HARRISBURG (TNS) — Who needs an education if you have AI? That’s the question many young students are asking themselves as they stand at the precipice of a whole new and exciting era that will completely reshape how they are taught and what they need to learn.

The age of Artificial Intelligence, robots and chips implanted in the brain is upon us. Yet many schools, especially in tradition-loving Pennsylvania, seem stuck in the 20th century, intent on trying to block students from embracing all that AI has to offer to make learning both quicker and easier.

As Jesse Waters, former director of the Bowers Writers House at Elizabethtown College asked a group of high schoolers recently, how important is the struggle to education? Is the human intellect formed not only by compilations of facts and figures, he asked, but by the hours of work, sweat and tears it once required to attain them?

Waters was engaging high school and college students participating in a summer internship program with PennLive and The World Affairs Council of Harrisburg on proper use of AI in education. The students already are steeped in AI and use it regularly, whether to compute the distance from Earth to Mars, work an Algebraic equation or to chart the closest path to a pizza joint. They are digital natives who have never lived without a keyboard or cell phone.

And the question they debated with Waters is what teachers and students throughout the nation are pondering: If knowledge comes at the click of a keyboard or from just asking Siri, has it become too easy and cheap to be truly valuable?

Should kids be forced to struggle through lines of equations to find the value of x, or is it all just a waste of time when AI can tell us in two seconds?

The kind of easy access to knowledge students have today is not what we have come to value as an education. But youth today are smarter than ever before. They can get answers to complex equations within seconds by simply asking Siri, and they can turn in term papers in a matter of minutes, if they know what to ask ChatGPT.

Many schools are struggling with how to cope with the new reality AI has unleashed. Hoping to stem the tsunami on the horizon, some have set stringent rules on when and how students can use AI. Some forbid them from using AI for writing papers; others allow its use but only for first or last drafts. But we are indeed at the frontier of a whole new universe of learning where rules are being rewritten every day to keep pace with the warp speed acceleration of learning artificial intelligence is bringing.

In the final analysis, educators like Waters know they are going to have to accept the reality of AI’s revolutionary impact on education AI. And it’s not on the horizon, it’s here.

Already there are chips that can be planted in a person’s brain to help overcome disabilities and improve cognitive abilities. It’s not hard to imagine one day being able to buy knowledge chips that erase the need for years of specialized training and education. What does that mean for a college degree that costs $200,000 to attain?

Youth today know they are the beneficiaries of AI genius, and the challenge educators face is striking the right balance in embracing all that is good while guarding against its misuse and abuse.

One thing is clear, schools that try to enforce a total ban on AI are doomed to fail. And many teachers are ill equipped to deal with the cataclysmic changes AI is unleashing in their classrooms.

Teachers need to be better trained in AI so that they can better protect their students, many of whom already are leagues ahead in understanding and using it.

Most of all, educators will need to teach these young superpowers what AI can’t— that an education is not just the acquisition of knowledge, but of the wisdom, ethics and restraint to use it properly.

(Joyce M. Davis is PennLive’s outreach and opinion editor.)