Schools want search. Must they take the AI too?

A teacher can want students to find a primary source without wanting a machine to summarize it first. That is not an argument against every educational use of AI. It is a request to decide which intellectual task the student should do. Google’s November 3 announcement puts access to Search and several Gemini products off by default for K–12 student accounts until administrators enable them, with rollout details still to come. AP reports that the services can be enabled individually, but Google Search itself retains AI. Turning Gemini off is therefore not the same as obtaining a version of Search without generative answers. Google argues that its Guided Learning approach can support problem-solving rather than shortcuts. That is a teaching proposition worth testing, not a reason to erase the distinction. DuckDuckGo offers a practical alternative: a no-AI search endpoint and instructions for managed deployment. Its own documentation also makes clear that filtering AI images is imperfect. No-AI does not mean every result was written by a human, every source is reliable, or all school safeguarding requirements are satisfied. The interesting competition is over who gets to choose the learning process. Before changing a default, a school should compare source quality, accessibility, explicit-content filtering and the burden on teachers. A browser policy that changes address-bar search does not automatically replace Classroom or all the other services a school uses. There is room here for both useful AI tutoring and a deliberate, supported route to research without it.