There is a growing debate about the incorporation of AI into education in every form. The first institutional response was largely skeptical and restrictive: New York City, for example, barred ChatGPT from all district devices in January 2023 but lifted the ban four months later after concluding that outright prohibition was “knee‑jerk” and unsustainable. UNESCO’s release of the world’s first global guidance on generative AI in September 2023 further confirmed that the conversation had shifted from blocking the technology to governing it responsibly.(The Guardian, Business Insider, UNESCO)

While policies are still uneven, that shift has broken the taboo. A notable early marker was the International Baccalaureate’s February 2023 decision to let students quote ChatGPT as they would any other source, signalling to schools and universities that engagement—not prohibition—was now the expectation.(The Guardian)

The public debut of ChatGPT also underscored that this was only the beginning of a historic transformation: the application amassed 100 million monthly active users in just two months, the fastest uptake ever recorded for a consumer technology.(Reuters) For the first time, a widely accessible machine could analyse problems, draft prose, and generate novel perspectives at a scale that rivals routine human work.

More than two years on, AI tools routinely summarise journal articles, explain difficult concepts, draft essays, analyse data sets, write code, and spin up learning platforms. A 2023 BestColleges survey found that 43 percent of U.S. college students had already used ChatGPT or a similar system for coursework, while an Education Week poll showed that 51 percent of K‑12 teachers were experimenting with the tool—often more frequently than their students.(BestColleges.com, Education Week)

The technology is, of course, imperfect. A Stanford Human‑Centered AI study published in January 2024 documented hallucination rates of 69 to 88 percent on specialised legal queries, underscoring why student work still requires close human oversight; teachers echo this caution even as 59 percent acknowledge that AI’s educational potential “cannot be ignored.”(Stanford HAI, Education Week)

This conceptual discourse is already filtering into policy. UNESCO’s 2023 guidance urges age limits and teacher‑training mandates; the U.S. Department of Education’s May 2023 report, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning, calls for “human‑in‑the‑loop” systems; and the EU’s 2024 AI Act obliges education providers to raise AI‑literacy among staff and students.(UNESCO, U.S. Department of Education, Artificial Intelligence Act)

Within a year of these publications, more than forty ministries of education had launched pilots or national strategies. Singapore scaled an AI‑driven maths platform from a 33‑school pilot to all primary schools in 2024, and South Korea will introduce AI‑powered digital textbooks to grades 3‑4 and 7‑10 beginning in March 2025.(Kyodo News+, World Bank Blogs)

The urgency is driven by the technology’s projected productivity gains. McKinsey estimates that generative AI could automate up to 30 percent of the tasks teachers perform by 2030, freeing time for higher‑value interaction, and a 2025 randomized‑controlled trial found that an AI peer tutor boosted student physics scores by more than ten percentage points.(McKinsey & Company, Quantum Zeitgeist)

Determining how this productivity can be harnessed—what to automate, what to preserve for human judgment, and how these choices should be reflected in national policy and institutional practice—now demands sustained scrutiny and dialogue among scholars, policymakers, and practitioners alike.