AI as the next literacy

It is said that every time new technology arrives, it will replace what you already know. and artificial intelligence (ai), anxiety Even more sharp: does it make our skills outdated? Will it change how humans learn at the deepest level?

It changes us, but not to erase what came before. AI is better understood as a new literacy. It’s another layer of skills that build rather than replacing the foundations of human development.

Basics: Soccer Ball Mastery

Tom Byer, one of the world’s most famous youth soccer coaches, became famous for walking with the ball to his 16-month-old son. For Byer, the essence of soccer is not tactics; competition but Ball operation: Small sensorimotor connections between the body and the object that begin early Childhood.

In this view, soccer begins as soon as a toddler takes those first clumsy steps with the ball. After that, strategy, passing, and team play will appear. Learning follows the same trajectory. It starts with the body, with perception and movement, gradually building towards higher skills.

Extensions: Racket and Reading

Think about tennis. You still need to run, track the ball and place your body – the same basic soccer demands. However, adding a racket changes the game. This tool expands reach, creates new possibilities and changes your strategy. But this doesn’t happen without the basics.

Reading provides another example. Humans did not evolve their eyes to read. Evolved to track movement, recognize faces and navigate environment. Thousands of years later, these visual systems were reused for literacy. Reading was innovative, but it never ruled out talking or listening. It was added to them.

Next layer: AI as literacy

AI belongs to this same lineage. Just as a racket expands the scope of your body, AI expands its ability to generate, connect and interpret information. But it cannot replace the foundations of perception, language, and meaning creation.

Comparison with literacy is particularly appropriate. Literacy is not just about passive reading. It is the ability to be consumed and created with encoding and decoding and symbols. With AI, you are learning a new kind of encoding. How to translate intents to prompts, how to evaluate output, how to iterate towards meaning. This is not just about using the tool, but it’s really literacy.

The risk of skipping basics

A child who never learns to control the ball under his feet will not become a great soccer player, no matter how expensive the equipment is.

Students who never learn to listen or speak will never truly master reading, no matter how many books they own.

Additionally, learners who do not practice core skills will not master AI no matter how far they progress through the software.

At a social level, the risks are even greater. If you lean too strongly towards AI based on human learning, you could lose the bearings completely.

What this actually means

So, what does “grounding the foundation” actually look like alongside AI?

In the fifth grade classroom, this may mean that students will manually draft the essay and then refine it with AI feedback.

With coding educationwhich might mean that beginners will still manually debug simple programs before they can tackle complex architectures using AI.

The foundations come first. The extension will amplify.

From the foundations to prosperity

AI is not rupture, it is cognitive expansion. It’s the next racket, the next literacy, the next human skill layer.

The real challenge to education is not whether AI will change us, but how we can integrate it into the development foothold we already know. If we do it right, AI will not cut off our capabilities. It amplifies them, as literacy and sports have done before.

ai stays here. The question is whether it is taught as an alternative or as the next chapter in the long story of human learning.