AI Literacy as Liberation: Teaching Ethical AI Practice to the Next Generation of Competitive Scholars

Anthony Berryhill is an educator, debate coach, and learning strategist who has spent over two decades working at the intersection of access, equity, and high-stakes academic performance. His AI education work is distinguished by what it refuses to do: it does not treat AI as a shortcut, a replacement for student voice, or a credential-laundering tool. It teaches young people to understand what AI is, what it isn't, and how to use it in ways that amplify rather than substitute their own thinking.

In practice, this has meant coaching 15 Louisiana State Championship-winning competitive debaters at Isidore Newman School in the ethical and strategic application of AI — research verification, argument construction, and critical interrogation of AI-generated content. It has meant teaching students to detect AI writing in their own drafts, to understand why authenticity matters more than polish, and to develop the metacognitive skills to know when AI is a tool and when it becomes a crutch.

Berryhill's AI education methodology has been recognized externally through a Silver Hermes Creative Award for an AI and Education video, and through speaking invitations including a featured talk at the Burj Global Power 100 in Washington, D.C. His approach connects AI literacy to a broader critique of educational credentialism: the systems that claim to measure merit while actually sorting by inherited familiarity with unstated rules. Teaching AI ethics is, in his framework, inseparable from teaching students to see and resist those systems.

The result is a generation of young scholars who do not fear AI, do not blindly trust it, and do not hide behind it — students equipped to enter any institution and perform with integrity on their own terms.