AI Literacy Classes Are Teaching Prompts, Not Thinking

Framing AI instruction as literacy has given schools a politically safe answer to a pedagogically hard question. The term implies critical engagement — understanding how AI works, what it gets wrong, what it obscures — but survey data on AI literacy lessons in schools shows that implementation has defaulted to tool familiarity rather than evaluative thinking. Meanwhile, schools are playing media literacy catch-up as AI use rises, adapting old frameworks to new outputs without addressing why students outsource thinking in the first place. The educators who dissent from the prompt-training…