AI Digital Textbooks Just Got Demoted in Korea, and Your High Schoolers Have Opinions
In 2025 Korea rolled out AI digital textbooks in schools, then the National Assembly stripped them of official status months later. This 45-minute lesson lets high schoolers debate whether the technology helped them learn or just added another screen to class.
Park English · 2026-09-02 · 3 min read
Print it out
No sign-up, no email. Opens a clean print page.
Most of your students used an AI digital textbook this year. Some liked it. Some thought it was a glorified app with a school logo on it. Either way, they have an opinion, which is the only thing a discussion lesson actually needs.
Quick background, so you're not walking in blind: starting in March 2025, Korea introduced AI 디지털교과서 (AI Digital Textbooks, usually shortened to AIDT) in English, math, and information/computing classes, first in grade 3, grade 4, first-year middle school, and first-year high school. The idea was software that adjusts to each student's level in real time. Later that year the National Assembly passed a bill that took away their status as official textbooks and reclassified them as supplementary material, which means individual schools can now choose whether to use them at all. The policy status may keep shifting, so it's worth asking your students what their school is actually doing this semester rather than assuming.
That reversal is the hook. Students who lived through the rollout can argue about whether it worked, and the fact that adults in the National Assembly are still arguing about it too makes the debate feel real instead of assigned.
Structure (45 minutes)
- Warm-up (5 min): Ask by show of hands who used an AI textbook this year, and for which subject. Get one or two quick reactions before you frame the debate.
- Vocabulary (5 min): Pre-teach the terms on the handout. "Adaptive" and "screen time" are the two that trip up mid-level students.
- Pair reading (5 min): Students read the pros/cons table below and pick which side they find more convincing before grouping.
- Debate (20 min): Split into two sides — keep it — remove it. Give each side five minutes to prepare arguments using the table, then run it as a structured debate: one speaker per side, one rebuttal per side, then open floor.
- Wrap (10 min): Vote by show of hands. Ask what a middle option might look like — not "textbook vs. no textbook" but something in between.
Pros and cons to hand students as ammunition
| Keep AI textbooks | Remove AI textbooks |
|---|---|
| Adjusts difficulty to each student, so a struggling student and a strong student aren't doing the same worksheet | Increases screen time on top of phones students already use too much |
| Gives instant feedback instead of waiting for a teacher to mark homework | Costs the government a large amount to build and maintain, money critics say could go to more teachers |
| Tracks progress data teachers can actually use | Software glitches and slow loading eat class time |
| Removes the stigma of a slower student visibly using an "easier" book | Some teachers report it's harder to keep a class's attention on a screen than on a page |
Don't let the debate collapse into "phones bad." Push students to separate the technology from the screen-time complaint — those are two different arguments and mixing them up is the most common mistake in this kind of debate at any level.
One honest note: opinions on this vary a lot by school and even by teacher, since implementation was uneven. If your students give you contradictory answers about whether their school still uses AIDT, that's not a mistake on their part. It's an accurate picture of a policy still being sorted out.