Russia Puts AI in Classrooms as West Sounds Alarms Over Screens

At this year’s St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s digital development minister Maksut Shadaev unveiled plans for a national programme to train school teachers in the use of artificial intelligence tools. The initiative, coordinated with the education ministry, comes with no immediate changes to teacher certification, but does set Moscow on a sharply different path from that advocated by some Western educators. Only weeks earlier, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, had called for sweeping restrictions on AI and electronic screens in schools, warning that the rush to put devices in every child’s hands – now the case in 88% of U.S. public schools – has brought harms that must be mitigated.

Viewed from Moscow, the societal backdrop to such divergent responses is one of guarded stability rather than acute anxiety. Polling data from the state-backed VCIOM agency, discussed at the same forum, places the public mood’s tension vector at a moderate minus‑4, suggesting worries are internalised without spilling into open discontent. The same research contrasts today’s youth with the generation that came of age during the 1990s: where the earlier cohort was defined by survival and a drive for material gain, younger Russians are portrayed as more attuned to meaning, comfort, and values – a shift that officials frame as a readiness to navigate a complex world rather than as mere entitlement.

On the labour front, too, the Russian analysis is notably upbeat. VCIOM’s director general insisted that digitalisation and AI are reshaping the structure of employment but are not eliminating jobs; record-low unemployment, he argued, owes instead to a profound mismatch between the skills the economy needs – more engineers and skilled workers – and the abundance of graduates in law, economics and management. Across the Atlantic, however, a more sober assessment is gaining ground. The historian and sociologist Aaron Benanav, whose work was cited during a Brazilian interview, argues that a long stagnation in the global economy, not intelligent machines, poses the real danger to employment. The rise of services with chronically low productivity, he contends, is hollowing out middle-tier positions while AI heaps precarity onto those at entry level, a pattern already visible in platform‑based gig work.

In the education sphere, the Russian state is positioning itself as both champion and guardian of AI integration. The Duma’s committee chair on science and higher education, Sergei Kabyshev, told the St Petersburg forum that it is the government’s job to take responsibility for the risks of introducing AI and to orchestrate ties between universities, schools and industrial partners. That paternalistic framing – state shepherds, teachers deliver, students benefit – stands in contrast to the alarms sounded in American union halls, where the likes of Weingarten are now calling for a rollback of technology’s classroom dominance, even as her own union has partnered with the very companies, Microsoft and OpenAI, that build these tools.

What this patchwork of views makes clear is that the debate over AI’s social footprint is fragmenting along national lines, shaped as much by labour market structures, cultural confidence in the state, and economic momentum as by the technology itself. Russia’s bet on upskilling teachers and tightly managed adoption assumes that the jobs of tomorrow will exist and that the state can deliver them; the Western counter-narrative – part stakeholder scepticism, part academic critique – warns that without restoring broad‑based economic demand, even the most sophisticated workforce will find itself navigating a precarised landscape. As the St Petersburg forum drew to a close, it was this tension, more than any single announcement, that defined the moment.