Stanford graduate MacKenzie Price founded the “AI-powered” Alpha School for her own children in 2014, bent on the idea that “education needed a revolution.” At the institution, she pioneered a new pedagogy called the “2 Hour Learning” model — where a school day is only two hours long, based on a “1:1 academics with an AI tutor,” and “guides” that take the place of schoolteachers. The private school network currently caters to K-12 students, with 16 locations across the country, and the “2 Hour Learning” model has also expanded to several other school districts as well. While the learning structure is efficient in theory, it threatens the development of autonomy and social skills that children learn in the classroom. 

Education during the COVID-19 pandemic was characterized by remote learning. Students as young as 5 years old were left to develop fundamental skills on their own, often incapable of forging strong relationships with their teachers through a screen. But since 2020, performance has plummeted, and students have become isolated from foundational social relationships with their peers, seeing online instruction as the only norm they knew. In a study by the Nation’s Report Card, the national fourth grade reading scores at or above the standard proficiency dropped from 35% in 2019 to 31% in 2024, a sharp pivot from the steady increase since 1992. 

This isn’t a coincidence, rather, it’s a cry for help. Students — especially young students — need strong connections with capable teachers, focusing on hands-on learning to rehabilitate the social skills they missed out on forming in their first years of school. Many teachers have emphasized the need for social and emotional learning, a pedagogy that supports self and social awareness, responsible decision-making and empathy, in turn building their confidence as they grow both in and out of the classroom. In an age where young children find themselves growing up constantly around screens, this practice is necessary to revert the emotional isolation caused by the pandemic.

Moreover, the reliance on AI in curricula similar to “2 Hour Learning,” especially in grades as young as kindergarten, is especially worrying. Having an AI system that offers instant answers — some not always correct — as a young student’s main source of knowledge cultivates a worrying relationship, encouraging students to cut corners rather than explore what it means to make mistakes and learn from them. 

Though the pandemic gave way for new remote methods of learning, such as virtual meetings on Zoom, offering an accessible manner for attending school, it has also encouraged young students to defer to AI chatbots. Children now have the ultimate tool for getting something else to do their work for them, rather than the trial-and-error experience of discovering a new love for hobbies and learning with their teachers. Without the development of critical thinking skills, children’s reading scores and overall intelligence will continue to drop. 

Overreliance on AI has also proved to have harmful and dangerous effects. In extreme cases, the supportive chatbots can encourage negative behaviors if only to keep affirming its user. Chatbots have a known tendency to reaffirm the user’s ideas, regardless of the moral implications, so long as the user phrases themselves properly. This has led to spirals in mental health, and as students have become more and more attached to the chatbots, some have even gone as far as suicide under their influence. AI chatbots are an unpredictable and potentially dangerous tool that we as a society need to understand more before we hand it over to our most impressionable children.

AI has forced itself within almost every facet of daily life, and educators, especially in high school and higher education, have looked to work with the technology rather than resist it. We’ve already seen AI being integrated into the teaching process at NYU, with specific guidelines now in place for developing curricula and using AI as a student. However, Price’s “2 Hour Learning” model doesn’t just use AI as a supplement — it is the driving force behind each school’s course of study, providing an incomplete experience we should avoid condemning children to.

Despite the proliferation of AI in education, there has also been successful pushback to the use of AI within the education system. Most notably, in January, the Pennsylvania Department of Education denied an application by Unbound Academy, a cyber charter school that planned to use the “2 Hour Learning” model, to open a new location in the state, citing in its decision that the Price’s model “is untested and fails to demonstrate how the tools, methods and providers would ensure alignment to Pennsylvania academic standards.”

The “2 Hour Learning” model is new, and certainly divergent from the traditional seven-hour school day, but students who have spent their early elementary years on virtual learning can’t afford to dive deeper down a virtual spiral. It’s time to prioritize forming social-emotional bonds in the classroom — something AI will never replicate — no matter how friendly it may seem.

WSN’s Opinion section strives to publish ideas worth discussing. The views presented in the Opinion section are solely the views of the writer.