Rain begins before dawn here. It gathers on the roof in patient taps, then settles into a soft and steady percussion that feels like permission: stay in, move slower, notice things.

By seven, the kettle is singing. The dog has already claimed the warm patch near the heater, and I’ve opened my notebook to a blank page that no longer feels blank. Outside, cedar branches bend and release, bend and release. It looks like breathing.

On ferry days, I carry this calm with me. The crossing is short, but it resets something. People stare out the windows, phones forgotten, as if the gray water has asked everyone for one honest minute of silence. I watch reflections slide across the glass and think about stories, and how most of them begin with attention.

When I get home, I make another cup of tea and edit what I wrote in the morning. Not to make it perfect—just to make it true. Rainy day rituals are not dramatic. They are small, repeatable acts of care. A notebook. A warm drink. A walk between showers. A few paragraphs that might become something more.

“AI is teaching our children to cheat.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this lately—on Facebook, in casual conversations with friends, in worried discussions about the future of education.

A conservative estimate suggests that 11% of college papers now contain at least 20% AI-generated content.

So the question becomes: How do we stop our children from cheating themselves out of an education?

As an educator with a master’s degree in teaching, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. But something about the premise of the argument has never sat quite right with me.

For decades—maybe even centuries—we’ve been teaching students to write in highly standardized, formulaic ways. There is the argumentative essay, designed to present and defend a claim. The persuasive essay, meant to convince a reader of a viewpoint. The personal narrative. The descriptive essay. The expository essay.

Each type of essay serves a purpose, but each also follows a predictable structure.

When I helped high school students write their college admission essays, I prided myself on being able to break those structures down into something almost mechanical.

• Start with a hook.
• Add a personal anecdote.
• Vary sentence structure and vocabulary.
• Insert theme.
• Check grammar and conventions.

It became a checklist—a formula that could reliably produce an essay polished enough to impress admissions committees.

But if the “perfect essay” is essentially a formula that can be reproduced on demand, is it really surprising that students are now outsourcing that formula to a machine that can produce it in seconds?

AI has become so effective at generating these essays that the technology designed to detect it has struggled to keep up. And whenever we begin investing large amounts of time and energy into proving that a human—not a machine—did the work, I find myself asking a deeper question:

Why?

Why are we teaching students to produce writing that a machine can generate just as well—if not better?

Why do we care so much that the words came from a human brain rather than an algorithm?

What is the true purpose of these assignments?

I’m not suggesting there are no good answers to these questions. But I do think we need to ask them honestly.

Because AI isn’t going anywhere. Students will always have access to it. So why are we focusing so heavily on teaching students to do something a machine can now do more efficiently?

Personally, I have never been asked to write an argumentative essay outside of school. I’ve never needed to produce a persuasive essay structured like the ones I learned in English class.

But I write all the time.

• I write marketing emails for my business.
• I write social media posts.
• I write website copy.
• I write reflections and ideas.

Ironically, AI has been far more helpful in teaching me those real-world writing skills than school ever was.

School never taught me how to write a marketing email. AI did.

School never taught me how to craft social media copy for a small business. AI did.

So why does our educational system continue to focus so heavily on producing academic essays—while simultaneously condemning the very tool that can produce them most efficiently?

Which leads to a bigger question.

What is the purpose of school?

It’s widely understood that modern schooling systems took shape during the Industrial Revolution, designed in part to prepare students for factory work. And what’s striking is how little the basic structure has changed in the past hundred years.

Yes, curricula have evolved.

Yes, teaching strategies have improved.

But the core model remains the same:

Put a group of students the same age in a room and have a teacher tell them what they need to learn.

I spent years inside this system—first as a student, then as a teacher. But increasingly, it feels like a paradigm that no longer serves the world we actually live in.

In many ways, it’s holding us back.

Instead of focusing on writing the “perfect paper” or memorizing the correct answers to pass a test, we should be focusing on the purpose beneath those tasks.

If writing essays is meant to develop critical thinking, then let’s focus on teaching critical thinking.

If the goal is to learn how to communicate ideas clearly, then let’s teach communication in the contexts people actually use.

There are countless ways to develop analytical thinking that don’t involve writing a five-paragraph persuasive essay. There are countless ways to explore ideas without memorizing information that will soon be forgotten.

Students will always be able to look up information.

They will always have tools that can help generate writing.

What we need to teach them is how to think, how to question, and how to apply the tools available to them.

In other words, we should be focusing on producing thinkers, not simply compliant participants in an outdated system.

I currently homeschool my daughter—but not in the traditional sense of recreating school at home with desks, textbooks, and daily assignments.

Instead, I started by asking a fundamental question:

What do I actually want her to gain from an education?

Do I want her to memorize information long enough to pass a test, only to forget it a week later?

Do I want her to wait passively to be told what she should learn each day?

Do I want to force her through calculus when she has no interest in pursuing a field that requires advanced mathematics?

Absolutely not.

What I want is to raise a person who is excited about learning. Someone who sets her own goals and eagerly seeks out the information she needs to achieve them.

I want her to be adaptable.

I want her to see failure as part of the process, not as a verdict on her worth.

And in that context, AI is simply another tool.

The goal is not to produce a flawless persuasive essay.

The goal—at least right now—is for her to work at a planetarium, teaching children about the stars. If someday she decides that writing a persuasive essay is necessary to reach that goal, then we can learn how to do that together.

Maybe we’ll even ask AI to generate one and analyze it—dissecting what works, what doesn’t, and how it could be improved.

Because AI isn’t the enemy.

It’s a tool.

And tools don’t replace human thinking—they amplify it.

The ability to dream, to question, to imagine new possibilities, and to pursue meaningful goals is something we cannot outsource to a machine.

Nor should we want to.

Those abilities are what make us human.

And if education is truly meant to prepare the next generation for the future, then those are the things we should be teaching.