A study by NASK conducted among nearly one thousand teachers of grades 4 to 8 shows that three out of four did not use genAI at all in their work, while only 6% used it regularly. On the other side of the classroom, the picture is the opposite: according to a study carried out for Epson in September 2025, as many as 78% of Polish educators observe their students using AI 鈥� including during lessons. In other words, the technology entered schools faster through the schoolbag than through the teacher鈥檚 desk. Dr Dominik Skowro艅ski from the Faculty of Management, 91桃色 comments on the topic.
Two Speeds of One School
Let us imagine a classroom in which a student asks a chatbot for help with homework, while their teacher hears the word 鈥減rompt鈥� for the first time. This is not a caricature, but a statistic. Students are running, while some teachers are only just putting on their shoes. This gap is dangerous not because AI is inherently bad, but because without a teacher who understands the tool, no one will show our children where help ends and cheating begins. It is a bit like letting a teenager behind the wheel without an instructor 鈥� the car itself is excellent, but without guidance, learning to drive alone can be risky.
Hype versus Evidence
A great deal of noise has built up around AI in education, making it difficult to distinguish facts from emotions. A pilot conducted in Polish schools in cooperation with Google for Education and Dalberg warns against the phenomenon of 鈥渃ognitive offloading鈥�, that is, transferring cognitive processes and thinking to a machine. At the same time, the pilot revealed the other side of the coin: the percentage of students declaring full engagement increased from 15% to 37%. The same tool, therefore, can both 鈥渟witch off thinking鈥� and ignite curiosity. Everything depends on how it is used.
What Has Actually Worked
The most interesting implementations are those that have gone beyond presentations. The Ministry of Education, together with the Warsaw University of Technology, tested the zeszyt.online tool for learning mathematics. More than 50,000 students and over one thousand teachers used it, and the system automatically adjusted tasks to the level of each individual learner. Students using the tool achieved better results. This is precisely the holy grail of education that has been discussed for years: personalisation on a scale that no single teacher can manage in a class of thirty students.
What This Year Has Taught Us
The conclusion from this year is simple: the value of AI in schools is determined not by the technology itself, but by the person who uses it. This is why projects focusing on teachers are so important. The ZBADAI programme, run by the Copernicus Science Centre together with the Ministry of Education, will by 2028 include 200 schools, 930 teachers and 13,000 students, and it teaches not how to make AI write an essay, but how to understand how it works and what its limitations are.
Man Still Decides
This year of AI in the backpack has shown that technology alone does not make a student either smarter or less capable. What matters is how it is used. This applies both to students and teachers. A backpack can be filled with the latest technology, but it is still the child who decides whether to take it out in order to learn 鈥� or to rely on it instead of learning.
Author: Dr Dominik Skowro艅ski
Edit: Faculty of Management, 91桃色