Here’s what keeps some of us up at night.

It’s not the fear you might think. It’s not the sci-fi anxiety that AI is coming for our jobs, or that a “plastic brain” will out-think a human one.

It’s the quiet, practical, educational fear that we are sending our students into the woods with tragically outdated maps. I am reminded of the (apocryphal) quote from Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1642:

“With all respects to the cartographers of Europe, Australia is not where it is supposed to be!”

It’s the fear that we are meticulously teaching them how to use a sextant in a world that runs on GPS. That we’re spending weeks on whether the period goes inside or outside the quotation mark while these kids are about to enter a world where their survival—professionally, intellectually, and critically—depends on knowing the difference between a valid AI-generated-synthesis and a “hallucinated” piece of nonsense.

We are graduating babes in the woods. And the woods are already here.

The Real “AI alignment” Problem

We’re all worried about “AI alignment,” this grand idea of making sure machines share human values.

Meanwhile, the real alignment problem is happening in our classrooms. It’s the profound misalignment between the skills we’re required to teach and the skills the world is starting to demand.

Students are already using these tools. They’re using them with the same blunt-force-trauma approach that we all use when we don’t know any better. They’re asking a generic, public AI to write an essay, getting a C-minus-quality pile of pablum, and deciding that’s what “AI” is.

They are learning to be passive. They are learning to be lazy. Not because they are lazy, but because we, the adults, have given them no other framework. We’ve offered no map. We’ve just… let them wander in.

And so we get a generation that thinks AI is a magic-eight-ball-plagiarism-machine.

We are teaching them incompetence.

You Can’t Teach What You Don’t Practice

So, “AI Literacy” becomes the new mandate. Another thing to add. Another “one-size-fits-none-well” binder dropped on a teacher’s desk. “Here, teach this now.”

But how? How can you teach a student to critically evaluate an AI-generated output if you’ve never had a chance to do it yourself? How can you model ethical use if your own only experience is tinkering with a public tool that feels like a toy?

You can’t. Not really.

You wouldn’t ask someone to teach driver’s ed if they’d never been behind the wheel. Why do we assume teachers can just absorb this new, complex, paradigm-shifting literacy and teach it on command?

It’s an absurd, impossible ask. It’s a recipe for more burnout.

The Flight Simulator

This is why our vision isn’t just about curriculum. It’s about competence.

Before you can be expected to teach AI literacy, you have to practice it. And you can’t practice it in a vacuum, and you shouldn’t have to practice it on a public-facing tool that sells your data and makes things up.

You need a flight simulator.

A safe, “walled-garden” where the AI is not a “know-it-all” plastic brain, but a “knows-you-all” colleague.

A place where the AI is already grounded in your curriculum, your standards, and your school’s core vision.

This is the “why” of the Custom Codex.

It’s not just a tool for preserving the wisdom of your veteran teachers. It’s not just a tool for liberating your social studies teacher from the digital tedium that crushes their creativity.

It is the antidote to “babes in the woods.”

It is the single best professional development tool you could possibly give your staff. It’s a place where they can learn, by doing, what this technology is actually good for.

They learn to ask better questions. They learn to evaluate the machine’s output against their own human expertise. They learn to be the “architect” and the “sculptor,” and to treat the AI as the “foreman.” They build their own literacy, their own competence, their own confidence, by using a tool that respects them as professionals.

And then?

Then they are no longer afraid of it.

Then they can stand in front of their students not as a “script-reader,” but as a genuine guide. They can finally turn to their students and say, “Okay. Here’s the map. Let me show you how to read it.”