In Argentina, parents fear the screen and kids fear losing their own judgment: the real gap is elsewhere

By Aptus · July 3, 2026.

Two studies by Santillana—conducted with the Inter-American Confederation of Catholic Education (CIEC), surveying 10,800 families and 28,845 students in Argentina—portray a very specific generational mismatch around artificial intelligence. 55.2% of families say the technology causes conflict at home, parents rate their concern about screen time at 7.2 out of 10, and although 88.3% say they talk with their children about what they do online, 77% demand that schools take a more active role in digital literacy. Meanwhile, on the students' side (63% Generation Alpha, 37% Generation Z), 64.5% use AI to save time searching for information, 55.2% to understand difficult topics, and 41.7% to organize tasks. And most interesting of all: six out of ten trust what AI gives them, but they cross-check the answer across two or three applications before accepting it as valid.

The asymmetry isn't trivial. Adults project onto AI the same fears they already held about screens in general—time spent, exposure to content, addiction—a diffuse fear largely inherited from the moral panic over the internet a decade ago. Young people, on the other hand, articulate a much more specific and, frankly, more sophisticated concern: they fear not the technology itself, but the erosion of their own autonomous judgment if they delegate too much. The study sums it up with a phrase that functions almost like a generational slogan: "I trust, but I verify." It's a nuance often lost in the public debate on AI and education, dominated by adult panic and paying little attention to what those who actually use it daily really think.

This connects with something we've already pointed out when analyzing AI's impact on the education sector: the winning teacher is the one who orchestrates the tool, not the one who merely transmits content, and the value of school shifts from transmitting information—a task AI already does reasonably well—toward developing critical thinking and validation criteria. What this Argentine study contributes is evidence that this transition is already happening organically among students themselves, even without schools having explicitly trained them for it: they've developed on their own a habit of cross-checking sources that many adults don't even apply in their own use of technology.

Our reading is that the real short-term risk isn't that young people use AI without judgment—the data suggests the opposite—but that the education system and families will be too slow to formalize and deepen a critical literacy that today is developing informally and unevenly. Not all teenagers have the same access to the 'technological maturity' the study describes; those lacking family or school support face a real risk of using AI without the validation filters shown by their more advantaged peers, widening a gap that will no longer be just about access to technology but about the judgment to use it well. It's the same pattern we see in other countries: future inequality won't hinge so much on who has the chatbot, but on who has learned to methodically doubt it.

In the long run, however, this kind of study reinforces an underlying thesis we hold at Zendoric: when the generation growing up with AI as an everyday tool develops, almost out of necessity, finer verification habits and critical thinking than their parents, it's laying the groundwork for a society better prepared to coexist with increasingly capable systems. The digital literacy that Argentine families are demanding today isn't just a defensive response to screen-time conflict: it's, potentially, the competency that will allow this generation to harness the abundance of information and cognitive capacity that AI promises without losing the ability to think for themselves—which is, in the end, the skill no tool should ever replace.