What LLMs are (and aren’t) teaching our children about good and evil.
The Tree of Knowledge in the Digital Garden
In classrooms across America, a new kind of tree has sprouted. It’s not in the corner by the windows or posted on a motivational bulletin board. It’s on every screen, every keyboard, every phone in a teenager’s pocket. Its roots are trained on data and its branches spread with infinite prompts. On it hangs the fruit of knowledge, freely available. But with all this power, we face a pivotal question: Who teaches our children what to do with it?
We’ve finally made the dream of universal access to knowledge real. But knowledge isn’t wisdom. In the presence of infinite answers, students are drowning in uncertainty about what’s right, what matters, and what it means to do good. If AI can teach them calculus, coding, or creative writing, can it also teach them courage? Empathy? Integrity?
Our nation has long been rotting from the cultural decay of removing moral education from schools. Though many teachers have kept skirting the attempted embargo, these individuated, isolated, and clandestine efforts only add to the youthful uncertainties.
Don’t blame the kids for losing ground their elders surrendered, or for spending years trying to find meaning or cement their own values as they “find themselves” instead of sitting down into careers.
The truth is that morality isn’t universal and different systems of it are not usually compatible: If we don’t teach the cover values of our nation to the children, then the propaganda machines will — and extremism of all kinds will result in Balkanization and war.
And it will happen faster than it ever has before thanks to technology like LLMs and social media. Overnight, even.
We don’t need to be afraid of LLMs teaching values. We need to remove the plank-in-the-eye of our own lack of cultural defense before trying to pick crumbs out of innovators’ successful experiments.
A Curriculum of Conscience: Practical AI Ethics for Teens
This vital shift doesn’t require a new textbook. It requires courage. We can integrate values education into the very AI tools students use if the adults can actually have an adult conversation about morality.
Picture this:
- A prompt where students role-play difficult conversations, then reflect on tone and empathy.
- An assignment to write a community improvement proposal, with the LLM helping them evaluate consequences.
- A peer-reviewed chatbot-generated apology letter, followed by a real-life moment of restitution.
- Essays and speeches focusing on the value of courage and examining national heroes instead of rehashing old book reports that bore everyone involved.
We’re not talking about lectures on Aristotle. We’re talking about doing real-world values-driven thought experiments and practical exercises. Living out the shared values that make us who we are. Practicing them — and with the same urgency and realism we apply to STEM.
Ethics isn’t a luxury topic. It’s a survival skill for both the community and national levels. The great news is that AI is the perfect recovery tool for the decades of confusion milquetoast, limp-wristed adults have inflicted on our cities and nations.
Because of its potency, the arrival of AI in schools forces us to revisit our moral curriculum — and reveals that what we’ve neglected matters more than what we’ve added.
The Values Gap: Because We Never Taught the Right Lessons
This panic about AI isn’t really about the bots. It’s about the vacuum we left behind being exposed. For decades, we’ve run classrooms as content farms. Facts over frameworks. Worksheets over wonder. Obedience over ownership. We’ve graded compliance more consistently than we’ve ever graded character.
Ask a teacher to show you their values curriculum. Most will point to a dusty poster about respect or a one-day assembly with applause lines but no follow-up.
Meanwhile bullying, disconnection, depression, and anxiety spike. Sure, there are less wedgies, but more ostracism and divisions. Students leave school with high information but low resilience and no experience. They don’t know how to talk through conflict, apologize, advocate, or organize, much less engage in an adult setting.
They’ve spent twelve years being told what to do — and now we expect them to know who they are and pitch in. Is that really fair? This isn’t just poor planning. It’s a betrayal.
The arrival of AI didn’t cause this deficit. It just exposes it. If we’re not careful and deliberate, AI will step in and fill the void with mercenary values that will accelerate our present global decline.
The Myth of AI Neutrality
One of the most dangerous assumptions about AI is that it is neutral. In fact it’s even less neutral than standardized textbooks. No history lesson is neutrally stated, and no subject is taught absent the relevant history.
Every LLM is trained on data — language and ideas generated by humans. It reflects our biases, our blind spots, our worldviews. It encodes our assumptions.
When a student asks ChatGPT for relationship advice, or Claude to write a persuasive essay, or Gemini to evaluate a decision, they’re not just getting raw information. They’re receiving responses shaped by cultural consensus, commercial guidelines, and in some cases, ideological direction.
It is proof that knowledge can be passed along swiftly, but mentorship and culture are indispensable to true education and the production of a healthy citizenry.
We must awaken from the dream of secularism uber alles to see that if we do not put our own children first, other nations will take advantage of us the same way that the colonial powers sliced China up like a pie two centuries ago.
AI reflects human values — but it cannot originate them. That’s our job. And if we don’t teach kids how to evaluate and challenge what they’re told — especially by machines and algorithmic social feeds — we’ve failed them.
Community and Accountability: Building the Moral Ecosystem
Values don’t form in isolation. They’re practiced in relationships. They exist systemically, not from rugged individuals alone, no matter how heroic.
That’s why I called for a national community surrounding the Presidential AI Challenge. It’s not just about winning prize money. My hope is about linking students, mentors, teachers, and communities in a shared act of creation on a national level that will move us forward.
When a team builds an AI tool to tackle local problems — food waste, public health, campus conflict — they don’t just learn skills. They live values.
What do you think happens when a 14-year-old sees their chatbot help a food bank communicate more effectively? Or when a junior codes a schedule generator that eases stress for classmates? They don’t forget that. Because it mattered.
It’s taking lessons taught in medical schools and bringing them down to the general public. Learn it, do it, then teach it to those younger than you and become a leader. That’s how you truly learn and build the experience necessary to thrive in the world and operate once you’re on your own.
“Using AI Will Make Us Irresponsible”
Let’s address the elephant in the server room: Adults fear AI will make students lazy, dependent, or unaccountable. That they’ll outsource every decision, every thought, every task. But this is projection.
The truth is, kids take their cues from us. When we wring our hands and ban tools instead of teaching responsibility, we model fear — not leadership. Do you really want to be surrounded by pearl-clutching Puritans?
Responsibility isn’t about rejecting tools. It’s about using them to build, to serve, and to own the outcome. When students craft an AI-supported podcast about local issues or code an app to help their school, they learn ownership. When they detect a flawed LLM response and challenge it or explain their changed prompt, they develop discernment.
The future doesn’t need students who blindly obey. We need students who can question, judge, and build to solve whatever comes. That’s the real challenge for them. And that’s what an AI+mentorship curriculum can develop in them.
The Double Standard of the Adults
Let’s be honest: the kids aren’t the problem. We’re burning GPU cycles making selfies younger and playing with face filters while we complain about students misusing AI. Monkey-see, monkey-do.
If you think kids are irresponsible with AI, ask yourself: what have we modeled? Accountability? Or aesthetic obsession? Community service? Or dopamine-chasing engagement?
We don’t need to shame students. We need to grow up. Show up. Lead. And if we want kids to use AI for good, we better start doing it ourselves.
A Generation That Knows Right …
Literacy alone isn’t enough, nor is knowledge. Not in this era. Our students must know how to write — but also why. How to reason — but also when to speak. How to build — but also for whom. It’s a time when loyalty, tribe, community, and even nation are being questioned or rediscovered.
Fortunately, this is the era of agency. According to the musician Ruslan, this is an era where two people thrive: The hypercreator and the hyperconsumer. The primary tools for both are AI and algorithms.
AI will do what it’s told. The question is who do our students believe they are? What do they believe is worth doing? Will they be led along like calves to be fattened up, waiting to get fleeced, or will they engage the warp engines and lead us forward into tomorrow? That’s a values question.
It’s our responsibility to teach them how they will answer it. We must stop being ashamed of the Western giants who gave us logic and grammar and rhetoric, and stop being afraid to embrace the discomforts of human history and indeed our own as we teach.
Our identity as a people flowed from somewhere, but we’ve cut off our children from that source and now they flounder in a perpetual adolescent doldrum … just as our nation — and the world that needs our example — is staggering under its myriad crises.
… And Can Act
In the old story, the tree of Eden and its forbidden fruit was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Knowledge is what our schools have focused on, but the removal of values from the curriculum at large into a single, elective ethics class is deliberately sidestepping the most important facet of education.
How can someone with zero conscious moral compass or established and disciplined principles be expected to uphold the role of a voter and citizen well, much less social mores like returning shopping carts or keeping their parties respectful of their neighbors?
Why leave this to the school of hard knocks? We don’t have to choose between skill and soul. We can teach both. How do you learn ethics? Practice. What exactly should be taught? Well, come over to my Substack and let’s discuss what that might look like, but it needs to be done.
AI will teach our children many things. Let’s make sure we teach them what matters most: decision making that satisfies the conscience.
