The Journal. - The High Schools Going All-In on AI

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

A 2024 survey found that 90% of high-schoolers in Estonia were already using generative AI for learning. So, the northern European country decided to lean in. In an experiment called AI Leap, the country has partnered with OpenAI and Google to give tens of thousands of high-schoolers access to free chatbots. WSJ’s Sam Schechner flew to Estonia and talked to teachers and students about whether there is a way to keep learning with AI in the classroom. Ryan Knutson hosts. Further Listening: - How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom - The College Student Who Defeated the World’s Biggest Cyberweapon Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A few months ago, my colleague Sam Schekner flew to Estonia in Northern Europe. He was there to visit high schools. A Spanish teacher let him sit in on the class. He had set up the class in the computer lab, and he introduced me to the class and said I'd be observing. The whole text that you have there, just copy paste that into... And, you know, basically he showed them some sort of game-like activities that he'd created with chat GPD for them to practice their Spanish. And then give chat GPD the prompt that you have there.

Yes, my dearest, the same one. Yes. So you should have... Sam, how did you find yourself in a classroom in Estonia? Well, they are doing something that I thought was unusual, interesting, and a little bit scary. They are giving every high school student in the country, or at least to start with every 10th and 11th grader, their own chat GPT account. Why? Well, yeah, that's the funny part. They're doing it because they're worried about the impact that AI could have on learning. Estonia started thinking about the project in 2024.

After one survey found that 90% of the country's high school students were already using generative AI for learning. They figured that not doing anything was the worst choice of all. And so instead, they're launching a national experiment to figure out what the best thing is to do. And I wanted to figure out if there's a way to... I guess at a basic level, if there's a way to keep learning in an age when machines can do your thinking for you.

You don't have to worry about the grammar. It's just the chat will tell you if you have made a mistake, and you can correct it afterwards. Why does what's happening in Estonian matter to people who are not living in Estonia? Estonia, right. It's a small country. It's, you know, bordering Russia. It's different language. It feels pretty far away.

But this is really the first big deployment in high schools of ChatGPT. The entire idea of school and how we encourage learning and what even we want people to learn is at stake here. And so it's a glimpse maybe of what could happen in a school district near you. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money. business and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Thursday, September 24th. Coming up on the show,

Inside Estonia's High School Experiment with AI. This episode is brought to you by IG Private Wealth. When your financial life gets more complex, having a clear plan matters. IG advisors build personalized, integrated financial plans that connect your investments, tax strategies, retirement income, and estate planning. into one coordinated plan.

They will help you make confident decisions about your wealth and your future. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Visit IGPrivatewealth.com to find an advisor near you. Estonia's decision to bring AI into classrooms is not the country's first rodeo with new technology. Estonia, since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in the 90s, was early to put the internet in classrooms.

They had something called the Tiger Leapes. Estonia's Tiger Leap foundations launched a program introducing IT science and computer programming at schools from the first grade. During the Tiger Leap, news shows in Estonia showed kids rushing toward computers. Its designers point out that Internet and modern technologies have become an integral part of daily life. They're extremely proud of this. This is part of the country's kind of founding legacy. They see themselves as a digital country. And so when the AI revolution comes about, the natural revolution comes about, the natural

instinct is, okay, we're going to have to grab this bull by the horns. This is what Estonia does. So last year, Estonia decided to launch a new experiment. They're calling it the AI leap. The country's partnered with OpenAI and recently with Google to give tens of thousands of high schoolers access to free chatbots. This is here. A small gym we have.

Not that small. Yeah, yeah, but for thousands students. One school that's part of AI Leap is located in Tallinn, Estonia's capital. During his visit, Sam met with the school principal. Indrek Lilamagi, he is the principal of Tallinn Pelagena State High School, or Perg, as it's known. If you would like to just see the school, maybe also. Yeah, sure, show me. It's a beautiful school.

And, you know, Indrek himself uses AI. tools, he tells me he does some vibe coding. And, you know, the school ethos that he set up is very human. And in fact, in the school, they don't oblige any student to use AI if they don't want to. AI leap, the program has provided meaningful, high-quality materials, resources, workshops for teachers, school leaders. I think it's going well. I mean, I guess one argument would be that effectively you're saying, use AI and that it encourages more than might otherwise.

Yeah, but the thing is that they use it anyway. They already use it. So, yeah, so I don't believe that AI LEAP like pushes them to use it more. Students might already be using AI, but Indraq told Sam that he's worried about students using the tools on their own and how it could affect their ability to learn. if you imagine that school is a gym for the brain and you go to the gym, it would be kind of pointless to ask your personal trainer to lift your weights for you, right?

I mean, the personal trainer there is to tell you what weights the lift, in what order. But if you don't lift the weights, then obviously you're not going to get stronger. Yeah, and your personal trainer just gets shredded. Yeah, well, I mean, as we know, these AI tools are, you know, when it comes to answering questions, they are shredded, right? They could do the work. They can do your high school work for you. AI can take a whole bunch of texts and can synthesize them for you. And, you know, kind of reading something along and figuring out what's important and what it's connected to, that's thinking too.

And those are important skills that you learn in school. And, you know, how much you want the machine to do that versus how much you want to do it yourself or you want your kids to do it in school is a really important question. Back in the day, the way teachers got students to exercise their minds was by, having them do stuff like answer questions or write essays. Teachers would then judge the output, the finished product, but the effort that the student put in to get that output was the point. That kind of learning changed with AI. AI basically breaks the connection between effort and output. AI now makes it so that the output, the performance is not correlated anymore with the effort that you do. Right. And so you have to rethink your whole pedicent.

because if the point is the effort, then the grade or the output kind of don't really matter anymore. So how do you lean into AI when AI breaks the learning process? Estonia's solution, in part, was to come up with a version of AI that didn't just give you all the answers. They call it the Socratic chatbot. Socrates, the Greek philosopher, was known for not stating what he thought, but instead, eliciting answers from his students by asking questions. That sort of is the coinage of the Socratic method. Under the AI leap, Estonia took the Socratic method

and applied it to the school's version of ChatGPT. Effectively, it's a tool that won't answer your homework questions for you, but instead helps you scaffold a way to approach the answer, helps you plan what you're going to do to do the assignment. and they're going to try to figure out a way to use it in a way that promotes learning rather than undermines it. So rather than being just an answer machine, which it is now for most users that want to use it,

more of like a tutor almost. Exactly. This Socratic chatbot in some ways mirrors the philosophy that Indrik and Perger is spousing, which is much more of a processed-based approach to learning than an outcome-based approach to learning. It's not hard to imagine, version of the future where the Socratic chatbot does all the teaching, where each student has

their own personal AI teacher. I want an aesthetically pleasing classroom, yes? But that is not what Indrich Lila Maggi's school is pushing for. He actually wants his teachers to play a more active role. Guys, no gaps between the discs. One teacher that Sam met at the school is Agnesk, the head languages teacher. I don't believe in AI as this thing that will personalize education, because... Because then it means that everybody's sitting in their own room somewhere and that it doesn't work.

They need to talk more than ever. Sam watched as Agnes tried to get students in an intermediate English class to use the Socratic Chatbot during an exercise. Are we going to use school AIA? Yes, so this is something that I do recommend. Use your school account. Agnakov was looking at trying to get the students to at once practice their English by chat. with a chatbot, but to do it, you know, doing something that actually would be of interest to them, which is researching possible study abroad programs in English.

We will try to then use AI to give us advice. We will see whether this advice is useful. And those of you who already know what you want to do, you can see whether the advice sort of lines up with what you have chosen for yourself. Now, how would you do that? How would you prompt it to do that? And they talked about prompting for a while. So if I say, please get, I don't know, career, further studies, advice from AI, how would you do this?

So come up with a plan. And then she shared her prompt of how she was going to do it. How did I make this prompt? This is an important point to sort of remember. Of course, I asked J.GPT to make the prompt. I gave it a little bit of information. So I have this high school class. I gave it sort of the task that we're going to do at the end.

Sam looked over one student's shoulder as she tried out the prompt. By the way, kids in Estonia refer to the chatbot as he. So what have you asked it here? Here, I just, I just based it here. Yeah. And then he just started to ask these questions about the future. And here I started to just... Say what you?

Yes, what I want. Pilot, flight attendant, sports coach. Yes. Those are your... Yes. At the end of the assignment, Agna asked her students to think beyond the answers that the chatbot gave them, to take the next step and think for themselves. You do your research yourself now. Don't rely on JaljpT.

might have outdated information at some point. It might be wrong about some things. So please check the school website to make sure. What was obvious to Sam was that Estonian educators have put a lot of thought and care into how they bring AI into the classroom. And the students, surely they're loving an education-oriented tool designed by grown-ups, right? I'm curious, how do you use AI? No, we don't. You don't?

Not really. No. What the students think of AI leap is next. So let's talk about the students. How are the students in Estonia feeling about this experiment? Well, you know, they actually did a survey of students, and I, you know, I talked to a bunch of well. And one of the first and biggest reactions they have to the Socratic chatbot is that it is super annoying. The complaints start with basic things. In Agnecosk's English class, for example, the chatbot

kept switching between Estonian and English. It said that I will talk to you in Estonia to support you better, even though the prompt said please you should be too English. It's so smart. It thinks you're trying to do a translation. Yes, yes. Kids started to see that it would switch back into Estonian, and they had to kind of repeatedly tell the chatbot, no, this is an English class. My teacher says we should be talking in English, please stay in English.

But the bigger nuisance was the Socratic element of the chatbot, or it asks more questions instead of just giving the answer. I spoke to some kids who are basically like, I'm so over it, I get it. You know, AI is going to make my brain rot, but like, it can't, you know, can I please stop asking me questions? Like, Anna, what did it tell you when you wanted to make porridge? Yes, I asked him that, oh, how I can make this porridge? And the answer that he gave, what experience you have with porridge?

And I haven't used it after. Yeah. I used the normal chatumet, not this studying. Even for school. Yes. Yeah. Another student uses chatbot sometimes. that actually avoids AI

when it's a subject he really cares about. Mathematics and stuff. AI, a lot of times wrong. Yeah. So in a way, you're deciding what you think is where you want to practice and where you want to get strong at.

When I feel I'm strong as something, I use AI when I feel like I'm weak or something, I basically learn it with them. Yeah, that makes sense. And then there are the kids who don't want to use AI at all. Did you find the AI useful? I really didn't.

I think it was a waste of my time. I don't use it because I don't. I'm afraid I'll just become lazy. It's easy to think that you don't need to do the job, but then who does the job for you and for what cost? There were some students I spoke with who don't want to use AI tools because they are concerned about the environmental impact of data centers and, you know, water consumption, energy consumption.

I just find it really wasteful, like, in the terms of water, of course. We were told in, like, third grade that we already don't have much drinking water on Earth, and now they use it to cool down the servers. That's, like, it's terrible. At the end of last school year, about 65% of Estonian students with access to the school's Socratic version of Chatchip-T had activated their account. but only a minority of students use it regularly. This year, Estonia's opening up the AI assistant

to 12th graders and vocational school students too. At the school in Tallinn, Sam spoke to the student body president, a 12th grader named Cordelia Violet Pap. She is really adamantly opposed to AI. I'm really, really strongly against it overall, specifically the language models and generative AI. She just thinks it's new. It's not studied yet. And she thinks that there's so much that could go wrong with it.

You know, teachers don't necessarily know how to use it effectively, she said. And students don't know anything either, she said. Cordelia also said that all the thought and care that went into the school's Socratic chatbot doesn't really fix the bigger problems with AI and learning. Just the fact that we have been given this does not stop students from using normal chat cheptie and just getting the answer anyway, which is what they are going to do because it's easy.

And humans naturally want to do things that are easy. School is already seen as something that's just mostly meaningless and too hard and too difficult, and why do we have to do all this stuff, basically? So if such a thing is given to us that makes us able to shortcut through all of this annoying, bad stuff

that no one wants to do, I mean the students specifically, then people are going to use it. Cordelia has since graduated, but she told Sam that earlier this year she stood up in front of the school at a talent show and read a poem she wrote about AI. Let me see. Maybe this, and this is a bit interesting because it uses words in Estonian that have been created recently. You know, one of the paragraphs that she read to me in Estonian, she said, was about all of the new vocabulary that AI was kind of unleashing. on all of us.

I don't even know how to translate them, but maybe it's just interesting to hear for you. The poem written for mehuis. She writes, the poem is about Estonian words themselves.

So Cordelia says the English translation sort of misses the point. But here it is. She writes, like, why must there be a term for water bankruptcy? and digital trash, smart sive, AI blunder, brain rot.

These are so ugly. And for what? We don't need a way to express yet another woe. And what's why we need to find out of view of being able to do other head? So maybe that's something. What if the answer to this big AI experiment in the classroom turns out to be that this is a bad idea and it's not working, that it harms education?

You know, I think that's part of the entire landscape within which the AI leap is trying to navigate. You know, how can we make this a positive thing as opposed to worrying about these downsides and just saying we're just going to say no and put our heads in the sand? And, you know, it points up really deep tension when it comes to AI in education. Because like most of us, actually, they're of two minds about it. They're scared of it, and they also see great opportunity, and they don't want to get left behind. What do you think we'll learn from Estonia? We're going to just have to see how the experiment turns out, you know, and what the educational results are in Estonia. Are we going to see kids doing better?

Are we going to see that this is, you know, helping educational outcomes? Because if Estonia can chart a path for this to improve educational outcomes, then that really could make an impact on schools all the way from Boise to Botswana. That's all for today, Thursday, September 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.