two decades is not that we have stayed the same. It is that we have stayed curious. Stability is not the enemy of innovation. Strong foundations do not prevent you from asking what could be next. In fact, they may be what give you the confidence to ask the question.

And that is what makes today so exciting. For the last couple of weeks, we have been able to talk about the year ahead in meeting rooms and theatres. We have talked about innovation and foundations and belonging and wellbeing and our commitment that all really does mean all. Today those ideas have names and faces.

The word I chose for this year is Alive. And today, this is what it looks like. There is a child learning to read. There is a student walking into a new school wondering whether they will find their people. There is someone discovering a sport, an instrument, an idea or a technology that may become part of who they are. There is a student who needs to be challenged more than they have ever been challenged before. And somewhere in one of our schools today there is a young person who needs an adult to notice them.

That is when the words matter. So as we begin another school year, I hope we remain genuinely curious about what should change and fiercely protective of what must endure. I hope we are ambitious about the future without becoming distracted by every new thing that arrives. And I hope we keep asking the uncomfortable question about every classroom, every program and every opportunity: Who is not experiencing success yet?

Innovation. Foundational Skills. All Means All. Not three competing priorities. Three parts of the same promise.

September always gives us another beginning.

Today, we get to make something of it.

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Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers as I edited and refined my thinking.

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The Easiest Post to Write

Posted in Change, Parenting, tagged , on September 1, 2026| Leave a Comment »

The easiest post to write this fall would be the one against it. I could open with a warning about screens, line up every worry about AI, about cheating, about the slow erosion of thinking, then call for a ban, promise to protect childhood and close with something stirring about the good old days. It would be a popular post. It might be my most shared one all year.

I am not going to write that post.

Not because those worries are wrong. A lot of them are right. There is a real mood out there this fall, a pushing back against technology in schools, and much of it is healthy. We restricted phones. We are talking again about attention, about presence, about what it means to actually be in a room together. I am glad we are having those conversations. This blog has spent more than fifteen years arguing that the human part of school is the whole point.

The booing

Think back to this past spring. At college and university commencement ceremonies across the United States, graduates booed. Not at anything you would normally expect. They booed at AI. At the University of Central Florida, a speaker described AI as the next industrial revolution and was met with jeers. At the University of Arizona, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was repeatedly booed as he discussed AI. At Glendale Community College, an AI system used to read the graduates’ names skipped some of them entirely, and the college president was booed when she explained what had happened, which honestly feels like the technology earning its own reception.

I keep thinking about that sound, and I do not think it was simple. Some of it was fear. This was a graduating class walking into a difficult job market, told over and over that a machine might take the work before they ever get to it. Some of it was the overhype, the sheer exhaustion of every product, advertisement and keynote speaker insisting that AI changes everything. Some of it was resentment at watching a handful of companies wedge themselves into every corner of our lives. Some of it was grief for something human that feels as though it is slipping away. And some of it, I suspect, was much simpler than all of that. It was young people, on one of the most human days of their lives, asking the adults at the podium for one afternoon, just one, where nobody mentioned the robots.

All of that was in the boo. That is what makes this hard. I do not think we can dismiss it as ignorance or resistance to change. It felt more like a very human response to being repeatedly told what the future is going to look like, often by people who have a significant stake in that future arriving.

And maybe that is part of what has me thinking differently about this year. I want school to feel more human, not less. More conversation, fewer screens. More looking up, less scrolling. More opportunities to make things, move, argue, wonder and be fully present with one another. If you have read me for a while, you know the word I chose for this year is Alive. That is what I want our schools to feel like.

It is also making me wonder whether we sometimes confuse being ready for the future with being ready for the newest technology. They are not the same thing. AI is certainly part of the world our students are entering, but surely the bigger goal is young people who are curious, adaptable and creative, who can think critically, work with others, make good judgments and learn something new when the world changes around them. AI happens to be one of the things forcing us to think about those qualities right now. It will almost certainly not be the last.

The world is not AI free

I understand the instinct behind a ban. Sometimes the easiest way to protect something is to keep something else out. But AI is not waiting politely at the school gate. It is already in the backpacks, on the phones and in the homework that gets finished at the kitchen table long after the bell. Our students use it. Their parents use it. I use it, and I tell you so at the bottom of every post. The idea that we can draw a clean line around the school day and declare it AI free has some appeal. But that line does not really exist anymore, if it ever did.

And this is not only an American story. A KPMG survey last fall found that 73 percent of Canadian students aged 18 and older were using generative AI for their schoolwork, up from 52 percent two years earlier. Whatever we decide about the place of AI in schools, students are already making decisions about it themselves.

That does not mean it belongs everywhere. In fact, the more I think about this, the more convinced I am that there are times when learning should simply be AI free. Some assignments, some conversations, some assessments and long stretches where students are expected to read, think, write, solve, struggle and create on their own. Young people still need to learn to write a sentence, develop an argument, sit with confusion and produce something that is genuinely their own. Sometimes the struggle is the learning, and if we remove the struggle we may also remove the thing we were trying to teach.

Context matters too. A six year old and a seventeen year old probably should not have the same rules. A student learning a skill and a student who has already developed that skill might reasonably have different access to tools. This is where I find simple answers less satisfying. There are times when restricting AI makes complete sense. There are other times when using it might deepen learning. Figuring out the difference seems much more useful, and much harder, than simply deciding whether AI is good or bad for schools.

That may also be one of the reasons school matters so much in this conversation. We spend a lot of time helping young people question sources, weigh arguments, recognize bias and tell the difference between knowing something and simply producing a good looking answer. AI complicates all of that, but it also gives us another context in which to teach it. A polished answer is not necessarily a thoughtful answer. Confidence is not accuracy. Generating something is not the same as understanding it.

A ban can establish a boundary. I am just not sure it can do all the teaching we need.

Even the builders are asking for caution

Here is another piece that keeps me from becoming much of an AI cheerleader. At the end of July, more than a thousand employees of frontier AI companies signed a statement called Pacing the Frontier. They did not call for AI development to stop. They asked the United States government to support an international effort to build the technical and governance tools that could deliberately pace frontier AI development if it begins moving faster than society can safely understand and manage.

That distinction is interesting. It is not a call for a ban, and it is not quite panic either. It is closer to asking whether we should make sure there is a brake pedal before discovering that we need one. Some of the people closest to these systems worry that the technology could begin advancing beyond our existing capacity for safety, oversight and governance. At the same time, many of them believe AI could contribute to a dramatically better future. Both ideas can apparently be true at once.

You could also fairly read a letter like this as its own kind of hype, insiders talking their book, and maybe some of it is. I do not know. But I find the uncertainty itself worth paying attention to. If some of the people building these tools are saying the outcomes are not guaranteed, it makes me a little wary when those of us in schools talk as though the path ahead is obvious.

Schools are certainly not responsible for solving the future of artificial intelligence. But we do have a role in helping young people live thoughtfully in a world shaped by powerful forces they did not choose and cannot entirely control. That feels like a bigger and more human challenge than teaching them how to write a good prompt.

The grey

Most of the interesting parts of life are grey, and this is no exception. A few years ago, I wrote that AI in education was getting murky. It has not gotten any clearer since. It has only gotten more interesting.

Perhaps the wrong question is whether technology belongs in learning at all. Schools have always been full of things that stand between a student and an idea: books, pencils, worksheets, screens and, sometimes, other people. Every tool mediates learning in some way. What I find myself wondering more now is which of those things deepen attention, understanding and relationships and which quietly diminish them. Which tools give students greater independence, and which make them more dependent? Which tools open possibilities, and which simply make it easier to avoid the work? Which tools help a teacher see a student more clearly, and which put one more layer between them?

I do not think those questions have simple answers. They depend on the student, the teacher, the task and what we are actually trying to accomplish. But I also wonder whether the more capable our technologies become, the more valuable some very old human capacities become. Curiosity, creativity, judgment, the patience to sit with uncertainty, the willingness to change your mind when the evidence changes, and the ability to make something with another person that neither of you could have made alone. We sometimes call these soft skills. There is nothing particularly soft about them. They may turn out to be some of the hardest and most important things we teach.

I have also seen enough by now to know this is not only a defensive conversation. I have watched a teacher use AI to clear away administrative work that was keeping her from her students, and spend that reclaimed time actually with them. I have watched it give a student a second way into an idea the first explanation did not unlock. I have watched young people use it to trace a claim back to its source, and push a draft they had already started further than they would have managed alone. None of those examples makes me think we should use AI everywhere. They do make it harder for me to argue that it has nothing useful to offer.

The version of this I keep circling back to is one I have written about before. What if AI, of all things, could make school less about screens and more about people? What if handing off some of the genuinely tedious digital work, without handing off the thinking, gave teachers and students more time to talk, connect, build, move and look one another in the eye? I believed that was possible when I wrote it. I still do.

Of course, that does not happen automatically. Technology has a way of filling whatever space we give it. Getting to a more human version of school will require some intention, some professional judgment and probably some mistakes along the way. It will also require us to be willing to say yes in some places and no in others, and to change our minds when the evidence tells us we should.

Maybe a better question

A couple of years ago, almost every conversation I heard about AI in schools was about what it can do. The demonstrations were irresistible. Look what it can write. Look what it can draw. Look what it can create in ten seconds. There was an understandable fascination with the party tricks.

Lately, I have noticed the conversation changing. Not everywhere, and not all at once, but increasingly I hear people asking not only what AI can do, but what it should do. And, perhaps even more importantly, what it should not do.

I like that shift. It feels less like adoption and more like education.

Maybe that is ultimately what I mean when I talk about preparing young people for the future. It cannot mean accurately predicting what the future will look like, because history suggests we are not particularly good at that. It might instead mean helping young people become comfortable making choices in a world that keeps changing. Choices about which tools to use, which claims to trust, when to ask for help, when to struggle on their own and when to reject something even though everyone around them seems to be embracing it.

AI makes those questions urgent, but they are not really AI questions. They are questions about judgment, independence and agency.

Where I am landing, for now

So perhaps that is where I am at as we begin another school year. I do not want us to pretend AI does not exist, but I also do not want fascination with the technology to become the point. I want us to stay curious about where it might help, cautious about where it might get in the way, and protective of the parts of school that remain deeply human: conversation, mentorship, relationships, belonging, connecting and the experience of working through something difficult together.

None of this feels particularly settled to me, which is probably appropriate. I am less interested than I was a couple of years ago in predictions about how AI will transform education. I am more interested in the smaller and probably harder questions about what we value, what we want students to be able to do for themselves, and where technology helps or undermines those goals.

So I will end where I usually do, with questions. What does a more human school actually look like this year? Where does AI help us get there, and where does it quietly get in the way? When should students use it, and when is the most important lesson learning to continue without it? What capacities will matter most for young people in a future none of us can predict very well? And how do we make sure the time technology saves gets spent on one another, and is not simply swallowed by the next screen?

I do not have all the answers. I am becoming increasingly doubtful that anyone does.

But school still seems like a pretty good place to work through the questions.  

Welcome back.

Note: The image at the top of this post was generated using AI. I also used AI tools for editorial feedback while refining the piece. The arguments and conclusions are my own.

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