Teaching social studies in 2025 is not the same as it was even five years ago. My middle schoolers live in a world where AI can spit out an answer in less time than it takes them to find the question mark on the keyboard. That changes things.
But here is the key: it does not change why we teach social studies. It just changes how we help kids wrestle with information. If anything, AI has made the skills of questioning, sourcing, and perspective even more important.
Here are five things I want my students to get if they are going to actually learn social studies in an AI world:
1. Be the historian, not the robot
AI is good at telling kids what happened. Historians do the harder work of weighing evidence, building arguments, and arguing over perspective. I remind my students that the chatbot is not the historian, they are.
2. Sources are still the anchor
AI does not always make clear where its information comes from and sometimes it just makes things up. That is why my students keep coming back to the question: What is the source? If they cannot answer that, the information does not carry much weight.
3. Bias never goes away
This one is easy for kids to grasp. We have always shown them that newspapers, diaries, and speeches carry bias. Now we add AI to the list. Whose voice do you hear? Whose voice is missing? Once they see bias in one place, they start spotting it everywhere.
4. Question before you accept
This is where I have found AI to be the best teaching tool. It gives kids a polished looking answer that is not always perfect. Instead of saying “do not use it,” I give them my Fray-I template.
Students take an AI response and then “fray it apart”:
- What is the main point?
- Did it use evidence or just sound nice?
- What is missing?
- Would you trust this for an assignment?
The beauty of Fray-I is that it forces kids to do what historians do: summarize, critique, evaluate, and revise. AI is not a shortcut. It is raw material for real thinking. You can copy a Fray-I template here!
5. History is still human
At the end of the day, AI can generate timelines and definitions, but it cannot teach empathy or perspective. That is still our job. My students need to see the choices, struggles, and connections that make history matter. That is where the learning lives.
Final Thought
AI is here, and our students are going to use it. We can either fight it or teach with it. For me, the answer is clear: use it as a spark, then give students tools like Fray-I to push deeper. That is how they learn to think like historians in an AI world.
Moler's Musings 