This is how kids should be learning with AI | Priya Lakhani

Summary

Podcast Summary: TED Talks Daily

Episode: "This is how kids should be learning with AI" | Priya Lakhani
Date: December 22, 2025
Host: Elise Hu
Speaker: Priya Lakhani

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Episode Overview

This TED Talk by Priya Lakhani explores the critical intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and education. As an AI education entrepreneur, Lakhani challenges the traditional "one-size-fits-all" teaching model, highlighting its shortcomings for both students and overburdened teachers. She presents a vision for using well-designed AI not to replace, but to amplify, the uniquely human elements of teaching and learning—emphasizing effortful, personalized, and meaningful education.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Problem with One-Size-Fits-All Education

[03:33]

• Lakhani recounts her journey in global social impact, discovering a shockingly high rate of illiteracy in UK secondary school graduates despite robust educational infrastructure.
• Critical challenges identified:
  • Traditional teaching still delivers content to large groups in a uniform way.
  • Teacher crisis: 74% of teachers consider quitting in the next three years due to unsustainable workload: “They are teachers by day and they are data analysts by night. And not one of them signed up to do that night job.”

2. Why AI Belongs in the Classroom

[05:20]

• Observing how machine learning shapes areas like shopping and sleep, Lakhani asks:
  “Why don't we have this technology in the classroom telling us how we should learn?”
• Calls for AI blended with neuroscience and learning science, not just any machine learning recommendation.
• Her platform (“Century”) now used by students in 140+ countries, gathering vast data on learning behaviors.

3. How Students Actually Use AI

[06:20]

• Lakhani shares genuine student feedback—ranging from gratitude to cheeky bribery to make the platform do their homework.
• Reveals a key issue:
  “A staggering fifth of children admitted they get AI to do all of their work for them. So they're not using AI to help them learn, they're using AI to actively avoid learning.”
• Draws a parallel to adults’ early excitement with AI and the sobering realization that shortcuts don't replace genuine understanding.

4. The Illusion of Competence

[07:35]

• Lakhani discusses how the fluent, smooth output of AI may make us think we’ve learned, when in reality, true learning requires effort—a “productive struggle.”
• Shares memorable analogy:
  “The shortcuts don't really replace the work. They're very helpful, but we still need to learn. We need to produce. And we need to think.”

5. Four Research-Backed Learning Strategies

[08:40]

• Durable learning requires effortful strategies:
  • Retrieval: Recall from memory improves retention.
  • Spacing: Learning over time beats cramming—enables repeated productive struggle.
  • Generation: Creating answers, even if initially wrong, strengthens recall.
  • Reflection: Structured evaluation (How am I learning? What’s my goal? Where are my gaps?) drives improvement.
• “These four techniques…are harder. They all involve a productive struggle.”

6. Learning Effort Shapes the Brain

[10:45]

• Cites research on London taxi drivers’ brain development (“the knowledge” test), emphasizing that sustained mental effort physically changes the brain in meaningful ways.

7. AI as a Learning Amplifier, Not a Replacement

[12:00]

• Well-designed AI can predict learning gaps, provide just-in-time support, foster productive struggle, and relieve teachers’ data burdens.
• Crucial point:
  “AI is not there to replace our expertise. It's there to allow our expertise to expand.”
• AI’s value is in pattern recognition and support—human creativity and goal-setting remain central.

8. The Human Role in Discovery

[13:05]

• Humans are needed to set goals, frame questions, and choose meaningful problems for AI to tackle.
• Lakhani encourages learners and teachers to use AI as a complement, not a crutch, and never to sidestep necessary struggle.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On teachers’ struggle:
  “They are teachers by day and they are data analysts by night. And not one of them signed up to do that night job.”
  [04:35]
• On AI’s role:
  “Why don't we have this technology in the classroom telling us how we should learn?”
  [05:20]
• On student misuse of AI:
  “A staggering fifth of children admitted they get AI to do all of their work for them. So they're not using AI to help them learn, they're using AI to actively avoid learning.”
  [06:44]
• About learning struggles:
  “Durable learning does not come from shortcuts. It comes from certain types of effort. And this is why AI is amazing for education.”
  [11:15]
• AI as an enabler:
  “AI is not there to replace our expertise. It's there to allow our expertise to expand.”
  [12:55]
• On learning and growth:
  “Just remember, you do not get the growth unless you go through the struggle.”
  [13:30]
• Closing wisdom:
  “Mental effort is not a flaw in the process. It is a critical feature that allows learning to stick, allows us to build expertise and fuel human ingenuity.”
  [14:05]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:33 — Identifying classroom and teacher workload problems
• 05:20 — The vision for AI in classrooms
• 06:44 — Student experiences with AI (for better and worse)
• 08:40 — Four “productive struggle” learning strategies
• 10:45 — Learning effort, brain science, and the London taxi drivers
• 12:00 — The unique strengths of AI—and human expertise
• 14:05 — The necessity and value of mental effort in genuine learning

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Conclusion

Priya Lakhani’s TED Talk brings clarity and optimism to the conversation about AI in education. She argues for a future where technology personalizes and supports genuinely effortful learning—helping teachers by reducing data burdens and empowering students to embrace the productive struggle that leads to real mastery. The message is clear: with thoughtful design and wise use, AI can help us unlock, rather than shortcut, the potential of every learner.

Transcript

[Elise Hu]

TED Talks Daily is sponsored by Capital One. In my house we subscribe to everything. Music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks. Until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn more at Capital1.comsubscriptions Terms and Conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Ambetter Health Group Health insurance can put businesses in a tough position if you're a business owner, a CFO or an HR leader, this is probably going to sound familiar. It's fall and you find out your group health insurance premium will be more expensive next year, maybe by a lot. And as usual, you have to pick one carrier and a few plans for all of the employees. But they each have different medical needs, different budgets and different preferences for doctors. Plus, the carrier's network might not be strong where all employees live. Fortunately, there's a new approach. It's called an Ichra or Ichra and it's a game changer. ICHRAs make costs predictable with stable pre tax contributions and a larger risk pool. And they make health plans personal because employees can buy any plan that fits their needs from any carrier. You choose how much to contribute. They choose what works for them. It's about time, right? For coverage you control, plan on and Ichra. Learn [e-mail] Ichra this episode is sponsored by Framer still jumping between tools to update your website? Framer unifies design, CMS and publishing on one canvas. No handoff, no hassle. Everything you need to design and publish in one place. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites and it's now redefining how we design for the web with the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas based design tool. Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. Think unlimited projects, unlimited pages, unlimited collaborators and all the essentials. Vectors, 3D transforms, gradients, wireframes, everything you need to design. Totally free. Ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool. Start creating for [e-mail] design and use code Ted for a free month of framer pro. That's framer.com design promo code TED framer.com design promo code Ted rules and restrictions May apply.

[Podcast Sponsor/Announcer]

Foreign.

[Elise Hu]

You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. No. 2 humans learn in exactly the same way. So what might happen when machines help us develop better tools to create personalized pathways to learning? In this talk, AI education entrepreneur Priya Lakhani shows us how a one size fits all approach to the classroom so strains teachers and fails students. And how, if properly designed, AI could amplify what students and teachers do best and reveal how irreplaceable we humans truly are.

[Priya Lakhani]

Twenty years ago, I founded a social enterprise. I wanted to change the world. And we were funding millions of meals to the underprivileged. We were providing tens of thousands of vaccines across parts of Africa and, and we were funding schools in the slums of India. Now, I thought that I was doing quite a good job and having a lot of impact in all of these areas until one day I was working with ministers in the UK and they said that 20% of students leave secondary schools in the UK and they're not able to read and write well enough. Now, I thought with brick and mortar schools and qualified teachers, if they're not able to do that in the uk, that I'm not having the impact that I wanted to have in those schools in the slums in India. So what's going on? What's the problem? We need to fix it. So I went to schools. I went to schools and I asked lots of questions and I found two critical problems on the front line of education. The first is that they continue to have the one size fits all delivery of education to a classroom of around 30 to 35 people. The second, I think you will agree with me, should be headline news every single day. 74% of teachers want to quit their jobs in the next three years. Why? It's because of workload. They spend so much time micromarking, micro assessing, trying to figure out where every child is at. They are teachers by day and they are data analysts by night. And not one of them signed up to do that night job. So walking around schools, I had a smartphone in my hand and we had machine learning applications telling us how we should shop, how we should save and how we should sleep. And I thought, why don't we have this technology in the classroom telling us how we should learn? We've got to build that technology, but we can't use any old machine learning recommendation engine. We need to combine artificial intelligence with neuroscientific theory and the learning sciences. To learn how every single brain in this room learns. Because if we can fix learning, we can improve outcomes, we can personalize education for every single one of us. And we. And provide intelligent insights to teachers to reduce the workload. So 12 years ago, I built a team. They built the technology. It exists. Students use it in over 140 countries. We've collected over 40 billion data points on how children learn. And I'm going to show you a couple of the things that I've learned about learning on the way. But before I do that, I thought it'd be really important to share with you some student feedback that I have on our platform. Yeah, it's really important because it tells us what children's expectations are when they use an AI education partner. So I get feedback like this. I'm trying to say thank you. It's lovely. It's brilliant. I think Century will help me achieve things that I thought were impossible. It's a golden child, Right? My life's purpose has been fulfilled. And then these sweet, lovely, innocent children send me messages like this. I don't like this website. It makes me able to do my homework. Wait. And then I'm being bribed. I will give you £100,000. I'm not joking. You just need to give me no work, give me a button to do the work for me. Now, these children, and that sentiment very much ties in with a recent survey where children were asked, how do you use AI LLMs, chatbots with your homework? A staggering fifth of children admitted they get AI to do all of their work for them. So they're not using AI to help them learn, they're using AI to actively avoid learning. Now, I know some of you are frowning right now thinking, how dare they? I don't think they're that different from us. Think about how we felt when we first used ChatGPT. I think that you all felt euphoric. You thought, wow, I'm going to look like a genius. I never need to do any work ever again. This is amazing.

[Elise Hu]

Yeah.

[Priya Lakhani]

And then it hallucinated and confabulated and you were like, big Tech. Seriously, you had one job to do. Sam Altman with all that money and it's making stuff up, right? And then for the lawyer who shared it in a courtroom and got fined, sheer humiliation and embarrassment for those people. And I think we've ended up with this sort of sinking realization of acceptance, right, that the shortcuts don't really replace the work. They're very helpful, but we still need to learn. We need to produce. And we need to think now, when we read those long answers that an LLM chatbot gives us, it feels very fluent when you read it, doesn't it? The problem is, is that fluency we often mistake for learning. And that is why people we know, not us, of course, but they end up with this sort of illusion of competence, like they know everything, right? What we actually know about learning is that learning requires what researchers called a productive struggle. It's this sort of mental effort, right, that builds understanding. Now, my top learning techniques, I've got four of them that all involve a productive struggle, and they improve outcomes. We've seen them work. Three of them are about memory. This is really important. Memory and understanding are two sides of the same coin. If you think about it. We draw on what we remember in order to shape what we think. If we can't recall it, we can't use it. So the first important one is retrieval. This is simply the act of recalling from our brain. So students in a study were given a passage, right? And it's the students who only read it once, but then try to recall it from their memory. Who could remember it far better than students who just read it over and over and over again? The second is spacing. And this is essentially students who then space their learning over time. So rather than cramming things all in one go, students that can do that active process of retrieval over time, because then you're essentially going through that productive struggle over and over again. The third, we don't like this one, but it's just generation, right? So students in a study were given word pairs like rapid, fast, and cold and hot. But then another set of students were just given the first word, and then a cue like the F, they had to come up with fast. Students who have to generate the answers themselves, even if they get them wrong initially, create a stronger memory trace. They remember more in the end. And then the fourth is reflection. When we reflect on our work and we are given structured feedback in three very specific ways. How am I learning right now? What is my learning goal? And then what are the gaps to get to that goal? What do I need to do those students improve their outcomes? Now, you'll find that these four techniques have something in common. They are harder. They all involve a productive struggle. We know sustained mental effort strengthens the parts of the brain, and it's positively correlated with growth in the brain. There was an amazing study in my home city of London with black taxi drivers. Now, if you're a cabbie in London, you Have to pass a test call the knowledge. You have to memorize 26,000 streets in the city of London. You're not allowed to use navigation apps now. Wow. Exactly. Right? Isn't that crazy? Yeah. No Uber drivers for them. Right? And so neuroscientists scanned their brains and they found that parts of the hippocampi in the brain, this is the part of the brain that's responsible for spatial memory and navigation, were larger in parts with experienced cabbies, because you have to build all of those mental models. You have to generate new routes every time you have a new passenger. And so they say that that growth, because of the positive correlation with what they have to do, is really meaningful and telling. And it is no different for learning. Durable learning does not come from shortcuts. It comes from certain types of effort. And this is why AI is amazing for education. Because AI can spot patterns in how we all learn. It can spot patterns in how concepts across subjects connect. It can predict if you don't know something and provide you with that material at the right time. It can provide us with timely, targeted interventions and give teachers those insights. It can predict when you're just about to forget something and give you that material at just the right time. It can force you to generate an answer rather than just reveal the answer. And it can provide amazing structured feedback against expertly designed rubrics from teachers. So AI, well designed can be phenomenal in education. And we've seen it work. Now a lot of people come to me, students and adults, and they say, but why bother? Because we've got gps, right? We have AI. We can Google the answer to absolutely anything, so we don't need to do this anymore. That's not true if you think about AI. AI is our history predicting our future. It is brilliant at space spotting patterns in data. It has been amazing as a partner in remarkable breakthroughs like drug discovery and protein folding, new materials and crystals. But the thing is, none of that happens with AI in isolation. We humans, we frame the questions, we set the goals, we chose the data sets. We decide which discoveries matter. Our knowledge is is not just trivia. It is the raw material of thinking and discovery. AI is not there to replace our expertise. It's there to allow our expertise to expand. And if you think about powered flight, penicillin, electricity, AI itself, humans learned. They went through that productive struggle, right? They built domain expertise, and from that, they took a leap in their imagination and they created innovations. So for students who want to cheat and want to use AI to do their homework, for us lifelong learners, right, who are reading and reading and reading and reinforcing that illusion of competence. Just remember, you do not get the growth unless you go through the struggle. So whether AI is good or bad for education is totally up to you. Are we designing it well and are you using it to complement or to replace human cognition? So the next time you're learning and you want to invest in yourself, educate yourself, you want to grow, and maybe take that leap in imagination, just remember, mental effort is not a flaw in the process. It is a critical feature that allows learning to stick, allows us to build expertise and fuel human ingenuity. Thank you so much for listening to me and good luck with your AI journey.

[Elise Hu]

That was Priya Lakhani speaking at TED Next 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out [e-mail] curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED Research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarni Vong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. TED Talks Daily is sponsored by Capital One. In my house we subscribe to everything. Music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks. Until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn more at capital1.com subscriptions terms and conditions apply.

[Podcast Sponsor/Announcer]

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