Teaching means teaching for the world kids live in, not the world we came from and not the world we wish we still lived in.

That means understanding and accepting AI. It means understanding that information is incredibly easy to get. It means recognizing that memorizing everything simply for the sake of memorizing it serves far less purpose than it once did. Memorization made a lot more sense when remembering something saved you a trip to the library.

It also means understanding that kids are different than we remember ourselves being at their age, because the world they inhabit is different.

Access to information and technology changes how we learn, how we work, what we need to know on demand, what we can reasonably look up, and why we need to learn information in the first place.

There is still a segment of the population that wants education to stay stuck somewhere around 1985. For those of us old enough to remember those days, there can be an idealized version of what life and school were like then. But it is not 1985, and we are not going back. We have to find a way forward.

Technology changes how we learn and live. It changes what we need to memorize, what we need to know without looking it up, and what skills become more important because information itself is no longer scarce.

If we are unwilling to accept technology and its effects, we will continue to struggle with technology in the classroom.

Banning it is not the answer. Banning technology simply creates a false environment where we ask kids to pretend the tools shaping the rest of their lives do not exist. That does them a disservice. They live in a technology-forward world, and the jobs they eventually take will exist in that world too.

Technology needs to be part of education. AI needs to be part of education.

Social media and digital information need to be part of education. Not so kids can spend the day checking notifications, but so they can learn how these systems work, how to evaluate what they see, why these tools matter, where their risks are, and how to use them responsibly.

Until we create an education system that stops trying to recreate 1985, we will continue struggling with how to teach children for the world they actually live in.

And they are the ones who will pay the price for that struggle.