On April 1, the Union Education Minister launched the new CBSE curriculum on computational thinking and artificial intelligence for students of Classes III to VIII. The rollout is among the most ambitious school AI programmes anywhere in the world. There is no plan, however, for how those children will use AI. Consider the chatbot on a child’s phone at nine in the evening, sitting beside a half-finished assignment. No syllabus reaches that.

A recent study by the Salaam Bombay Foundation and NMIMS surveyed 1,050 Class IX students across 20 Mumbai municipal schools. More than 70 per cent reported using ChatGPT, mostly for maths problems, translations, and homework. The study also found early signs of cognitive offloading: Letting a tool do our mental tasks. We all do this; the worry is when a child does it before........

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