Who Is Gen AIC? Understanding the Students Growing Up With AI, COVID, and Educational Disruption
Written by: Christian Talbot, President Middle States Association | Published January 12th 2025
Image Source: Unsplash
According to conventional wisdom, students currently in high school are part of Gen Z or Gen Alpha.
Gen Z, as in “Zoomers,” because many experienced school on Zoom during the COVID pandemic.
Gen Alpha, as in “alpha,” because they are the first generation born entirely in the 21st century.
I see them as Gen AIC, because they are coming of age amidst the two great paradigm shifts in school: AI and COVID.
And because I imagine “AIC” pronounced like “ache.” Today’s high schoolers must surely be aching amidst a deepening loneliness epidemic, climate collapse, and anxieties about AI taking their jobs before they even graduate from college.
In a similar vein, The Economist recently published an article titled “At home and at school, AI is transforming childhood,” in which they write, “Children are the pioneers—and guinea pigs—of artificial intelligence. [...] At school, AI promises to change how children are taught, how they are assessed and, ultimately, how they think. At home it is changing how they play, how they are supervised and with whom—or what—they share confidences and form friendships.”
In the face of all this, who wouldn’t feel despondent?
And yet I am also deeply hopeful about Gen AIC. Four particular things give me hope:
The OECD’s Education for Human Flourishing framework. Allow me to quote from the executive summary: “As flatlining results in PISA starkly demonstrate [...] [m]odern education systems are increasingly seen as sorting young people for jobs in yesterday’s economy, contributing to a crisis of mental health and inadequate to the future.” In response, the OECD has developed an elegant framework for human flourishing. And if the OECD can disrupt itself in this way, I am hopeful that their partners at the International Baccalaureate will demonstrate the courage to disrupt the IB curriculum.
The rise of microschools. Meanwhile, in the United States, Spain, and other parts of the world, microschools are already designing for flourishing through learned-centered models. Middle States-accredited Beyond 8 and The Innovation Fellowship are pioneers in this space, but over the course of 2025 over 200 new microschools inquired about accreditation with Middle States—and there are orders of magnitude more popping up.
The Declaration of Powerful Learning. At Middle States, we have developed a new foundational document called the Declaration of Powerful Learning. If your mission statement describes what success looks like at the level of your school, and your Portrait of a Learner describes what success looks like at the level of your individual students, then your Declaration of Powerful Learning describes what success looks like at the level of your classroom. We have designed this asset to align with research from the last 50+ years that tells the same consistent story: powerful learning emerges from experiences of purpose and agency.
I’m not naive. Gen AIC has a mountain to climb.
And the truth is that every generation of learners has had to navigate the difficult “middle states” of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood.
Which is why you matter so much to Gen AIC. In fact, if you’re working in a school right now, in any role, you have never mattered more to the formation of young people.
I mentioned above that there are four things that give me hope, but I only listed three.
You are the fourth thing. Go forth!
