Estonia Offers High-School Students Free ChatGPT

 

“TALLINN, Estonia -- An entire country just gave all of its 10th and 11th graders their own ChatGPT accounts to use for school.

 

No one knows how the experiment will turn out.

 

This Baltic nation of 1.3 million people saw early in the artificial-intelligence revolution that most of its high-school students were offloading schoolwork to chatbots. Rather than ban the new technology, Estonia mounted an intervention, distributing free chatbots to nearly 20,000 students this year and rethinking pedagogical methods.

 

The questions with which Estonia is grappling are universal ones for academic institutions and workplaces alike: In the AI era, how much thinking should humans do, and how do we keep the new technology from becoming a crutch?

 

English teacher Agne Kosk tries to combine chatbots and human interaction. In one unit, students conversed with ChatGPT role-playing the attendees of an 1816 dinner party where Mary Shelley hatched the idea for "Frankenstein," and then discussed the experience in class. In another, the teacher at Tallinn Pelgulinna State high school asked students to write an essay on paper in class and use AI to help improve it, but turn in the handwritten original.

 

St. John's School, a private Christian high school in Tallinn, is trying flipped lessons. Instead of introducing a topic in class and assigning exercises about it at home, teachers assign a chatbot-enabled at-home exploration of a new topic and discuss it in class.

 

At the core of Estonia's high-school initiative is a custom "Socratic" version of OpenAI's chatbot that refuses to complete students' work for them. Instead, it is instructed to do things such as help plan how to approach a task, or ask questions to explore one's thinking. Organizers in late April also started distributing a similarly customized version of Google's Gemini.

 

"What's at stake here is losing an entire generation," said Ivo Visak, a former high-school principal who now runs Estonia's AI Leap foundation, which partnered with OpenAI and Google on the rollouts.

 

Estonia's project is one of the most high-profile showcases in a new commercial race for the educational AI market.

 

Researchers in Estonia, working with Stanford University and OpenAI, have been measuring students' cognitive skills and attitudes toward learning. They hope to announce early results this year, one of the first large-scale looks at what impact coordinated AI adoption has on skills such as reasoning and retention.

 

Reception from students has been mixed. Some say they use it to explore a topic or to help drill for exams, while others want the unfiltered ChatGPT to do their homework for them. Another contingent hates AI altogether and wants nothing to do with it. So far, about 62% of students with access to the school ChatGPT have activated their account, and about 35% use it regularly.

 

A small but vocal minority of Estonian students say they refuse to use AI on moral grounds, citing issues such as water consumption by data centers, teachers say.

 

Madis Kahro, a Spanish teacher at Miina Harma high school in Tartu, said he has his students use the AI as a practice buddy that never gets frustrated, and tries to teach them the mechanics of prompting AI. "It takes a bit of time to get used to it, but I think it can be very helpful," Kahro said.

 

One major goal of the Estonian program, both in lessons and through the Socratic chatbot, is to help students understand what they know and what they don't -- distinctions that research shows AI can blur. "My biggest fear is that learning becomes an imitation of learning," said Indrek Lillemagi, principal of Tallinn Pelgulinna State high school.

 

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OpenAI Aims to Increase Its Educational Footprint

 

Estonia is the first in a series of countries where OpenAI hopes to start rolling out its education product ChatGPT Edu to secondary-school students.

 

Leah Belsky, OpenAI's vice president of education, said the tool "is intentionally designed to slow students down at the right moments and keep them engaged in the thinking."

 

Until now, there has been little large-scale research on the impact of student AI use in schools. Some studies show that children who rely on AI to handle mental work later struggle on exams without AI.

 

One widely cited experiment published last year found that high-school math students in Turkey improved their practice grades when using ChatGPT, yet saw a 17% performance drop when taking exams unassisted.

 

That study also suggested a possible way forward: Students who used a version of ChatGPT instructed not to give answers and fed with problems from teachers saw almost no drop-off.” [1]

 

1. World News: Estonia Offers High-School Students Free ChatGPT. Schechner, Sam.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 03 June 2026: A9.