GoKawiilNearly seven in ten middle and high school students now say they believe artificial intelligence is eroding their critical thinking skills. They reported this in a December 2025 survey conducted by the RAND Corporation's American Youth Panel. They also reported, in the very same survey, that they are using AI for homework more than ever before, with usage climbing from 48 per cent to 62 per cent in barely seven months. The students, in other words, can see the problem clearly. They simply cannot stop participating in it.
This is an extraordinarily revealing paradox, and it deserves more scrutiny than the predictable hand-wringing it has generated. Because the most uncomfortable question here is not whether ChatGPT is making teenagers worse at thinking. It is whether the education system that ushered AI into classrooms with such breathless enthusiasm ever genuinely valued the kind of independent, rigorous, critical thought it now claims to be losing.
The answer, if you follow the evidence, is not encouraging.
The Paradox in the Numbers
The RAND data is striking in its internal contradictions. Among the 1,214 young people surveyed (aged 12 to 29, all enrolled in school during the 2025-26 academic year), 67 per cent endorsed the statement that “the more students use AI for their schoolwork, the more it will harm their critical thinking skills.” That figure had risen more than ten percentage points in just ten months. The concern was especially pronounced among female students, 75 per cent of whom agreed, compared with 59 per cent of male students.
Yet during the same period, the percentage of middle schoolers using AI for homework leapt from 30 per cent to 46 per cent, and among high schoolers it jumped from 49 per cent to 60 per cent. Most of these students (60 per cent) also expressed concern about using AI for school-related purposes. So they are worried and they are doing it anyway. This is not cognitive dissonance in any simple sense. It is something more structurally interesting: students have correctly diagnosed a systemic problem, but they exist within a system that gives them no rational incentive to behave differently.
Consider the logic from a student's perspective. Assignments are graded. Grades determine university admissions. University admissions determine (or are perceived to determine) life outcomes. If your peers are using AI and getting better grades, opting out is not a principled stand. It is a competitive disadvantage. The students are not confused. They are trapped.
Think of it another way. You are sixteen. You have five GCSEs to revise for, a personal statement to write, and a part-time job. Your classmates are producing polished coursework in half the time it takes you to write a first draft because they are running their ideas through ChatGPT. Your teachers, overwhelmed and under-resourced, cannot reliably tell the difference. The system rewards the output, not the process. In this environment, choosing not to use AI is not intellectual integrity. It is self-sabotage.
Meanwhile, faculty at the university level are sounding alarms with even greater urgency. A national survey conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University's Imagining the Digital Future Centre in November 2025 found that 95 per cent of the 1,057 faculty respondents feared that generative AI would increase student overreliance on the technology. Ninety per cent said it would diminish students' critical thinking skills. Eighty-three per cent said AI would decrease student attention spans. And 78 per cent said cheating on their campuses had increased since these tools became widely available, with 57 per cent saying it had increased significantly.
The teachers see the same thing the students see. The difference is that teachers are surprised. The students are not.
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