It’s a question we ask every year. What are the most important skills that young people should be learning?
As for the answer? That can vary depending on who you ask – and the context of what exactly that learning should be preparing them for – but the consensus usually lands on a combination of critical thinking, people skills, and digital literacy.
If we’re talking about preparing young people for work, According to the World Economic Forum’s latest ‘Artificial intelligence and the future of entry-level work’ report, employers increasingly prize learning agility, emotional intelligence and human qualities AI can't replicate over a degree alone.
A new book, ‘First Movers: Courageous Leadership for a Human Future in the AI Era’, explores how today's students need distinctly human capabilities that tech can't replace: curiosity, critical thinking, courage, empathy and independent judgement.
Its author, Yasmin London, has spent more than two decades working across policing, education, technology and leadership, and regularly works with schools and educators on digital safety, resilience and preparing young people for a rapidly changing world.
“AI can give us an answer in seconds. What matters more is knowing which questions to ask, whether the answer holds up, and when something doesn’t feel quite right,” London told The Educator. “That last part is especially important in schools. A student might seem fine on the surface, but a teacher notices a change in their behaviour or the way they respond to a question.”
London said human connection gives us the context to notice those signals, and courage helps us follow up rather than take things at face value.
“In conversations with school leaders, staff, parents, and senior students, I keep hearing the same realisation: these skills don’t develop by accident,” she said. “Young people learn from how we model curiosity, handle disagreement, trust our judgement, and show that it’s okay to say, ‘I don’t know, let’s find out.’ When a shortcut is always available, choosing to pause, think, and check in with someone matters more than ever.”
Making room for thinking and conversations
A growing body of research has highlighted the cognitive health risks for young people who rely too heavily on AI for learning.
London said the risk she worries about most is that students start trusting an answer because it sounds convincing, without stopping to ask whether it’s right.
“That’s automation bias, and it makes protecting their own judgement a priority for schools,” she said. “We also need to be careful about which parts of learning we hand over.”
MIT Media Lab’s preliminary ‘Your Brain on ChatGPT’ study found that people who used AI to write essays had significantly more difficulty quoting their own work shortly afterwards. London said it’s an early finding from a specific writing task, but it raises a useful question for schools: is AI helping students think, or doing the thinking they need to practise?
“Then there’s the relational side,” she said. “Young people build communication skills by having awkward conversations, disagreeing, and finding their way through a misunderstanding.”
London said that if AI becomes the easiest place to go for every answer, piece of advice, or moment of company, young people may get fewer chances to practise those skills with other people.
“The lesson is to make room for the thinking and the conversations, even when they take longer.”
Teach students how to judge, not just how to prompt
With more AI tools continuing to flow into classrooms, London stressed the need for schools to move beyond simply teaching students how to use AI and focus more strongly on developing their capacity to question, challenge and think independently.
“We need to teach students how to judge what they know, not just how to prompt,” she said. “This means building skills around knowing when to trust an output, when to challenge it, how to interrogate and validate it and when to put the tool down.”
London noted that The World Economic Forum has ranked misinformation and disinformation among the top two risks in its two-year outlook for three consecutive reports, saying that makes that judgement increasingly important.
“In practice, school staff can ask students to form a view before opening a tool, then test its answer for errors, bias, and missing perspectives,” she said. “Teachers can model the same habit aloud. When we question a polished AI answer, students see that scepticism is a skill.”
Embracing uncertainty starts with staff
When asked how she believes school leaders can create learning environments that encourage students to embrace uncertainty, make mistakes and develop their own ideas, London said it starts with staff.
“When I work with leadership teams, I often say, ‘You can’t find new treasure with an old map’, but teachers need more than permission to experiment,” she said. “They need time, support, and room to share what didn’t work without feeling they’ve failed.”
London said students notice how adults respond when an idea goes wrong, so leaders can make that learning visible across the school.
“In classrooms, that means rewarding the quality of thinking as well as the final answer, and giving students chances to show their drafts, rethink an idea, or say, ‘I changed my mind because…’ If we want them to navigate uncertainty, they need opportunities to practise it now.”
Closing the ‘gender harm gap’
London said AI is widening what she calls the ‘gender harm gap’, pointing to Harvard Business School research showing women are around 20% less likely than men to use generative AI.
“Meanwhile, eSafety reports that deepfake image-based abuse involving under-18s has doubled in 18 months, and it overwhelmingly targets girls,” she said. “Bias is built into the systems too.”
Another sobering study, London said, is MIT's ‘Gender Shades’ research, which found facial recognition error rates of up to 34.7% for darker-skinned women, compared with 0.8% for lighter-skinned men.
“It's a big part of why I wrote First Movers: a small, narrow group is shaping this technology for all of us,” she said.
“Schools can change that by getting girls building, questioning and leading, and by bringing boys in as allies, showing rather than shaming. Courage isn't a personality trait, it's a practice, and it can be taught.”