The education system is racing towards AI, but who will teach the students to think?

Artificial intelligence is no longer a matter of the future in the education system. It is entering classrooms, assignments, and tasks, allowing students to receive summaries, answers, and even entire papers in seconds. Alongside the promise of personalized learning, the question sharpens: what happens to their ability to read, write, and above all think, when technology can do the work for them?

This issue gains further validity against the backdrop of the Ministry of Education's "720" program, which is intended to promote personalized digital learning and strengthen the teacher's role as a facilitator. In the 2026/27 school year, about 180 schools will experiment with technological tools in 7th-8th grades, and at the same time, the personalized learning model in English will be expanded to all middle schools. The move is part of the plan to strengthen science, technology, and innovation studies, and serves the goal of making Israel a leader in the OECD in AI-based education.

Dr. Gila Levy-Atzmon, head of the Learning Technologies and AI specialization in the Master's program in Education at Ono Academic College, does not, of course, suggest stopping the move, but rather advancing gradually. "Integrating AI into learning can be fantastic. It has huge potential, but it must be done with discretion," she says in an interview with Walla.

According to her, AI can especially assist in adapting learning for every student — a task that is very difficult for a teacher to implement in a class of 30 or 35 children. But this is exactly where the line is drawn: "There cannot be a situation where 90% of the time children are in front of technology. There needs to be a balance between screen time and person-to-person time. One needs to learn to think, develop critical thinking and creativity, hold a conversation, and articulate."

From her perspective, the challenge is not to teach students to operate the tools, but to examine in depth the products they receive. "Any ten-year-old child can enter a prompt into a chat, but do they understand the meaning? Do they think critically about the results, or do they simply 'copy-paste' without any criticism, responsibility, or value-based awareness?". One of the main risks she identifies is "cognitive laziness": "When everything is so accessible and the products are so good, it is very easy to be lazy. You no longer need to think, because the chat gives you an answer that sounds excellent."

In the "Atid" education network, they are trying to deal with the same problem from a different direction: re-strengthening reading, writing, and discourse skills. Dr. Avigail Adin-Sorkis, director of program development and manager of the language field at the network's pedagogical headquarters, says that already in 2023 a decline in achievements in reading comprehension and written expression was identified. As of today, according to RAMA data, more than 60% of 9th-grade students in Israel do not meet the threshold requirements of the curriculum in linguistics and mother tongue — Hebrew.

"You could literally see a downward graph: as thinking skills became more challenging, student achievements plummeted," she describes. "The children wrote less even before, they searched on Google and found existing summaries. They read abstracts instead of full texts. Now it is intensifying even more, when you can simply ask the AI to write the entire paper."

Following the trend, the network began a research and development process in the summer of 2023, and in September 2024 a pilot was launched in four schools. Towards the upcoming school year, the program will be expanded to six schools and nearly 30 teachers, with the National Library also joining as a pedagogical advisory body.

The program relies on the triangle of "reading, writing, and discourse." During lessons, for example, students receive an image and are asked to answer for themselves questions like: "What do you see?", "What is missing?" and "What questions does this raise?". Even before they talk to their friends, they put things in writing. "I try very hard to activate their brain," explains Adin-Sorkis. This writing is not necessarily work for submission, but rather a "dialogue with the paper": "I am not interested right now in syntax, punctuation, or spelling errors. Just write."

Noam Shavit, who is entering 10th grade this year at the "Atid Kramim" school in Binyamina-Givat Ada, participated in the program. "We learned a little differently than the rest of the grade," she tells Walla. "We took a biblical text and connected it to our lives. We talked about hatred and jealousy, and examined it through our point of view versus traditional interpretations. Everyone wrote about their own jealousy and hatred, and about the way they deal with them in their personal lives."

Shavit describes that the change in pedagogical approach succeeded in arousing interest even among students who find it difficult to connect to the traditional lesson: "We wrote a great many texts that presented our personal position, and I saw around me that it aroused much more curiosity towards the material. Everyone listened more and there was motivation to learn. The fact that we shared from ourselves also contributed to class cohesion. It was truly a different way to learn, in my eyes it is amazing. When you read a text and then dive into depths, into your interpretations and thoughts, the material gains meaning. You no longer act like a parrot that answers questions and closes the book — you connect it to something that exists within you."

Alongside this, Shavit sets a clear line regarding technology: "It is good to integrate AI because the world is progressing, but it should not come at the expense of writing, reading, and thinking skills. Also in English, they integrated tasks on the net and AI for us, but at the same time we continued to learn a lot with a notebook. I have been writing since I was very young, I love writing, and it is easier for me to vent thoughts in a notebook and with a pen than on a computer. Therefore, it is important that the notebook remains, even if one needs to consider students who prefer a tablet. I hope it will not disappear."

"I liked most that we talked a lot," concludes Shavit. "We had entire lessons dedicated solely to discussing the material, and there was a lot of enthusiasm. The teacher really swept us away, we would dive into the topic for 45 consecutive minutes of discourse. You hear others' opinions, process them, and voice your own. Such discussions arouse students much more than the 'write, submit, and finish' method."

Dr. Adin-Sorkis clarifies in this spirit that there is no intention to turn the wheel back: "The question is whether we think alongside the technology or atrophy ourselves, and whether we allow it to take over the thinking processes. It is by no means an all-or-nothing game."

Ran Aviran, a communications and film teacher at ORT Ramat Yosef High School in Bat Yam, also decided not to wait until AI becomes an inseparable part of the education system. During the last year, in which he was on a half-year sabbatical, he dedicated, according to him, more than a thousand hours to AI studies, training, and courses, with the goal of understanding how the new tools can be brought into the classroom without them replacing the students' independent thinking.

Already today, teachers use AI to prepare teaching materials, and the Ministry of Education even encourages additional use such as building presentations and adapting content for students. "It is possible to learn through tools like NotebookLM, and we as teachers can build presentations, adapt the study material, and make it more visual," explains Aviran. "After all, today when you give an assignment, the student uses AI, receives a product, and simply sends it. For me as a teacher, the goal is to understand what the student knows and what he does not know. If the AI does the work for him, I cannot really know that."

Following the knowledge he accumulated, Aviran developed an AI-based tool that helps him examine student papers and mark characteristics that may indicate the use of artificial intelligence. However, it is important to emphasize that tools for identifying text created by AI cannot determine with certainty who wrote a paper, and therefore, according to him, the check is for him an indication and not a substitute for the teacher's acquaintance with the student.

So how do you still identify a text written by AI?

"It can be too perfect, phrased at a very high level, or loaded with words that the student does not usually use," explains Aviran. "Sometimes the answers are especially long and repetitive, and sometimes they have errors or inaccurate information. You ask one thing and get an answer to something else. These signs also allow me to understand if the student even read the question and the answer he submitted."

"Of course I want them to use AI," he clarifies. "My goal is to make the field accessible to them in the best way and expose them to tools that suit them, but it must be done with informed use. I hold a lot of presentations with the students in front of an audience: the student stands in front of the class and explains. Even if you built a presentation with the help of artificial intelligence — it can be stunning and I have no problem with that, but if you did not go over it and you do not know what is written in it, it will be discovered the moment you have to stand and explain it."

Dr. Levy-Atzmon concludes: "I do not want the student to use AI so that it thinks for him, but that he understands that he is the one leading the learning process, and the AI is only an auxiliary tool. The main test in implementing these tools is not in which subjects we will integrate them, but whether the student will ultimately remain the 'thinking student'."