Estonia’s education ministry launched the rollout earlier this year after a 2024 survey revealed that more than 90 percent of the country’s high school students were already using generative AI for schoolwork. President Alar Karis announced the national initiative in February 2025, directing schools to integrate the tools rather than restrict them. Nearly 20,000 students received access to a customized OpenAI chatbot, and organizers added a tailored version of Google’s Gemini in late April.
At the center of the deployment is a Socratic system prompt engineered to refuse direct answers to homework assignments. The software is programmed to help students outline tasks and ask questions that probe their reasoning. “What’s at stake here is losing an entire generation,” said Ivo Visak, a former high-school principal who runs the AI Leap foundation that coordinated the deployment with OpenAI and Google. Education and Research Minister Kristina Kallas said the government recognized that prohibition was ineffective. “We knew that not doing anything, that’s the worst option,” Kallas said.
Student engagement has been divided since the accounts were distributed. Approximately 62 percent of eligible students have activated their educational logins, and roughly 35 percent use the platform regularly. Some have adopted the tools for subject exploration and exam preparation, while others actively try to circumvent the built-in restrictions by repeatedly requesting answers or falsely claiming teacher permission. A number of students have refused participation outright, some citing data-center water usage and political objections to U.S. technology firms. Seventeen-year-old Kadi-Ly Lestal said she avoids generative AI out of concern for cognitive decline. “I’m afraid I’ll just become lazy,” Lestal said. Twelfth-grader and student body president Cordelia Violet Paap said the technology remains underexamined. “There’s so much that could go wrong with it,” Paap said.
Teachers have adjusted classroom structures to accommodate the shift and ensure students still perform heavy cognitive lifting. At Tallinn Pelgulinna State high school, English teacher Agne Kosk assigned handwritten essays that students could revise with AI, but required the original draft be submitted on paper. Madis Kahro, a Spanish teacher at Miina Härma high school in Tartu, uses the chatbot as a conversational practice partner and instructs students on prompt engineering. “It takes a bit of time to get used to it, but I think it can be very helpful,” Kahro said.
Not all interactions with the Socratic model proceed smoothly. Seventeen-year-old Anna Trofimova reported that the bot responds with inquiries regardless of context. “I asked it, ‘How can I make this porridge?’” Trofimova said. “The answer it gave was, ‘What experience do you have with porridge?’” School leaders and OpenAI representatives say they are continuously adjusting the educational version’s behavior to refine the student experience. Indrek Lillemägi, principal of Tallinn Pelgulinna State, said the core objective is helping students distinguish between verified knowledge and AI-assisted speculation. “My biggest fear is that learning becomes an imitation of learning,” Lillemägi said.
Academic researchers are tracking the pedagogical shift against documented risks of overreliance. Partners at Stanford University and OpenAI are measuring students’ cognitive skills and attitudes toward learning before and after the implementation, with preliminary results expected later this year. A widely cited study of high school math students in Turkey found that test scores improved with ChatGPT assistance during practice but fell by 17 percent on unassisted exams. That same research indicated that restricting the chatbot from providing direct answers nearly eliminated the performance drop. Leah Belsky, OpenAI’s vice president of education, said the Estonian deployment aligns with the company’s design goals for the platform. The tool “is intentionally designed to slow students down at the right moments and keep them engaged in the thinking,” Belsky said.
The Estonian rollout is the first phase of a broader push by OpenAI to distribute its ChatGPT Edu product to secondary schools internationally. Similar initiatives are expanding in the United States, including a Miami-Dade County program providing Gemini for Education to 100,000 high school students and teachers. Educators and analysts are monitoring the programs as the educational AI market grows toward a projected tens of billions in annual valuation by 2030.