New Oriental Forum: Chinese Scientists Warn AI Study Tools Carry a 'Cognitive Penalty'

New Oriental held the 18th edition of its Family Education Forum in Beijing on 7 November, drawing more than 1,000 attendees - officials from women's federations and local education bureaus, a Chinese Academy of Sciences academician, university professors in economics, psychology and philosophy - and a simultaneous online broadcast. The theme was "Growth Beyond Algorithms: Reshaping and Returning in the AI Era of Family Education".

For 18 years the forum has been the NYSE-listed education group's annual public argument about how Chinese parents should raise children. This year the question moved on from whether children should use AI to what AI use does to the mind - a shift that matters well beyond China, as schools from Singapore to California debate the same trade-off between convenience and cognitive effort.

Yu Minhong, New Oriental's founder and chairman, opened in dialogue with Zheng Quanshui, an academician who founded Tsinghua University's Qian Xuesen Class and the Shenzhen X-Institute. Yu urged parents not to pit children against machines on intelligence. "However powerful the compute, it is no match for heart-power," he said, arguing that sustained motivation comes from obsessive interest in something a person loves, and that this is what machines cannot replace. He offered the image of asking an elephant to climb a tree and a fish to walk on land: one yardstick for every child only makes children miserable. Zheng said the one thing parents should do is help a child find a passion, and described the method used at his schools - set a task roughly 20% beyond current ability, complete one loop, bank a small sense of achievement, then widen the loop. His parting line: "Your child knows better than you what he needs."

The sharpest warning came from Wu Yanhui, head of the economics department at HKU Business School, whose talk was titled "A Fine Line: Learning Offloading and Cognitive Penalty in the AI Era". Over-reliance on AI tools, he argued, produces cognitive laziness and false effort, and parents need a workable boundary between assistance and independent thought. The claim has international support: a 2025 MIT Media Lab preprint by Kosmyna and colleagues tracked 54 students through four months of essay writing and found markedly weaker EEG connectivity among ChatGPT users, lower ownership of their own texts and poor recall of passages they had written minutes earlier - what the authors call "cognitive debt".

Liu Jia, director of Tsinghua's psychology and cognitive science department, made a related case from brain science: psychological growth, cognitive breadth and the capacity to survive matter more for teenagers than short-term scores.

A philosophy roundtable with Cheng Lesong, chair of Peking University's philosophy department, and Zhou Lian of Renmin University, worried less about children failing to understand AI than about AI hardening into yet another single yardstick. If not knowing AI becomes grounds for writing a child off, Cheng said, education has not changed in substance - it has simply renamed backwardness. Their prescription was "liubai", deliberately leaving blank space: enough unstructured time for children to explore, plan their own learning and even stare into space.

Chen Zhiyan of the Institute of Psychology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences spoke on building psychologically friendly schools, and Chen Xingjia, New Oriental's general adviser, closed on raising children in love. The summary line - technology as instrument, humanities as root, companionship as foundation - doubles as a business argument for a company that has spent five years rebuilding itself around non-academic tutoring, study-abroad services and AI-supported learning products.