Capital City College teamed up with AI Awareness Day to give students an opportunity to participate in shaping the future of technology and education. Rio shares their view on Artificial intelligence and what questions we should be asking.
The debate in every staffroom is the wrong one. Ban it or embrace it. Restrict or allow. Two sides, endless arguments. None of them change the reality. AI is already in every student’s pocket.
So the question was never “should students use AI?” The question is: are we teaching them to interrogate it, or just pretending they are not using it?
I’m Rio. Sport Science student and AI Ambassador. I’ve led yoga and boxing sessions, taught anatomy, coordinated volunteers, and presented to rooms of people. When you lead others, you cannot fake it. You need to know the material. I build that knowledge the same way I build my college assignments: from lesson notes, textbooks, podcasts, peer-reviewed research, and real conversations with lecturers. Those are my foundations. Build your own framework first. AI can add to them or edit them. AI cannot build them for you.
That is the distinction that matters.
Most students have never been taught it. That is not their fault.
According to Bett’s 2025 AI in Education report, nearly half of UK teachers have received no AI training from their school. If the adults guiding students can’t engage with it critically themselves, how are students supposed to learn to?
Some educators call AI a crutch. For students who copy and paste, they are right. But banning AI because students misuse it misses the point. Many students misuse it because no one taught them otherwise.
The students who succeed will not be the ones who avoided AI. They will be the ones who learned to argue with it. To look at a confident answer and ask: “is this true?”
That is the skill. Can you use AI and still think for yourself.
When calculators entered classrooms in the 1970s, teachers called them a crutch. Today we consider calculator literacy a basic skill, which has been normalised. AI will follow the same pattern.
The worst outcome isn’t students using AI. It’s students who never learned to push back – who accepted the first answer because it was fast and polished. We solve that not by banning anything, but by teaching students how to interrogate a tool that will never tell them when it’s wrong. That’s the conversation schools aren’t having yet.
