Google takes Guided Learning worldwide in Classroom — and gives schools the off switch for its AI, and Search
Google has made its Guided Learning study coach available in Google Classroom worldwide and says Gemini and even Google Search will stay off for school student accounts until administrators choose to turn them on, a shift that has drawn both praise and sharp criticism.
Google has redrawn its offer to the world's schools. At its AI in the Learning Era event on Tuesday, the company made Guided Learning — the Gemini mode that coaches students through a problem instead of handing them the answer — available in Google Classroom worldwide, announced a pilot of the same approach inside Google Search, and said its AI products, and Search itself, will in future stay switched off for school students' accounts until an administrator explicitly turns them on.
Guided Learning is built around what Google's vice president and general manager of education, Chris Phillips, calls “productive struggle”: keeping a student actively challenged without letting them become so stuck that they give up. Rather than producing a finished answer, the tool asks open-ended questions, breaks problems into steps and responds with diagrams, videos and interactive quizzes. It first appeared inside Gemini in August 2025 and has now been woven into the classroom software that teachers already use to set and collect work.
In Classroom, the mechanics are simple. A teacher assigns a Guided Learning activity, and each pupil then works through it one-to-one with Gemini, anchored in the class's own material rather than the open internet. Google says the feature was tested with schools and educators before release, and from Tuesday it is available globally, not as a limited trial.
Search is next. Later this month, a pilot in selected US schools will bring Guided Learning into Google Search for student accounts, so that homework-type questions are answered with step-by-step coaching instead of quick answers in AI Mode and AI Overviews. Google says it will gather educator feedback from the pilot before expanding to more districts in the coming months.
The bigger change, though, is about control. Access to Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search will be entirely off for K-12 — primary and secondary — student accounts until a school administrator explicitly enables each product. Schools can switch the services on individually, in any combination. Google says it will share more specifics with schools in the coming months before the new defaults roll out, so districts have time to prepare.
That is a reversal of the direction of travel earlier this year, when Gemini features were switched on by default for many student accounts and drew demands for answers from US senators. Google says the new approach came from listening to schools, teachers, researchers and policymakers who wanted the decision about classroom AI to sit with the school, not the vendor.
The company also published research behind the feature. Its main study was a randomised trial with more than 300 students at the University of Tokyo, each given half a day to learn a statistics lesson; Google says students learning with Guided Learning showed stronger improvement than those studying without it. Separately, Google.org is providing more than $9.5 million across five organisations that build AI tools with and for educators.
The announcement has not landed quietly. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan were among those accusing Google of using its dominance to push AI into classrooms, after it emerged that a school wanting no AI at all may have to give up Google Search too, because Search and its AI features are now too integrated to separate. For many districts, Search is not an optional extra but a basic research tool, which is why the linkage has become the controversial part of the package.
Google pushed back publicly on Tuesday afternoon, insisting the changes give schools “more choice, not less”. In a post on X, the company stressed that Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Search can each be turned on separately, that the off-by-default setting was based on schools asking for more control, and that the coming Search changes are designed to make it better for learning rather than to force AI on anyone.
What happens next will be decided in thousands of individual districts. Administrators must weigh a coaching tool with some evidence behind it against concerns about dependence, data and the precedent of a single company controlling both the search box and the AI inside it. The Search pilot this month, and the detailed rollout rules Google has promised in the coming months, will show how much real choice schools feel they have — and how many choose to switch anything on at all.
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