A new class for high school seniors in Newark, New Jersey, is skipping the coding lessons to focus on a more urgent skill: human agency. At Washington Park High School, students are learning to distinguish between passively consuming content served by algorithms and actively using technology to achieve specific goals.
What Happened
The curriculum, designed by career explorations teacher Mike Taubman, treats artificial intelligence literacy like driver’s education. According to reporting on the program, the central question posed to students is simple: “Are you steering the technology or is it steering you?”
To answer this, students analyze their own digital habits. They compare the experience of passively scrolling through social media feeds against the active process of using Google Search to find specific information. The goal is to identify "passenger mode," a state where users surrender control to algorithms—like letting Spotify’s AI DJ dictate their music choices—without realizing it.
This initiative aligns with a growing national focus on AI literacy. While New Jersey does not yet have a specific statewide mandate mentioned in the reports, a recent executive order urged schools to teach foundational AI literacy starting as early as kindergarten. As we previously reported, resources for teachers are expanding rapidly to meet this demand.
The Bigger Picture
The Newark program's emphasis on human oversight is backed by new research showing that AI is far from infallible. While chatbots can handle basic tasks, they struggle significantly with complex reasoning.
A recent study by Microsoft Research found that AI performance drops sharply when math problems are embedded in real-world scenarios. The study notes that large language models often fail at "problem formulation," meaning they can do the math but cannot figure out which math to use when a problem is presented as a story. Similarly, the FrontierMath benchmark reveals that current AI models still cannot reliably solve research-level mathematics.
Despite these limitations, industries are moving forward with automation. In the publishing world, Harlequin France has begun using AI to translate popular paperbacks, a move that prioritizes speed over the nuance provided by human translators. This shift reinforces the need for students to become "architects" rather than just users. As outlined in the "Crawl, Walk, Run" framework adopted by other districts, the goal is for students to treat AI outputs as rough drafts that require human sculpting.
What This Means for Families
The distinction between "active" and "passive" use is the new dividing line in digital literacy. If students use AI passively—asking it to write an essay and accepting the result without question—they risk submitting work filled with "hallucinations" or irrelevant information.
However, active use turns the AI into a thinking partner. Educational experts suggest shifting from passive consumption to active critique helps students develop higher-order thinking skills. By treating the AI as a debate opponent or an unreliable narrator that must be fact-checked, students remain in the driver's seat of their own learning.
What You Can Do
- Audit your "passenger mode": Ask your children to identify apps where they feel they are in control versus apps that feed them content automatically.
- assign the role of "Editor": When your child uses ChatGPT or similar tools, encourage them to treat the output as a first draft that they must critique, edit, and fact-check.
- Debate the bot: Use AI to strengthen arguments by asking it to provide a counter-argument to your child's opinion, then have your child refute it with evidence.