Estonia believes the future of education lies not in excluding artificial intelligence from classrooms, but in placing it at their very core. Instead of attempting to ban students from using the technology, Estonian Education and Research Minister Kristina Kallas told POLITICO that schools must teach them how to harness generative AI for their academic benefit. “If you regulate AI out of school, you’re risking significant cognitive decline because the students will be using it anyway,” Kallas said. This approach forms the foundation of one of Europe’s boldest national initiatives in AI-powered learning: a collaboration between Tallinn and Sam Altman’s OpenAI to deploy a tailored educational AI platform in all of Estonia’s upper secondary schools. Estonia has long been an enthusiastic adopter of artificial intelligence. According to Eurostat, 23.4% of companies in the country adopted artificial intelligence in 2025, exceeding the EU average of 20%. Tallinn has eagerly embraced cutting-edge technologies—it is the birthplace of the once-dominant telecoms app Skype and is now home to leading tech firms such as the mobility and food delivery platform Bolt and the global identity verification service Veriff. Around half of Estonia’s 20,000 upper-secondary students are already using the new platform, with the rest expected to join this summer, in what Kallas called a drive to reimagine teaching. Vocational schools are set to join the initiative in the next academic year. The program represents a significant break from the strategy adopted in the rest of Europe, where countries have been wary of embracing artificial intelligence and have mainly concentrated on catching students who use it to cheat. „That is the wrong fight,“ said Kallas, who also teaches at the University of Tartu. After realizing her students were using generative AI to outsource traditional assignments, she redesigned her own university coursework to incorporate the technology. „The challenge is not how to keep AI out,“ she said. The key challenge is integrating AI into learning in ways that speed up and amplify cognitive development, instead of substituting for human thought. Kallas likened artificial intelligence to previous disruptive technologies that initially triggered alarm but eventually became standard classroom resources. „We ought to view it as a calculator,“ she remarked, while warning that its usefulness hinges on the manner and timing of its application. The minister emphasized that AI ought not to be introduced too soon in a child’s development.
Artificial Intelligence – POLITICO