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New Brunswick is out front on experimenting with AI in classrooms
Tuning into CBC-TV’s The National newscast on September 18 was startling, coming on the heels of the province’s disastrous international and provincial student results. A segment on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the classroom featured a “bold risk/risque audacieux” underway in New Brunswick schools. While major school systems such as Lost Angeles Unified and New York City have banned AI, Canada’s lowest performing system was moving in the other direction.
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New Brunswick is incorporating AI into its school curriculum from kindergarten to Grade 12. It was, CBC News reported, the first province in Canada to do so. With a global debate raging over the dangers of AI, including the threat to our existence, N.B. was embracing it and, at the same time, attempting to limit the exposure of younger children.
New Brunswick is definitely out front on experimenting with AI in classrooms. One of its champions, Anglo East superintendent Randolph MacLean, maintains that trying to keep artificial intelligence out of New Brunswick schools is tantamount to “trying to hold back the Bay of Fundy’s tides” – not something you can or should do. Back in October 2025, MacLean let the cat out of the bag. The spread of AI was unstoppable, so his school district and others were getting on board with society’s latest technological advance, so children got a head start. That made the province an “early adopter” in the education world.
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The New Brunswick approach flew in the face of the rising education “techlash” and movements afoot to ban AI in New York City (for grades K–8) and Los Angeles (for K–12). It also amounted to a rejection of concerns raised in Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s 2025-2026 best seller The Digital Delusion making the case for strict limitations, pauses, or local bans on rapidly evolving tools like generative AI in K-12 schools.
The introduction of AI to classrooms has stoked parent concerns and wider fears among experts over its hidden dangers, given the relative absence of guardrails and potential for going horribly wrong. The most recent study, a Fordham Institute report by Brian Fitzpatrick, only adds fuel to the growing fire, Among its more alarming findings:
Prominent American critics of the uncritical adoption of AI claim that the onslaught is undermining the essential purpose of schooling. Our K-12 school systems, they argue, is designed to produce in students with the basic cognitive capacity to read, think, reason, and work through problems independently.
Unsupervised A.I. use, according to Cooney-Horvath and his allies, is essentially undermining a young person’s cognitive learning and development. It takes away the struggle necessary to grow both intelligence and confidence. Banning or pausing AI, then, is an attempt to preserve the foundations of a child’s intellectual development.
A new report from M.I.T., entitled “AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training,” provides very sound guidance – implement AI with clear-eyed awareness of its unintended effects. For a child, developing the ability to struggle productively is the entire point of school, making A.I., by M.I.T.’s estimate, a threat to its purpose.
New Brunswick’s tech enthusiasts might want to consider the impact of AI on student achievement results. On the just released PISA 2025 global assessment, the OECD Education Director Andreas Schleicher claimed that AI is depressing student achievement across the developed world.
Students who use AI for schoolwork, the OECD Office reported, underperform those who don’t by a significant amount. The leading countries, mostly in Asia, are barred from using AI and, among all students, those who never use AI scored 509 in science, some 27 points higher than those who use it frequently, equivalent to about a year and a half of schooling.
Fifteen-year-old students from New Brunswick performed abysmally on PISA 2025, finishing with a 463, last among Canada’s provinces and territories. Why, then, would New Brunswick be going ‘gung-ho’ for AI in classrooms? It doesn’t make much sense if the province is really committed to raising achievement scores. If it’s used at all, Bloomberg reports, it has to be rationed and used sparingly, perhaps one or twice a week.
Techno-optimism seems to have swept MacLean and his allies off their feet. “The next generation is artificial intelligence,” Superintendent MacLean believes, and that informs the province’s ‘gung-ho’ approach being actively promoted by AI and Innovation Coordinator Jordan Smith. Such tools can, and do, assist teachers in planning lessons, taking notes, and creating presentations. It’s also modelling AI ‘shortcut’ behaviour, observable to students, which is problematic.
It’s time for the province’s education leaders to consider the unanticipated consequences of immersing kids in a world of screens.
We are coming to realize that the new technology packs a one-two punch. In the first instance, screens and social media make people dumber by diminishing our attention span, while, at the same time, AI makes it easier to be stupid by doing our thinking for us.
The best advice given, so far, is to handle with care and it comes from leading cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham: “Students should only use AI for things they already know well.”
Surely the green light should be flashing amber on New Brunswick Education Avenue.
Paul W. Bennett is Director, Schoolhouse Institute, Senior Fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute and Education Columnist for Brunswick News/Postmedia.
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