Singapore's Ministry of Education has announced that secondary school students will be banned from using smartphones and smartwatches throughout the entire school day starting January 2026, extending current restrictions beyond regular lesson time to cover recess, co-curricular activities, and supplementary lessons. Under the new guidelines, students must store their phones in designated areas like lockers or keep them in their school bags. Smartwatches also fall under the ban because they enable messaging and social media access, which the ministry says can lead to distractions and reduced peer interaction. Schools may allow exceptions where necessary. Some secondary schools adopted these tighter rules after they were announced for primary schools in January 2025, and the ministry reports improved student well-being and more physical interaction during breaks at those schools. The ministry is also moving the default sleep time for school-issued personal learning devices from 11pm to 10.30pm starting January.

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The skills that future graduates will most need in an age of automation -- creative thinking, critical analysis, the capacity to learn new things -- are precisely those that a growing body of research suggests may be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process, yet universities across the United States are now racing to embed the technology into every dimension of their curricula. Ohio State University announced this summer that it would integrate AI education into every undergraduate program, and the University of Florida and the University of Michigan are rolling out similar initiatives. An MIT study offers reason for caution: researchers divided subjects into three groups and had them write essays over several months using ChatGPT, Google Search, or no technology at all. The ChatGPT group produced vague, poorly reasoned work, showed the lowest levels of brain activity on EEG, and increasingly relied on cutting and pasting from other sources. The authors concluded that LLM users "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels" over the four-month period. Justin Reich, director of MIT's Teaching Systems Lab, recently wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education that rushed educational efforts to incorporate new technology have "failed regularly, and sometimes catastrophically."

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