It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System
a year ago by youradhere to c/technology
I regularly advocate for banning phones from schools but people here in Lemmy (same on Reddit years ago) completely lose their shit with that idea, start talking how that'll leave them defenseless in an emergency, how it is torture, how they absolutely can't live without them
Not thirty years ago nobody had cellphones in school, they barely existed, and everything was fine, everyone was fine without and with cellphones I see so much shit going on. Yes, it's the Future, kids need cellphones, but they also need to learn to be without cellphone, and they need to learn responsible use.
honestly a few years ago I didn't agree with it, but now things are enshittifying so much that it really seems to be the better option now. it'll unfortunately bar even those from using their phones who would use it for other things than mindless scrolling, using ai chatbots and playing microtransaction and ad filled games, but for the whole class and the whole generation it would be better in the end.
To me the point is a simple question: why are you at school?
Unless the class is explicitly to teach you how to use your phone responsibly, nobody should have a phone in school. Any arguments I've heard against that always boil down to "but I wannah doom scroohooollll" or some variation of that
Which age were you when you didn't agree and what age are you now? I also this changes drastically as a teen I wouldn't see why it would be bad but nowadays I do (while also everything just got worse and worse, not to glory my time was any better)
Which age were you when you didn't agree and what age are you now?
yeah, that's the reason I probably changed my mind, because it was not too long ago that I would fall under such a restriction, and I remember thinking about schools that do this that it is unfair, and wouldn't have wanted to be in such a school.
Outright banning them from schools is wrong imo, but if I had to put my phone in a locked box every class, I would've lived. I just think banning them outright is bad for needing to contact parents, especially for kids like me who had after school activities often.
My only issue I had with HS teachers were the ones who bitched about people having headphones/earbuds in during class. Obviously I don't have them in during instruction or group work as that would be disrespectful, but if you're not at the front of the room talking and we're doing individual work, I want to have my earbuds in. I had a study block teacher who was so fucking anal about phones and earbuds, when it is literally a fucking break class to do whatever the fuck you want/need to do.
I just really like having music or background noise while doing work.
EDIT: God this blew up.
Well first off, I DEFINITELY remember not being able to contact my parents while at elementary school because they had out state phone numbers, so unless they were at home, I literally couldn't contact them. Furthermore, if teachers get angry at kids simply going to the bathroom, you think they're going to let us ask them to call our parents? Hell no.
Also, how is putting earbuds in while someone ISN'T teaching disrespectful? If you're not lecturing at the moment, then I'm putting my earbuds in. I don't always need them to get work done, but I prefer to. It's especially great if the class is being noisy, as I can put my music on to drown out the outside conversations. There are 30+ year old people who didn't have phones growing up that like to play music while working.
Please remember, most of those who oppose the introduction of phones to schools are part of the gen who decided to introduce them to us and bought the damn phones for the kids.
Many middle schoolers I work with have an ear bud in at all times, and as an ESL teacher my population of kids really needs to practice processing spoken English without that as a distraction. Hell, that applies to every kid.... This isn't an issue of somebody listening to music in the hallway or while studying, this is during class, during lecture, during group work, while writing essays, while reading...
My only issue I had with HS teachers were the ones who bitched about people having headphones/earbuds in during class. Obviously I don't have them in during instruction or group work as that would be disrespectful, but if you're not at the front of the room talking and we're doing individual work, I want to have my earbuds in. I had a study block teacher who was so fucking anal about phones and earbuds, when it is literally a fucking break class to do whatever the fuck you want/need to do.
I actually agree with this. If I have kids doing individual work in my class, I could care less if they’re using their phones or have headphones in as long as 1) they’re working, and 2) they’re willing to put it aside when I need their attention again. I’m actually much more productive with music on, so who am I to judge?
who am I to judge?
You're the teacher?
I know that kids may want / like to do something their way, but how about you learn it the normal way too? You can do your home work at home with music, I did that too, that's fine, but in class you pay attention
I just think banning them outright is bad for needing to contact parents, especially for kids like me who had after school activities often.
Ok, well that's completely ridiculous.
Look, 25 years ago nobody had cell phones in school. Kids had just as many after school activities, this wasn't a problem. It was sometimes inconvenient, but not a problem. It's also worth remembering, many rooms in every high school have phones, you'll be able to use one if you need to.
I get wanting to have your phone throughout the day, I do. But on the other hand... no.
many rooms in every high school have phones
You mean like landlines teachers had at their desks?
I suppose that's fair.
I'm kind of amazed with reading this, really.
No, kids don't need phones. Do you think that after school activities didn't exist thirty years ago? They did and omg, nobody had cell phones so yeah, so ma y kids disappeared and died because of that and of course nothing like that happened because you plan that stuff ahead and worst case, a student can ask the teacher or some central ooi t where all cellphones are kept to make a quick important call.
Same thing also goes for head sets. How the heck do you think we did that thirty years ago? Hint: we simply didn't because it wasn't a thing, it didn't exist. Walkmans barely came into existence and you could wear one outside class, all fine, but I side classes you're there to learn, not to listen to your favorite music or podcast or influencers.
Id I'd have to allow headsets in class I'd refuse to teach. I'm not there to dick around or wsste my time, I'm there to teach and you're there to learn, not to play or dick around
I worked in a school in Asia that actually banned students from bringing their phones to school. One year there was an earthquake in the morning that caused all the trains to stop for half a day while they checked the rails. We were all on our way to the school, got stranded, and some had to walk for hours to get back home. The school got a few calls from parents and the policy was changed the very next week. Now students can bring their phones, but they need to be turned in at the front office when they arrive.
One girl forgot to do it once, so she put her phone her locker. Another earthquake set off the warning alarm system and her phone went off in the hallway. Later that day I saw her getting lectured hard by the staff and the poor thing was in tears. She was actually a good student, so it was weird seeing her in that scenario.
Anyway, I wouldn’t mind the idea of students handing in phones at the front desk, but I was allowed to pack a cd player, a Nokia, and a variety of other devices around my school as a kid. I don’t really see smartphones as being much different, so I don’t mind them being around just so long as students are using them in their own time.
I mean, I was in high school when the cell phones were largely flip phones and that one nokia brick that could probably survive being run over by a tank and at that point the rule was "nobody gives a shit if it's in your pocket/in your bag and on silent, but if I see it or if it's making loud disruptive noises from wherever you've got it it's going in my desk until the bell rings". That still seems a reasonable middle ground in my opinion. That way, it's still accessible enough in the event of an actual emergency but not usable otherwise.
Yeah, that was back when a single person had a cell phone it was a wow thing. Now everyone has it, and the addiction and doom scrolling is real. Kids will have a headset in during class.
Nope, all of it, out. Leave it in your locker, store it at a single special place, whatever, but not in class
Phones totally need to be reeled in. Stop making a Do it all device. Self discipline and responsibility have been guard railed for years. This 100 percent.
Lol… yes my classmates died en masse.
but people here in Lemmy (same on Reddit years ago) completely lose their shit with that idea
I've practically never seen anyone over 19 who was opposed to this idea. It's obviously the right move. Phones don't belong in school.
If you want to get all fussy about the "danger" of being without a phone, they can be allowed to keep it in their lockers until the last bell rings. There's literally no down side to this and a whole lot of up sides.
I mean, you could probably solve this shit by restricting the types of phones used to dumb phones. Phones only capable of texting and calls. Perhaps some basic access to school websites and Wikipedia too. Everything else default blacklisted.
That is just no phones with extra steps
Just leave the damn thing in a special storage at the start of your school day, or in your locker. During lunch you pick it up, and when you leave you take it with you
I was uninterested in school because nothing was ever done to make me interested, even at home.
Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD and now I’m a software developer. Sadly school isn’t for everybody and I just thought I was stupid and lazy, it turns out I was fine I just needed the right help.
Edit: Votes don’t matter but I’d love to know the reasoning for the 5 downvotes on this. Like why don’t you put across your opposition.
100%, but sadly many people, myself included didn’t get that and actively grew up in terrible environments.
I guess that’s what happens when you mum is 18 when you’re born. You’re being raised by a kid that didn’t make the best choices and the cycle continues. Although I don’t and won’t have children.
This is why school should be empowered to do more as that place is literally the only place you’re learning how to be a person and get ready for life.
I saw my dad beat my mum up. Been in the house when he tried to drive the car into the house but got stuck in the privits.
I’ve seen my mum attack my dad with a frying pan and witness my tea be dunked on her head. Or my dad go to prison for drunk driving.
Spent my entire pre high school childhood sat in the back of a car as my mum would berate the different men in her life, to her best friend.
Spent the following years seeing my mum psychologically bully my dad and he would be sat down stairs crying at night.
Is it little wonder that when people grow up like this and with ADHD that they might be hard to reach in school and that they are withdrawn.
I want to say that life’s hard and I don’t blame my family for the shit I grew up because they were young and not ready for life themselves as they had shit lives too. We were fed, went on holidays, and were richer than most of my council estate (I grew up there too) friends, but we didn’t get stability, love, or encouragement which is sad.
Like this is the tip of the iceberg of what shit I’ve seen growing up or some of the fucked up shit they dragged me into, being the eldest. I have two younger brothers and we are all fucked up in different ways but I’m by far the worst (as society would say) in every metric like wages, progress in life etc.
Edit: Looking introspectively I am thinking I’ve got unresolved issues for all this shit to just come out my finger tips on Lemmy 😂
Edit: Reflecting on this a little more, it’s annoying when people like dude I replied to say it’s the parents job. Like no shit dude, but what do you do when the parent fails the child, just leave it at that and say to the kid sorry mate, but it’s your mums fault but good luck in life. It’s the same kind of thing where people say the parents should feed the child so the school doesn’t have to, this just leaves hungry fucking kids.
Well it's not like you had a choice in the matter and that's why they don't care how interested you are. You and the rest of your batch just need to sit still for an hour and a half until you get a break walking to the next boredom session.
I find it quite incredible that I spent 14 years of 40 hours weeks listening to people talk about stuff I did not care about under the assumption that if I didn't I'd end up homeless so they never tried to make me care.
Fortunately we had a computer at home to learn about the stuff I actually cared about.
I find it crushing that they're still making students sit and listen about this boring useless shit when they can just ask their phones about whatever they'd be trying to do if they weren't listening to a course plan from the 1800s about completely obsolete and irrelevant things.
How can this incredibly important phase of life be so hopelessly poisoned by school for absolutely no reasons at all.
Sure but that was not anywhere near the bulk of my time spent in school. Most of my actual learning occurred after school on the internet. School mostly made me accept that my most useful hours of my life would be consumed, and largely wasted, by external forces which I would have little to no control over and even less chances to escape from.
I like to keep a positive mindset on things and although I believe I was failed by the education system, ADHD wasn’t as known back then so to them I was just an easily distracted comedian with no desire to learn, except in maths I would ask for homework as I was alright and it was relaxing and I suppose subconsciously I didn’t feel like a failure here. Again they didn’t really help me nurture that desire.
What I like to keep positive about is that the teacher is powerless to do anything and they just need to teach the most about of people as possible without letting the disruptive kids take time away from the ones who are better at school.
My issue is with the education system for the masses and cynic in me doesn’t believe that systems wants everybody to reach their potential, it’s just to get you used to routine and to allow your parents to be slaves to capitalism. If it was about potential then teachers would be paid more and we would have class sizes similar to private schools (those where you pay obscene amounts) where the teacher can individualise the education.
The "boring useless shit" your talking about is that stuff that teaches people not to repeat dumb ass decisions. The stuff like social studies tells us WHY things are the way they are. The fact that there are people in the US that are cheering for taxation without representation is EXACTLY why we need those boring classes and why you should have to sit through them until you fucking get it. Unfortunately we've let too many through under the guise of no one left behind that we've crwate a couple of generations of complete and utter morons. Morons that stack with lead poisoned and aging geriatrics with dementia. And now we have Trump. Trump is what you get when you ignore everything else in favor of only those things you find interesting or easy.
I understand very well what you mean and what the goal is, the problem is that it just doesn't reflect the reality of what was happening in school. For fuck's sake, not a single class in the entire duration explained how to do taxes or fix your car. It was all the most tepid and diluted of learning, thank fuck I had the internet to learn about the world because there was very little of that going on at school.
I really don't know how it was even possible that so much filler, never ending school slop as appetizing as what they served at the cafeteria.
But really that's not the worse of it, no, even thought it was VERY bad, the worse was the total suppression of agency, the lack of relevance, taking absolutely for granted that we could not escape and so there was never any need to even tell us what we're going to learn or why or have any choices.
Every single day started with waking up too early, bussing around for an hour and then enduring this torture that would not even end one fucking minute at a time. I have a hard time even imagining how it used to be back then. If I had known how bad it was going to be I would have probably killed myself to save myself from this hellish horror. At least real physical torture wouldn't have been so hopelessly boring.
Chris Crawford was talking about this problem in 1992 and we still haven't learned anything
The Dragon Speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBrj4S24074
I couldn't find a transcription, and it covers a lot more than education, but it's a good speech. The relevant part starts at ~12:45
Thanks I'll check that out
For me it is
"Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED"
which is the first result if you search youtube for "ted talk education"
He doesn't really have a solution of mass manufactured education but he does highlight the problem real good
Actually, someone made a drawing version of this talk and it's really good
Ngl. I bought a signal jammer for my wife to use in her classroom (after all, it said “for educational purposes only”) and the kids could never figure out why the signal sucked so bad in her classroom during class times. She never got caught using it and never had to worry about them being on their phones.
If there was an emergency, people would just call the front office and they could always reach her on the land line in the classroom.
Violating federal laws is awesome, everyone should do it.
One proposed Florida law I actually agree with is: phones off during school - all of school, including between classes and recess. Possible exception for lunchtime. Definite exception for when the teacher is specifically using the phones as a fully engaged teaching tool, which should be no more than 20% of overall classroom time, but definitely could be used as a way to "grab attention."
I get wanting to be able to track little Ginny and make sure she got to school O.K. and know when to go meet the bus to pick her up.
There should definitely be "Cybersafety" education in our schools, and the phone as a teaching tool definitely makes sense there.
Having AI write the first draft of your assignment can be a good lesson too, but the remaining 28 minutes should be spent understanding and refining what the AI has given you.
This gives me flashbacks. I had to take Java exams with pen and paper. They took 6+ hours. The reason? Not enough computers for everyone and our teacher wasn't willing to make 2 different exams, like every other fucking teacher does.
I can't imagine dealing with a room full of kids, especially ones with phone addictions.
If your school is not supporting teachers with a cell phone policy you should try to find another place to teach and tell them exactly why when you leave.
Edit: this is also something your union should be pushing for. I'm surprised parents haven't demanded it.
Well yes, and it’s a tourism based economy, which means I usually don’t have to deal with any particular group for longer than a few weeks. Some groups are loads of fun and don’t have any problems with their phones. It usually just depends on which part of wherever they’re coming from, and how life is like for them back home.
It’s possible, but it takes time and effort to prepare, and I’m not getting paid at home, so I’m reluctant to do it.
You could offer the students a choice: no AI and a 5 slide presentation, or allow AI but with a 15 slide presentation, then let them decide. AI makes work more efficient for us, so if we can be 3x more productive, I should expect 3x more product.
I taught an ESL group once. One of the girls, around 15-17, plastered a bunch of ChatGPT text on the slide and sat the whole period on her phone. When it was her group’s turn, she quickly realized the position she put herself in as she was now in at the front of the class trying to sound out a wall of high-level English words she’d never heard before. I gave her the standard score because, even though she failed the task, she tried really hard to read out all those difficult words and I thought that was probably more work than anyone else had done.
I gave her the standard score because, even though she failed the task, she tried really hard to read out all those difficult words and I thought that was probably more work than anyone else had done.
That is a tragic indictment on the state of your class. You are failing your students by refusing to give them failing marks for this shit.
I think she learned the lesson on her own on that one. No need to rub salt on the wound.
Furthermore, at their level, they already assume that they’re hopeless. I don’t want to reinforce that idea and discourage them from reproaching the subject later on. We’re talking about a lower vs mid elementary proficiency rating here, so no one’s life is changing.
• Require students to cite their sources
• Require students to show their working
• Ask students questions related to the process of a given task during class
• For things like media analysis, require them to do it with a pencil and paper without the use of computers where possible
• Treat the use of LLMs as an act of academic plagiarism
All of these are things that schools should already be doing holy shit
Yes, this absolutely. It should have always been like this but there is no other option now with AI.
Only thing I disagree with is using LLMs - if anything they should make that mandatory now because it's going to be totally integrated in the future and they're going to need to get used to using it. BUT grading should be 1000% more stringent on getting facts right and specifically looking for things that LLMs get wrong.
AND all that to say - using your list and other methods to show student knowledge/undertanding should avoid any possibility of being able to complete a task with AI alone.
You gave them a task, they used their imagination to apply it, in a different way than you expected, by using a new tool which is a non traditional method you asked for but the task still got completed. They still loosely completed the task 30 times ahead of schedule by using their imagination on how to constructively solve your problem, utilizing a tool in their imaginary bag.
I don't think it's wrecking the system as long as the LLMs could be trained and ensure strict accuracy (yes I know they can be inaccurate but again so is any tool in its infancy), the system fails people everyday as a whole. I think it's changing the traditional paradigm. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Time will tell. I think ChatGPT is a tool in its infancy. It's changing the way minds think fundamentally like for isntance critical thinking skills decline by relying on "AI" but it frees up the mind to grow in other ways to adjust to the new paradigm.
I think the true point here is fear from breaking traditional values. Humans have never accelerated faster with current technology thats with or without LLM usage.
Holy fuck, we are so cooked.
This is such a concavebrained take. The point of exercises handed out in schools isn't the accomplishment of the set tasks; it's that students internalise the processes necessary to do the task themselves and thereby learn those skills.
Thus, giving away a task to a LLM is only "using their imagination on how to constructively solve [the] problem, utilising a tool in their imaginary bag" in the same way that bullying a nerd into doing the work for them used to be.
I think it's changing the traditional paradigm. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Time will tell. I think ChatGPT is a tool in its infancy. It's changing the way minds think fundamentally like for isntance critical thinking skills decline by relying on "AI" but it frees up the mind to grow in other ways to adjust to the new paradigm.
This is so obviously for the worse. Losing the ability to think critically isn't "freeing up the mind to grow in other ways:" basic critical thought is a foundational prerequisite to fully developing as a person capable of participating in society in the current age in much the same way as basic literacy is. It's limiting the mind from growing in any meaningful way.
And don't get it twisted, you're just saying this shit to be contrarian. I doubt you actually believe this development could be a good thing. Like come the fuck on, let's say in ten years' time you get into some kinda accident and need surgery. There is no way you'd would want your surgeon to be someone who 'did' most of their assessments in med school with a fucking chatbot. Who are you kidding???
You’re not wrong, but the difference is that they came up with a creative solution to avoid the task, not a creative solution to engage the task. If I ask them follow up questions to explain their thoughts and reasoning behind their own work, I get deer in the headlights.
Now, I think the tide is rising with AI and it’s sink or swim if you’re a teacher, so it’s better to just learn what AI is and how to leverage it no matter what people think of it, or if I’m even getting paid for my effort.
A different approach I’m considering is embracing AI for teenage groups and changing the format of the course entirely so there’s more interaction (incorporating AI) than production. I’ll be the first at my school to do it, but I’m also the only person there who could tell you what the fediverse is.
Maybe it was a task they considered shitty and uninteresting. Not trying to be insulting but a lot of teachers have this problem. They assign a task they think will be interesting and captivating to their students only to be disappointed or irritated that their students didnt find it nearly as interesting or fun as the teacher did. You want them to pay attention make it real and relevant to them. That last part being especially important.
Now I get that 100 percent. Avoiding the task makes total sense, especially coming from students of all ages. I absolutely think critical thinking skills are foundational to understanding and knowledge and need to be practiced, learned so much more than they are.
I think rather than free range use of LLMs or any other tool there needs to be some guidance. I don't think clogging the system with dumb laws will do it, and I certainly don't have all the answers. But with the usage of GPT if it can be made explicitly accurate within reason, one can gain knowledge at an accelerated rate due to the speed it can process vast data.
Its awesome to see teachers, educators trying to evolve and improve the learning experience which we desperately need. So thanks for putting in the extra effort whether your rewarded or not financially. The real people the got failed, or generally care thank you for your efforts!
Dunno Yeah I disagree with AI. I grew up without phones but they should not be used in schools.
I actually sometimes ask my students to use their phones to produce presentations and such (AI permitted). I just think the rule needs to be no phones in sight otherwise, and the phone stays if you go to the bathroom.
Right on. Your opinion is better than mine. I’m not a school teacher.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say my opinion is better than anyone else’s, it just an experience that suits the context of the life I’m living now. There are definitely schools out there where the learning culture probably couldn’t handle it.
Because school is boring, that's why.
Most people don't need to learn beyond the fourth grade, especially because calculators and now GPT exist for instant answers.
And I say this as someone who wasted his time all the way up to a Master's degree just to show society I too followed the beaten path. It's time I'll never get back.
It's not a take, it's how children (and adults, frankly) feel about school. It's not great at making you a capable adult.
Do you know how useful my two diplomas were to get a job? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. None of the theories I learned were useful, neither on the job nor for their own sake.
As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life? I'd happily replace learning "how to discover x in n dimensions" with basic financial literacy, for example.
The latter years of the school system are quite literally a waste of time. The useful stuff you learn before high school.
As for middle school, exactly what did you learn that you think is so useful for daily life?
Off the top of my head: basic biology so I'm not dumb enough to be antivax. History subjects that require more than elementary maturity so maybe we can avoid another Holocaust. Enough physics, ecology and chemistry that I can comprehend how climate change is happening. How basic statistics work so I'm not completely lost when someone throws around misleading data.
None of that is automatic from a 4th grade education and is crucial to be a functioning citizen. Learning to take unquestioned GPT answers is not a substitute for actually learning any of those.
You either went to a painfully bad pipeline of schools or were too dumb to recognize the important parts.
It took all of school to help me realize what kind of person I wanted to be, and more importantly, what kind of person I didn’t. It seems it had the same effect for you, albeit a much different outcome. I changed my major two times and was in university a couple years longer than most. It was wasteful for sure, but it directed me down the path that eventually led me to my current career and meeting the wonderful woman who became my wife. My studies don’t really apply to anything I do, but I know they’ve enriched me as a human being.
Just because you didn’t find a use for math in your life doesn’t mean nobody else does either.
Lmao. You think kids are going to be any more interested and pay more attention in a financial literacy course than they are about arbitrary math problems. I have some bad news for you about finance. It's full of math.
but our education system is not good either.
No Child Left Behind has fucked us for over 20 years...
People are blaming these college kids, but their entire k-12 was under No Child, they were never taught critical thinking, what the fuck are they supposed to do? No one ever taught these kids to think for themselves.
We failed an entire generation, and it's too late to fix it for them now, the best we can do is fix it for the kids that will start public education in a few years.
But we'll be paying the price for decades
Like all things republican, you ruin the public service, then tell everybody we need to get rid of this public service cause only the free market can provide that service in good quality.
Vouchers will save us our children!
It’s simply easier to exert control over society through private corporations than in the light of day with public goods and services. Especially when what you desire is of minority opinion.
You are mixing up transparency and legality with the private\public category. When one side of this category is more popular, the other side is often described as the solution to the problems with the former two. But there's no causation.
I would go further back than that. Our entire education system has failed to adapt to the fact that rote memorization is not the most important form of learning and that any question that could be answered in a multiple choice manner is not really worth asking to verify if someone understood the taught material.
We have an education system that has failed to adapt to the easy availability of references which should have resulted in a focus on teaching a "skeleton" of knowledge to students since the exact details can always be looked up as long as you know the information exists and how to interpret it (e.g. you don't need to memorize which element carbon is and how much it weighs, you need to understand what an element is and what important properties of chemical elements are).
We have an education system that failed to adapt to the availability of video recording which would have meant it would be easy to have every student understanding the same language watch the most engaging individuals instead of the average ones, presenting the content in a way designed by entire teams of top teachers, falling back on the average ones only for the interactive parts of education.
We have an education system that still struggles with the teacher for a subject as a single source of failure, both in terms of absence and in terms of that teacher not being very compatible in their explanations with the way specific students think instead of having some kind of online forum or matching of teacher to student for one on one questions in a more flexible manner.
We have an education system that still rigidly adheres to categories like physics, chemistry, mathematics, languages, history, geography,... designed in the 19th century for its degrees even though many jobs require more flexible mixes of knowledge and many also require learning for the entire life, not just at the start.
Students today learn for exams a few days before they happen, then purge that knowledge again a few days or hours afterwards.
There are many, many things wrong with our education system and we failed to even acknowledge that there are possible alternatives.
On the other hand, people don't realize how far we've come especially for rural areas.
I got an uncle still alive and kicking whose school had to combine grades because there were so few kids.
So for the bulk of his public education it was just him and another girl like 2 years younger than him. That was the whole class, and it was literally a one room school. Not "one classroom" it was a one room log cabin with an outhouse. One single teacher "teaching" literally everything to 1st graders and the rare person who stayed till 12th at the same time.
Oregon Trail generation really looks more like the exception than the rule every year. It seemed like a terrible education at the time, but we're sandwiched between complete farces of an education system.
The only point I will disagree on it's about video. Today's teaching actually over relies on video media precisely under the hypothesis you suggested. Unfortunately modern science knows that showing and telling is the lowest and most primitive form of learning. Effective learning happens when the student starts using the knowledge in interaction with others. For example practicing using said knowledge to solve problems and later teaching others about the topic. The old medical adage has been proven to be true: see (hear), do, teach. Video is less effective at knowledge transfer than reading and for the worse, reading proficiency is at an all time low. Precisely because of pedagogic inertia in adapting evidence based strategies and depending on tradition based strategies.
Well, video of an actual good teacher is still better than having to passively listen to a bad one in front of you though. I agree that something more interactive and involving the students more actively would probably be even better though.
And this is why my wife and I homeschool our kids. It’s all about teaching critical thinking. They’re so far beyond their peers in public schools it’s not even close. NCLB was one of the worst decisions for our society in centuries.
I will take limiting liability and running with it. Not just the schools, but the kids and parents too no one wants to be responsible and step up to fix the problem.
Sounds kinda similar to how Wikipedia was approached by instructors. I remember an English teacher proudly proclaiming she had participated in a "Kill Wikipedia" seminar at a convention. Just a few years later, they're instructing students on how to properly use Wikipedia as a starting point and not a primary source.
What are the headline recommendations?
I had the class build a database of ideas, but one I really liked went like this:
You put a bunch of quiz questions into an AI song generator. The students listen to the song and try to provide the answers afterward.
You can make it really stupid and funny if you want.
Another would be to have AI produce a “podcast” about some topic, maybe Elvis interviewing Churchill about who Darwin was. Tell it to use some key points you want the students to take note of, then let them hear it and talk about it afterward.
Sounds like very inventive ways to include AI in teaching and make it fun and interactive.
How are you modifying what you teach? Wikipedia reduced the focus on learning facts, what does AI remove from the syllabus? What areas should be strengthened to leverage AI?
Came here to say that. If AI has the leeway to affect things in a negative way, then we're not focusing on the right things to begin with. If kids are graded sometimes for the amount of (not necessarily coherent and sound) text they're able to spit out, this is what you get.
Not US but I still remember printing off a full page of text, teacher looked at it for less than 5 seconds before giving it a tick. This is all meaningless, no one is reading it, no one cares, nothing matters.
The corrupt cheapskates trying to nickel and dime every ISD in the country to bankruptcy absolutely fell over one another at the opportunity to fire staff and replace them with Clippy.
Twenty years ago, state officials were all fawning over the idea of turning every university in the country into a pile subscription based Udemy online courses. Ten years ago, letting Pearson hijack the lesson plan of every classroom in the country was the dream. This has been a long time coming.
Independent School District.
Although, given how my Houston ISD is being run after being hijacked by the state government...
Well, here's how you figure that out - think about it with your brain. Should children and young adults be given materials and assignments that require them to use thinking and develop their brains, or should they be given machines to do their thinking for them so that it's easier to complete schoolwork?
One route develops valuable brain skills that can be useful for life, and the other teaches dependency on fancy machines to accomplish the same.
- Teachers are overworked, underpaid, some still using course work that hasn't been updated in years despite what the field has advanced
- Students go into college due to the social expectation, some even unsure of what to get into as a career or even a class
- Exceeding above the course requirements does nothing for your GPA, an A that got a "110%" and an A that got 90% are the same.
- Students failing or passing still rack up debt for this social expectation
- Teachers still failing to pay bills for this social need
Yeah AI is the fault here, its not the system at large been fucked over since Reagan.
Well yeah the education system is the burning tire fire and AI is tech bros pouring gasoline all over it
A fitting description, a big tire fire won't really change with the addition of gasoline, burning rubber has a lot of energy to release.
Exactly
For anyone who is also not from the US:
A blue book exam is a type of test administered at many post-secondary schools in the United States. Blue book exams typically include one or more essays or short-answer questions. Sometimes the instructor will provide students with a list of possible essay topics prior to the test itself and will then choose one or let the student choose from two or more topics that appear on the test.
EDIT, as an extra to solve the mystery:
Butler University in Indianapolis was the first to introduce exam blue books, which first appeared in the late 1920s.[1] They were given a blue color because Butler's school colors are blue and white; therefore they were named "blue books".
Give them typewriters
There is test-taking software that locks out all other functions during the essay-writing period. Obviously, damn near anything is hackable, but it's non-trivial, unlike asking ChatGPT to write your essay for you in the style of a B+ high student. There is some concern about students who learn differently or compose less efficiently, but as father to such a student, I'm still getting to the point where I'm not sure what's left to do other than sandbox "exploitable" graded work in a controlled environment.
Speaking from a life of dyspraxia - no, not everyone with sucky handwriting is lazy, many of us would spend 95% of our capacity on making the writing legible and be challenged to learn the actual topic as a result.
keep at it. it is worth the pain.
Computers with some encyclopedia, but no GPTs are fine, no?
If a kid can write and train a mini-GPT trainable on that encyclopedia, then maybe they deserve the mark for desperation and ingenuity and being a fucking new Leonardo.
Open book and calculators would seem reasonable. No communication or searching devices.
GPTs are fine, if you learn to disrespect their output and fix it before presenting it as your own.
Actually, taught that way, GPT may be a tool for teaching critical thinking - if the professors aren't too lazy to mark down the garbage output.
hand writting is a completely useless skill, file it with underwater basket weaving.
Oh. Hate that. You have a list of subjects, prepare for them as good as you can, then get one you know and one you don't, start with one you don't know - not be in time or mood to finish one you know, get something shitty, the other way around - do the one you know and then be interrupted while you just probably remembered something about the one you don't, get something shitty.
I have a friend who has taught Online university writing for the past 10 years. Her students are now just about 100% using AI - her goal isn't to get them to stop, it's to get them to recognize what garbage writing is and how to fix it so it isn't garbage anymore.
I teach Philosophy.
I need them to think for themselves, which just isn’t happening if they turn in work that isn’t theirs.
So, I’m pretty harsh on anyone using AI. Even if it’s for a discussion post, I’m reporting it to the Academic Integrity office.
her goal isn't to get them to stop, it's to get them to recognize what garbage writing is and how to fix it so it isn't garbage anymore.
I wish English teachers did this instead of... Whatever TF they're doing instead.
This is something they should've been doing all along. Long before the invention of LLMs or computers.
This is the inevitable result of "No Child Left Behind" linking school funding to how students performed on standardized tests. American schools haven't been about education for the last 20+ years. They are about getting as much funding as possible.
American schools haven’t been about education for the last 20+ years. They are about getting as much funding as possible.
Not just American schools, all the way back to Leonardo DaVinci and beyond it has been all about the funding.
That's going to be great fun when the AI bubble pops and the subscription prices go up exponentially.
On the other hand, there have been other opinions about education that say it should be about making or researching something. Give a student a goal and let them figure it out using chatbots or whatever.
That sounds like a way to make a generation of students wholly reliant on AI, much to Altman's delight. People are going to still need to know how to do stuff in the future and not just how to request the answers to things from somewhere else.
(Disclaimer: this is not a fully formed counter-argument to your statement, merely my thought-vomit).
As a kid growing up in the 90’s you wouldn’t believe the amount of times my parents and teachers vehemently insisted to me that I MUST do dictionary lookup drills because there’s no way I would just always have access to an electronic dictionary in my pocket. I was also told that I absolutely HAD to be fast at paper-based multiplication and long division. It’s not like I would just carry a calculator around with me everywhere I go, that would be insane!
Knowing how to use a physical dictionary or do basic math in your head is absolutely still a good idea, your phone battery can die, your network connection can fail, and doing challenging things with your brain is good for your long term brain health anyway especially while it's still developing.
Maybe, but are there other things we can focus on? For example, as an ESL teacher, why do my newcomers only get a word to word paper dictionary on end of grade exams? I'm pretty sure the state of North Carolina just hates children? There's literally no reason for this. Give them a digital dictionary.
I guess if Big Calculator was lobbying for children to no longer be taught any maths but for calculators to ask other calculators questions and have the student move answers between them.
If students did useful things, self directed things, were allowed to discover and create, can you imagine how ducking crazy that would be ? Imagine if we didn't largely waste the bulk of everyone's youth on boring 1800s style lecturing toiling in mass education factories ?
I guess everyone just gets a completely different education then...? The education system might have its issues, but providing a baseline bulk level of education to the entire population is not exactly straightforward.
Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don't retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn't cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one's life.
People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.
So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.
Well, pre-recorded video should have LONG ago replaced in person lectures. And we could have had symbolic programs handles all exercises, exams, quiz most of the formulaic interactions that teachers use to bulk up their courses.
All those freed teaching hours could be pooled together to create the video content and refine it more and more.
Instead we've got teacher giving the same lecture 6 times a week. Exhausting and unnecessary. Their efforts would be much better spent with rapid one on one tutoring of only those who need help.
And that was all BEFORE we had AI to offload most of the mundane tasks.
One of my family members participated in one such project, she wrote scenarios for a number of video lectures for schoolkids. It was bad, it was really fucking bad, and I could write an essay explaining why it was so, there's a wide variety of reasons ranging across the technical, legal, administrative, etc. Just one example: you're making a lecture about art? Yeah, go contact the copyright holders if they would be merciful enough to allow us to use the artwork in the video.
And your idea that the default approach should be that kids have no interaction with their teachers is honestly horrifying.
Going to have generations of people unable to think analytically or creatively, and just as bad, entering fields that require a real detailed knowledge of the subject and they don't. Going to see a lot of fuck ups in engineering, medicine, etc because of people faking it.
I am having flashbacks to the scene in Idiocracy where the doctor is talking about his wife.
She's a pilot now.
..or will be in 480 years.
Don't tell them it applies pretty damn perfectly to journalism and online commentators that both heavily shape their worldview even indirectly (because even if you don't believe it your homies will and you get peer pressured) because they'll go into a loop.
Unpopular opinion:
I am a public school teacher and I support public schools, but there have been a lot of issues with our education system for a long time. Talk to any kid with ADHD who had to sit through 12 years, and they are indicative of a larger problem. Our idea of school now is as a place that teaches kids to behave and mostly follow rote instruction. Wouldn't it be so much better if we were teaching kids to be creative thinkers, work well in groups, problem solve, and think critically about the information they're getting? We know that's what school should be, but maybe now we will be forced to go there. Yes, there will be issues like learned helplessness and certain skills being difficult to teach, but it's kind of exciting too.
Though it's also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated... can we not, please?
only the wealthy kids will be well-educated
You could argue we’re already way too far down this road. Quality of education is very dependent on location. Some of it is rich districts but also richer states. Whatever level of granularity you want, there’s always sone more willing or more able to spend money on better educating their children.
For all its faults, Department of Education was at least trying to set minimum standards for those areas unwilling to invest in a good education system and minimum investments for those unable. We desperately needed to raise this bar, not remove it
Anyhow my kids school leaned into ai a bit and taught the kids some valuable lessons about how it works, where it helps, and especially its limitations. There’s nothing wrong with ai as a tool, as by long as you don’t treat it as a magical thing that can think for you
Man, I am 38. When I was in highschool I was in an alternative curriculum Math program called IMP, and it is/was literally what your talking about.
Instead of memorizing equations we were instead given a hypothetical situation and learned to solve it socratically both through conversations as a class with the teacher, and in small groups to try and figure out how to solve it. It made me love math so much I almost made it my life, it was literally everything I needed as a severely ADHD teen. Everything was a puzzle to be solved, and when you solved it you gained not just knowledge, but the perspective to know where the knowledge applies.
OpenSciEd is a model that teaches science like that. There’s been a ton of pushback from conservatives.
This is me with coding. Learn the rules. See a problem. Code a solution.
I wouldn't call it unpopular because how the education system works in America and several other countries has been a very obvious problem for decades. What we should be teaching is more barometer question
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question
The student admitted that he knew the expected “conventional” answer, but was fed up with the professor's "teaching him how to think ... rather than teaching him the structure of the subject.
"Though it’s also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated… can we not, please?"
Trump and Republicans would like nothing more than to turn this country into another Russia where your kids have to pay through the nose go abroad to get a decent education.
Do you mind clarifying what you mean is a problem? Are you saying kids with mild symptoms aren't getting access? Or there are far too many kids accessing the special needs services than can be accommodated?
The cynical view of America’s educational system—that it is merely a means by which privileged co-eds can make the right connections, build “social capital,” and get laid—is obviously on full display here.
Cynical? I call that realistic. That's what privileged co-eds have been using it for the past 100 years.
Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars (probably of their parents saved money) to go to university and have a chatbot do the whole thing for you.
These kids are going to get spit out into a world where they will have no practical knowledge and no ability to critically think or adapt.
This was true before AI, it's just going to be 10x worse with AI
Do you really think schools teach critical thinking and practical knowledge? State mandated education is geared to produce people who are smart enough to run the system and stupid enough not to question it. The fact that this dullard factory is being distrupted by what is essentially an electronic parrot speaks volumes about the whole charade.
I'm not talking about state mandated education. Nobody is required to attend university.
If you go to a college worth attending, they will teach you critical thinking skills as part of the course requirements.
Regardless, the situation with generative AI is not helping in that regard.
I'm thinking the only way people will be able to do schoolwork without cheating now is going to be to make them sit in a monitored room and finish it there.
I really hope I'm dead before we have androids.
Because it test what you actually retained, not what you can convince an AI to tell you.
But what good is that if AI can do it anyway?
That is the crux of the issue.
Years ago the same thing was said about calculators, then graphing calculators. I had to drop a stat class and take it again later because the dinosaur didn't want me to use a graphing calculator. I have ADD (undiagnosed at the time) and the calculator was a big win for me.
Naturally they were all full of shit.
But this? This is different. AI is currently as good as a graphing calculator for some engineering tasks, horrible for some others, excellent at still others. It will get better over time. And what happens when it's awesome at everything?
What is the use of being the smartest human when you're easily outclassed by a machine?
If we get fully automated yadda yadda, do many of us turn into mush-brained idiots who sit around posting all day? Everyone retires and builds Adirondack chairs and sips mint juleps and whatever? (That would be pretty sweet. But how to get there without mass starvation and unrest?)
Alternately, do we have to do a Butlerian Jihad to get rid of it, and threaten execution to anyone who tries to bring it back... only to ensure we have capitalism and poverty forever?
These are the questions. You have to zoom out to see them.
Because if you don't know how to tell when the AI succeeded, you can't use it.
To know when it succeeded, you must know the topic.
The calculator is predictable and verifiable. LLM is not
but what good is that if AI can do it anyway?
It can't. It just fucking can't. We're all pretending it does, but it fundamentally can't.
Creative thinking is still a long way beyond reasoning as well. We're not close yet.
If you want to compare a calculator to an LLM, you could at least reasonably expect the calculator result to be accurate.
What do you think testing is for? It's to show what you know/have learned
Education and learning are two different things. School tests are to repeat back what has been educated to you. Meaningful learning tends to be internally motivated and AI is unlikely to fulfill that aspect.
This is the purpose of essay questions.
When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”
Yikes.
Y'all are surprised?
Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?
If we're going to claim that education is being destroyed (and show we're better than our great^n grandparents complaining about the printing press), I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers. Every other technology that the kids were using had think-pieces and anecdata.
As far as I can tell, the strongest data is wrt literacy and numeracy, and both of those are dropping linearly with previous downward trends from before AI, am I wrong? We're also still seeing kids from lockdown, which seems like a much more obvious 'oh that's a problem' than the AI stuff.
Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?
The only serious method of evaluating critical thinking and creativity is through peer evaluation. But that's a subjective scale thick with implicit bias, not a clean and logical discrete answer. It's also not something you can really see in the moment, because true creativity and critical thinking will inevitably produce heterodox views and beliefs.
Only by individuals challenging and outperforming the status quo to you see the fruits of a critical and creative labor force. In the moment, these folks just look like they're outliers who haven't absorbed the received orthodoxy. And a lot of them are. You'll get your share of Elizabeth Holmes-es and Sam Altmans alongside your Vincent Van Goghs and Nikolai Teslas.
I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers.
I agree that we're flush with think-pieces. Incidentally, the NYT Op-Ed section has doubled in size over the last few years.
But that's sort of the rub. You can't get a well-defined answer to the question "Is Our Children Creative-ing?" because we only properly know it by the fruits of the system. Comically easy to walk into a school with a creative writing course and scream about how this or that student is doing creativity wrong. Comically easy to claim a school is Marxist or Fascist or too Pro/Anti-Religion or too banal and mainstream by singling out a few anecdotes in order to curtail the whole system.
The fundamental argument is that this kind of liberal arts education is wasteful. The output isn't steady and measureable. The quality of the work isn't easily defined as above or below the median. It doesn't yield real consistent tangible economic value. So we need to abolish it in order to become more efficient.
And that's what we're creating. A society that is laser-focused on making economic numbers go up, without stopping to ask whether a larger GDP actually benefits anyone living in the country where all this fiscal labor is performed.
I think it's fine for this to be poorly defined; what I want is something aligned with reality beyond op-eds. Qualitative evidence isn't bad; but I think it needs to be aggregated instead of anecdoted. Humans are real bad at judging how the kids are doing (complaints like the OP are older than liberal education, no?); I don't want to continue the pattern. A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I'd rather learn from that mistake.
A handful of thoughts: There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings? Some kids have AI earlier; are they much different from similar peers without? Where's the broad interviews/story collection from the kids? Are they worried? How would they describe their use and their peers use of AI?
A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I’d rather learn from that mistake.
The "old people complaining about Shakespeare" was the thin end of the wedge intended to defund and dismantle public education. But the leverage comes from large groups of people who are sold the notion that children are just born dumb or smart and education has no material benefit.
A lot of this isn't about teaching styles. It's about public funding of education and the neo-confederate dream of a return to ethnic segregation.
There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings?
A lot of these studies come out of public sector federal and state education departments that have been targeted by anti-public education lobbying groups. So what used to be a wealth of public research into the benefits of education has dried up significantly over the last generation.
What we get instead is a profit-motivated push for standardized testing, lionized by firms that directly benefit from public sector purchasing of test prep and testing services. And these tend to come via private think-tanks with ties back to firms invested in bulk privatization of education. So good luck in your research, but be careful when you see something from CATO or The Gates Foundation, particularly in light of the fact that more reliable and objective data has been deliberately purged from public records.
What's breathtaking is how clueless education system administrators are failing at their jobs. They've been screwing up the system for a very long time, and now they have a whole new set of shiny objects to spend your money on.
In my former school district they paid a ton to some consultancy firm to "use AI to optimize the bus route". The first day of testing the new route many kids didn't get home until after 9pm. They cancelled school for the rest of the week and then immediately reverted to the old route.
Student: AI, write my thesis for me!
Prof: AI, was this thesis generated by AI?
AI: yes, of course, you poor human!
Prof: ...shrug...
I thought my class to write a standard 5-paragraph essay and made all tests essay questions, written in class by pencil- had to have an opening statement, complete sentences, well organized, and a conclusion…was told I was asking too much for a final day of school and everyone I failed got a C minus.
thought my class to write a standard 5-paragraph essay and made all tests essay questions,
I would rather teach them to give short and precise answers LOL
Final day of school. Yeah you're a real piece of shit. Why wait until the last day to pull some shit like that. I bet you gave them a time limit and critiqued their handwriting styles too huh.
Hi,
I would have failed every single one of your tests. Not because I don't understand the material, or the English language, but because structured writing, to this day, makes me seize up. Blank space is one of my biggest triggers for executive dysfunction/PDA. Turning everything into a cookie-cutter essay is just a different form of trying to fit everyone into the same box. More selective than making everything multiple guess, but no better. I feel bad for your students.
Signed,
Former "gifted" kid (with then-undiagnosed AuDHD) who got sick of bad teachers 30+ years ago
if you're in academia you should be able to produce a five paragraph essay.
So, K-12 is "academia" now?
Being able to produce a narrative is an essential life skill.
Lots of essential life skills are difficult for lots of people. Something we get reminded about every time it comes up by people who have no clue what they're talking about yet see fit to tell others what they should and shouldn't do, and how to feel about it.
The world isn't going to cater to you
No fucking shit.
your self diagnosed executive dysfunction
I'm sorry Dr. Jackson, I'll have to let my old neurologist, psychologist, neuropsychologist, and psychiatrist know that The Internet told me that the assessments I had done at ages 23 and 44 are all in my head.
learning to adapt is probably a useful habit.
You're right! I'm just going to do that instead of being in constant psychological agony. Where were you all of my life? ❤️ If only I had someone talking down to me saying Just Do The Thing over and over again, from childhood onwards, life would have been so much easier.
🤡
...so you just gonna leave everyone in suspense? The internet loves armchair psychology!
There are good teachers, and there are good methods for writing essays. Did anyone ever give you a graphic organizer to plan an essay? You should know how to put an essay together after coming up with an organized outline, and you should never write an essay from beginning to end without planning it out first in some way or another.
Workaround 1: AI write my thesis in French. Translator app, translate my thesis into English.
Workaround 2: AI write my thesis and insert „Hadouken“ randomly everywhere. AI remove „Hadouken“ from my thesis.
Ah yes, goal misalignment at its finest.
The students need high grades to get a job, so they focus on ensuring that happens (AI use being the easy path).
The teachers have progression targets to meet, so they focus on ensuring this happens (keep the AI vulnerable assessments).
If you want to change a module as a teacher, good luck getting that work loaded when you should be implementing AI in your curriculum ^_^
If success is determined by a metric, the metric will go up. Any relation to actual increase in value is coincidental. Lol. Long ago someone tried to incentivize programers by giving abonus per bug fixed. Didn't last long before they blew through the bonus budget and realized the programers were putting in bugs so they could fix them. (Urban legend really... probably)
In practice you're right, and I'm not going to even try to argue the real life consequences AI has caused. However I disagree that AI doesn't have any place in the education system. Used on the appropriate problems, AI is a tool that makes a few things which were challenging to compute much easier. One example is large AI models folding proteins for medical research. A problem that took a computer a day or more to solve can be solved in hours on the same equipment using AI software. That's just one application that admittedly isn't useful to school aged children but it's still one useful example of AI. There are others. Students should be taught how to use AI properly, and part of that is teaching them what it's good at and what it'll never be able to do.
The part I get angry about is disgusting Tech Bro Billionaires trying to shove AI into every piece of software they can. Just like the block chain they're over promising and there's a bubble. Unlike block chain technology AI actually has a few useful applications and because of that it'll take a lot longer that BitCoin to finally level out.
The protein-folding ai is not the same as the generative ai.
It's really unfortunate that the conversation around AI lumps these different technologies together
Generative ai is a tool that must be used carefully else the kids will take the easy path.
It’s kinda funny cause usually isn’t it the AI agent that has a misaligned goal? Like when I say don’t die, and it discovers that pausing Tetris technical means you never die. But now it’s students that have been given the wrong goal: pass the test by whatever means (e.g. use AI).
That's the real joke behind it all, the use of AI is such a problem because we're turning education into a stamp dispenser - everyone needs an A* to get anywhere.
AI has given every student a path to this - however if industry stopped demanding that universities train their damn staff for them, and instead insist we teach their future staff how to be trained (as well as giving them subject specific knowledge), then we'd see the misalignment vanish. Once the need for an A* to land a good job is gone, then so is the misalignment.
I work in higher education making online courses. It’s really stressing everyone out.
Stressing out in what way? For the viability of your job being lost to this ai bullshit? For the outcomes of students who will just try to chatGPcheaT their way through everything?
Likely both. I used to be involved in creating educational material for employers. First, voiceover artists were replaced with shockingly low quality AI models. This was about two years ago. Training prices didn't drop and no employers complained.
The industry experts we'd pay for consultation were increasingly replaced with ChatGPT queries. Information was sometimes wrong but the employers purchasing these trainings would catch and correct it (for free) in the proofing process. Prices stayed the same, employers still didn't complain.
After launching trainings, we'd monitor engagement. When asking relatively simple questions that anyone who paid attention would be able to answer immediately, the average response time was initially about 2-3 minutes, then about 60-90s for subsequent questions. They were likely finding ChatGPT and using it to answer the questions. We shared these findings and, you guessed it, employers didn't care.
How are other countries handling it? I can't imagine AI being an American only education issue.
It's in France and I guess everywhere else. Students can cheat for free and no longer need to do anything, why would they study anymore?
I've also seen a few young engineers using ChatGPT to do their job because it's easier than working. When I told them their code was bad (with mentoring and help, I'm not an asshole), they used another prompt that changed their whole code but it was still full of bugs.
We're doomed.
Students can cheat for free and no longer need to do anything, why would they study anymore?
In theory, they need to study in order to learn the skills necessary to be gainfully employed. But in practice, the promise of the future is "automate everything", so might as well learn how to maximize the outputs of the Big Grifting Machine while you're still young.
Why waste time mastering comprehensive writing when there won't be any employers left to read what you wrote? Why waste time developing technical skills when everything gets outsourced to the lowest bidding firm in the South Pacific? Why waste time developing a talent for artistry, music, or cinema when we've decided the future of performative arts is whatever bot-farm best self-promotes AI slop to the top of the most trending Spotify playlist?
When I told them their code was bad (with mentoring and help, I’m not an asshole), they used another prompt that changed their whole code but it was still full of bugs.
Why do they care if the code is full of bugs? They'll be changing jobs in another two years anyway, because that's the only way to get a raise. They aren't invested in the success of their current firm, much less the profitablility of the clients they work for (who are, themselves, likely going to be outsourcing this shit to India in another few years). And all this work is just about maximizing the bottom line for private equity anyway, so why does anyone care if the project succeeds? It's not like my quality of life hinges on my ability to do useful productive work.
And if quality of life declines? Just find someone to blame. Migrants. The Wrong Politicians. China. Lizard People. Fuck, I'll just ask ChatGPT why my life sucks and believe everything it tells me, because... why not? Its not like everyone else isn't lying.
I code for fun, have been doing so for decades and using AI as an helper has been amazing.
My coding skill in my cursed basic variants (VB6/VBA/vb.net)
translated overnight to basically any language that I want, it's just amazing.
I can almost code in javascript by hand just from exposure, despite never formally trying to learn it
Apropos of nothing, I read a post claiming that the phonetic pronunciation of "ChatGPT" in France translates to "Cat I farted." So I used Google Translates audio and sure enough, "ChatGPT" and "Chat j'ai pété" sound nearly identical when piped through the app's audio feature.
Yeah, I figure this isn't going to be an American only problem.
American education isn’t actually about education, but about creating compliant cogs for the machinery of the corporate oligarchy. When the goal is the betterment of individuals and society, the methods with which you teach and assess progress will be dramatically different. This is more of an “American problem” than the rest of the world precisely because of how the American system is designed and implemented. It does not value, measure, reinforce, or reward individual betterment… but rote memorization and how compliant you are under the arbitrary authoritarian structure of the system.
American education isn’t actually about education, but about creating compliant cogs for the machinery of the corporate oligarchy.
Well, historically that's true.
But the modern American education system is about Stack Ranking to create the illusion of meritocracy. So the functional purpose of the system is to score better than the rest of your classmates. Since the actual lesson plan doesn't matter and only the honors you get from completing the course are perceived to have value, you either want to cheat the hell out of every course to beat the herd. Or you want to find a degree plan where you can appear to be the Best Kid In Class, either through grade inflation or by participating in a class full of dropouts/fake students.
It does not value, measure, reinforce, or reward individual betterment… but rote memorization and how compliant you are under the arbitrary authoritarian structure of the system.
Rote memorization is easy to evaluate, because the answers are discrete and can be fed into a binary grading engine.
It's also easy to cheat, because you don't need to know how to solve the problems, just how to source the correct pattern of answers.
Despite your wall of text this isn't just a problem in the United States.
I never said it was. However it is a much bigger problem in the US.
How are other countries different?
The story, which involves interviews with a host of current undergraduates, is full of anecdotes like the one that involves Chungin “Roy” Lee, a transfer to Columbia University who used ChatGPT to write the personal essay that got him through the door
Students are turning in work they didn't perform as their own? How novel!
I reckon we have reached that state for a long time.
The vast majority of people would have a pretty hard time without food logistics, utilities, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals. The list goes on.
All of which are provided by corporations of some form or another.
Something something about civilization being 5 warm meals away from collapse.
I can confirm this is not just in the land of burgers. Back in the war from October to December, I fleed to Germany and went to school there, and the stuff I saw where absolutely disgusting: kids were using ipads (ibads) given to them by the school, the computers ran windows on them, and every time even a single task came up, they would directly resort to artificial unintelligence. When the "ceasefire" started and I finally went back to Lebanon, most of the kids were using Artificial unintelligence to write their essays as well. I don't blame these kids, they don't know better, they don't know how artificial unintelligence is trained from the stolen work of the people, they don't know what non-free software is, and they don't know how these devices/software are tracking their every move. It's up to the school's to teach them such and schools are doing a terrible job both in America and internationally.
Unfortunately, I think many kids could easily approach AI the same way older generations thought of math, calculators, and the infamous “you won’t have a calculator with you everywhere.” If I was a kid today and I knew I didn’t have to know everything because I could just look it up, instantly; I too would become quite lazy. Even if the AI now can’t do it, they are smart enough to know AI in 10 years will. I’m not saying this is right, but I see how many kids would end up there.
This could be complete bullshit because im not an expert but i sometimes think that we could have a future where without testing and nurturing peoples critical thinking skills we end up with people who dont know how to create a rational argument or assess information they are given for its accuracy and authenticity, or to know when they are being deceived by malicious actors.
English writing assignments as simple as a book report require you to take different views and angles on something to understand it better and the nuances of the whole, but tell a LLM to write it for you and you are not developing that part of your own mind where you may learn to do things like see the whole story above the individual events noise, see things from others perspective/feelings and understand alternate world views. These are critical for having empathy for others and understanding the world around you.
And that is just one small example i came up with.
We are already there. Just look at the state of society right now and observe the critical thinking and media literacy skills of the average person.
In the words of cyberpunk author Wiilam Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.“
I always think about the Time Machine and the Eloi people. I really think that is the world we are headed towards. Basically creating a class of cattle brained people, and a class of super humans.
know AI in 10 years will.
That kind of the main problem: there is no indication that it will. I know one thing: current way LLM works, the chances that the problem of "lying" and "hallucinations", will even be solved are slim to none. There could be some mechanism that works in tandem with the bullshit generator machine to keep it in check, but it doesn't exist yet.
So most likely either we will collectively learn this fact and stop relying on this bullshit, which means there is a generation of kids who essentially skipped a learning phase, or we don't learn this fact, and there will be a society of mindless zombies that are fed lies and random bullshit on a second-to-second basis.
Both cases are bleak, but the second one is nightmarish.
but we already have Fox News
It’s all based off of predictions, it has no concept of the physical world or the ability to understand facts. Its goal is to please the user, not parse the entirety of human knowledge and provide an insightful complete thought.
The fact people can't even use their own common sense on Twitter without using AI for context shows we are in a scary place. AI is not some all knowing magic 8 ball and puts out a ton of misinformation.
Yeah my university (California State University system) has some chatgpt school partnership now.
Prelude to the society Vonnegut wrote about in 'Player Piano' and Bradbury in 'Farenheit 451'
We’ve been needing to rework education for years now anyway. At least this will force the teachers to change & adapt, whether they like it or not.
Teachers are generally quite adaptable. We have asjustes for AI in our classrooms. We have adjuated to not teaching up to standards because we would be fined by our states for pushing some imaginary agenda. We have changed our entire curriculum the week before classes start because the County curriculum specialist had a bright idea.
The reality is that we have to navigate arbitrary law, we have to not do what's best for our classroom and teaching style because someone who hardly spent any time in a classroom thinks they know better. We have to do all this while being blamed for the behavior of students when their parents block the school phone numbers.
I’m not saying there aren’t great teachers, but I have family in education and know a lot of teachers, and I would not describe most of them as adaptable.
The key concern with reforming social programs like public education is that they are ongoing concerns with impacts that extend decades into the future. "Creative destruction" in public education is liable to cause far more harm than good if the transition is not handled with knowledge and care.
I think doing nothing, while this emerging tech obliterates the functioning of existing methods, is much more dangerous.
My point is that doing "something" haphazardly is just as dangerous, if not more so, than doing nothing.
I love that this guy is in an Ivy League school to meet his 'co-founder', when it's hard to believe that someone that knows nothing and is intellectually incurious could ever found anything of value.
My point is that it's a somewhat outdated skill, and these kids have enough to figure out without the encumbrance of a paper dictionary. Most of my kids have never used one before, and yes, I can show them how to use it, but it's not a functional testing accommodation. Testing accommodations should not include learning skills that are only tangentially related, especially not when there is a reasonable alternative.
If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I'm supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I'm here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we'd have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don't waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.
This has always seemed overblown to me. If students want to cheat on their coursework, who cares? As long as exams are given in a controlled environment, it's going to be painfully obvious who actually studied the material and who had ChatGPT do it for them. Re-taking a course is not going to be fun or cheap.
Maybe I'm oversimplifying this, but it feels like proctored testing solves the entire problem.
Problem is, by the time they've failed the test, the opportunity for them to learn the content is largely passed.
The purpose of school is to educate and teach thinking skills. Tests are just a way to assess how effectively you and your students are achieving that goal. If something (in this case easy access to AI tools in the classroom) is disrupting that teaching/learning process, sure it's useful to detect that through testing, but I'd doesn't do anything really to solve the problem. Some fraction of kids are disciplined enough to recognize that skating by on classwork will lead to poor test results and possibly retaking classes, but generally those aren't the kids you need to worry about anyway.
Who would you rather have as a surgeon? The one who did all their coursework by hand and graduated with Bs or the straight-A superstar who got a full ride to John Hopkins by using ChatGPT and just hiding their tracks better than the rest of the class? I'm not saying those are the only two options, but there's definitely a reason we shouldn't be so cavalier with cheating
In France you cannot fail a middle or high school class anymore. The official explanation is that it hurts the kids' feelings. The teachers' explanation is that too many people would fail.
AI is probably the worst invention sense the atom bomb.
Ah yes. The education system. Yeah. That one. where the kids gets slain periodically and systematically. That education system. Where they don't get food. The one where they are killed in systematically over and over without reaction. It's being destroyed by ai? OK.
The teacher uses PowerPoint and multiple choice tests to depict fake effort at teaching, the students use AI to depict fake effort at learning. I see nothing wrong here.
Oh, do your regional school districts let teachers design their own curriculum?
You know that this is a global forum, right?
Of course AI isn’t the enemy. The enemy is their corporate ownership.
But no doubt AI will be huge in the future, in the sense that “AI” basically means “much better computing capabilities than we have now.”
Yes, but like mental math, it didn't go away when we introduced calculators, and there's a correlation between people who have those skills and income levels (which I'm using as a proxy for "usefulness"). The education system needs to adapt to assignments that students can't just paste into ChatGPT and call it a day- students need to keep spending effort learning.
True but a downvote magnet on Lemmy. But I would dispute the "benefit" part... What exactly is the benefit in not having to learn anything? Why would I even want to exist if not to be good at something and create something? It just seems like we're building towards stuff that's better than us at doing what WE want to do as a society. Thinking about chess here: why would I care about the best Stockfish moves in every line of my favorite opening if no one will ever be able to explain them?
Congrats you are now the old person saying "young bad"
Bet the squirt of dopamine you got hitting send was orgasmic
That's a clean gotcha
I'm sorry you don't like being reminded you are old.
BRO, what an opinion. Love how out of touch and sarcastic you are. Really adds to the "I am not aware of the damage tech billionaires are vomiting out into society" vibe.
If the goal of school was to learn then people wouldn't cheat the learning process.
When the goal is a piece of paper that makes you more likely to be employed then people will find the easiest path to get the piece of paper.
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NGL, it’s really f*cking depressing when you give students 30m to create something of their own imagination, and they do it in the first minute with chatGPT and spend the other 29m playing games the phone and asking to “go to the bathroom” whenever they notice someone in the hallway.
The excuses you hear when you do something so oppressive as to request they keep their phones in their own backpacks for the duration of the task.
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