Agriculture made food cheap, convenient, and abundant — and now we fight obesity. The essay’s argument is that AI is doing the same thing to thinking: making it cheap, convenient, and abundant. If we already go to the gym to burn off calories that used to be hard to get, the uncomfortable question is whether our children will soon need a “mental gym” to keep their minds sharp.
It sounds alarming, but the piece lands somewhere useful and hopeful: the problem is not AI itself. It is a specific way of using it. And once you can see the difference, the fix is straightforward — and it happens to be exactly how good tutoring has always worked.
The Real Danger
Convenience isn’t the enemy — deskilling is
Technology doesn’t automatically make us worse. Eyeglasses don’t make you blind. Writing made memory less central, yet let humanity accumulate knowledge like never before. Calculators made mathematicians better, not worse. GPS makes travel safe. And AI can absolutely teach, not just answer.
So the variable is not convenience. The danger arrives only when a convenience quietly wipes out the repetition, attention, error-correction, retrieval, and practice that build a capable mind in the first place.
Offloading is not the same as losing a skill. It becomes deskilling when you stop practicing a skill you still need — and then perform worse the moment the tool is taken away.
The Study Every Parent Should See
Same tool, opposite results
In a 2025 randomized experiment with more than 1,000 high-school math students, cited in the essay, how the students used AI decided everything:
better math performance while using ChatGPT
With the tool
worse than peers once the AI was taken away
Used for answers
jump when AI was used as a tutor — with no drop afterward
Used to learn
cheaper AI gets each year for the same intelligence
Why this matters now
The takeaway
AI makes it so easy to get the answer, so fast, that you never have time to learn. But use AI to learn, and you outperform everyone else.
The essay’s core finding
A Simple Test
The “use-it-or-lose-it” check
To tell whether a tool is quietly costing your student a skill, the essay offers four questions worth asking about anything — AI included:
1 What did you have to do before? The skill the tool replaced — remembering, calculating, planning, writing, reasoning.
2 What does the tool do for you now? Be honest about how much of the thinking has been handed over.
3 Do you still practice it? A tool helps if it helps you practice. It hurts if it does the task instead of you.
4 What if the tool disappeared? If you’d now be worse than before you had it — that’s the warning sign.
The essay shares a teacher’s story that stops you cold: a profile-essay assignment given for thirty years, easy until AI. Now some students can’t complete it — and can’t even say what they found interesting about their subject, because the AI never told them what to find interesting.
The One Rule
Output vs. learning
Here is the whole thing in a sentence. When the goal is output — a task you already know how to do — automate aggressively. When the goal is learning, make yourself predict, draft, recall, explain, decide, and correct your mistakes before you ever see the AI’s answer.
In practice, that flips how you prompt: instead of asking AI which approach to take, tell it the approaches you already thought of, weigh each one’s trade-offs, and let it check your reasoning. Be the pilot, not the passenger in the assisted seat.
For Students
- Answer first, check with AI second. Do the hard part yourself, then let AI critique or extend it — never the other way around.
- Use AI as a tutor, not an answer key. That single choice is the difference between +127% and −17%.
- Notice when you’ve stopped practicing. If you couldn’t do it without the tool, that’s exactly the skill to go practice.
For Parents
- Ask “how,” not “whether.” The question isn’t whether your child uses AI — it’s whether they use it to think or to skip thinking.
- Run the disappearing-tool test. Could your student do the work if the AI vanished tomorrow? Their answer tells you a lot.
- Protect the productive struggle. The difficulty AI removes is often the exact place where real learning was happening.
Where Corngold Prep Stands
This is how we already teach
The essay calls for a “cognitive gym” — a place that deliberately keeps memory, reasoning, writing, and judgment in shape as the world makes them easy to skip. That is a fair description of a good tutoring session. In ours, the thinking always comes first: the student predicts, attempts, and explains before any shortcut, tool, or answer key enters the room.
We treat AI the way the research rewards — as a tutor that makes a prepared mind sharper, never as a machine that does the work in its place. A student trained that way doesn’t just score higher on the test in front of them. They keep the skill after the tool is gone.
Let the tool sharpen the skill — never replace it.
Get in Touch
Want your student using AI to get smarter, not softer?
That’s the habit we build in every session. We’re glad to talk through what it looks like for your family.