To the parents lying awake about AI —

You've seen what the machines can do. So have we.

Your child will never memorize their way past a computer. Nobody's child will.

The gap won't be knowledge. It will be knowing what to do when nobody hands you the answer.

Curiosity. Judgment. Agency. Persistence. These don't ship in an update.

They're built the old way: a real problem, a real try, a real failure, and another try.

That's not a feature of our school. It's the whole school.

See the full letter below, and our policies on AI.

Read the full letter ↓

Dear families,

Almost every tour now includes some version of the same question, usually near the end, usually asked lightly because it doesn't feel like a preschool question: what does all of this mean for my child? You are not asking whether we own iPads. You are asking whether the things your four-year-old is learning will still be worth anything in twenty years. That is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a brochure.

Ours: nobody knows which jobs will exist in 2046. What we do know is narrower and more useful: the capacities that make a person hard to replace are the same ones that make a four-year-old good at being four. Noticing something is odd. Asking a question nobody assigned. Holding onto a problem past the first failure. Working with someone whose idea is better than yours and saying so. Those are not futuristic skills. They are early-childhood skills, and they are the ones most easily trained out of a child by a school that prizes compliance and neat outcomes.

So we are not going to sell you fear, and we are not going to sell you a robotics lab. Both are marketing. What we will tell you is exactly what we do.

Our policy

There are no screens in the infant, toddler or two-year-old rooms. None, at any point in the day, for any reason. At those ages the entire developmental agenda — attachment, language, motor control, cause and effect — is built through a responsive adult and real objects, and a screen is a poor substitute for both.

In preschool and above, a screen appears only when it is the only reasonable way to see something: the inside of a hive, a bird that will not tolerate an audience, a person who knows more than we do and lives somewhere else. It is used together, it is short, and it goes off the moment the children return to the materials. We do not use adaptive learning apps, tablet reading programs, or AI tutors with young children — not because the technology is poor, but because the thing it is efficient at is supplying the answer, and supplying the answer is the exact experience a four-year-old needs less of.

Our teachers use these tools as adults, for planning and administration, the way they use a photocopier. That is where it stays.

What we do instead

Children here spend the year running a cycle: a real problem, an honest guess, an attempt, and an unflinching look at what happened. In the Pre-K room last spring it was three bird feeders that attracted nothing for six days. The temptation — for every adult in the building — was to fix it. Instead a teacher asked, on the sixth morning, "Nothing has come. That's information. What do we know now that we didn't know on Monday?" and then said nothing else for a long time.

That silence is the whole method. It is also the part that no software has any interest in reproducing, because tolerating a child's frustration is expensive and slow and cannot be optimized.

The children changed two things, birds arrived, a squirrel emptied the largest feeder in an hour, and the project began again. Nobody had predicted the squirrel. Learning to be undefeated by the squirrel is, as far as we can tell, the actual preparation for a world that will keep producing them.

What we are not claiming

We are not claiming this makes your child AI-proof. No school can promise that, and you should be wary of the ones that try. We are not claiming screens at home are harmful in every dose, and we are not going to make you feel judged about the ones you allow — you know your family and your evenings better than we do. And we are not claiming to be neutral: we chose this method because we believe it is right, and we would rather say so plainly than hide it in a mission statement.

If you want to do one thing at home

Wait longer before you help. That is it. When your child hits something they cannot do — the zip, the lid, the tower — count silently to twenty before you step in. The first few times will be unpleasant for both of you. What you are protecting is the small, unglamorous experience of getting past something on their own, which is the raw material of everything we have written above.

If you would rather see it than read about it, come on an ordinary Tuesday morning and stand in a room while it happens. Ask any teacher what failed this week. They will tell you, in detail, and they will be pleased you asked.