AI is not your enemy. It IS the future whether you like it or not. Your kids will benefit from AI in ways you cannot even imagine.
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.
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.”
lol , piret getting robbed kind of situation we are in
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.
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.
It’s breathtaking how quickly the President of the United States and his good South African buddy can topple a superpower.
Don’t worry they’ve defunded all of the bodies that might have compiled any fair statistics so they can deny the downfall for a few years.
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 ^_^
AI is bullshit and has no place in a school curriculum outside of computer science. Keep that shit away from children if you want them to have any critical thinking skills.
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)
Yet they keep shoving it down our throats forcing us to delete entire systems to be rid of it
Maybe the best headline that’s come out of the recent LLM explosion
- 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.
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
Yes and no. Remember that rich kids could always hire ghost writers. ChatGPT made that available to the masses, but that particular problem goes back centuries.
What we have seen is that the curriculum is often decided by a distant committee who actually doesn’t understand life on the ground. In reality, there are easy ways for teachers to undercut the utility of ChatGPT, if they have the freedom to make changes. But that depends on teachers having control and the time to make changes to how they teach.
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.
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.
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.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.
but we already have Fox News
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.
Brave New World? No, the rulers aren’t that benevolent.
1984? Still no, they aren’t that competent.
We are heading for fareinheit 451.
You’ve never watched a 12 year old write a book report have you.
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?
“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.
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.
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
There is plenty wrong with generative AI as a tool if you think of it in those terms.
I would say that if the depth of analysis is limited to “AI” or “genAI” then use of it in schools is overwhelmingly bad. If that’s the limit of our ability to frame the issue, then banning AI would appear inevitable, and any graded assignment that might encourage AI use should be banned.
But if you want to break things down, you can find specific tools (i.e., calculators, grammar checkers) that could be labeled as AI or specific uses of genAI (i.e., brainstorming) that have use. And it is this latter approach – clearly identifying positive uses – that is difficult for students, media writers, and apparently policy makers to do.
As someone with adhd the public school system was hell. My local community college had a program where you could get your ged and learn a trade so I left my junior year to do that instead. I really wish the public school system was better but sadly people just don’t care enough.
I work with special needs kids in a school district and the amount of access kids with even mild symptoms is atrocious. It’s a huge problem.
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?
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.
Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?
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.
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.
I’ve definitely never only read halfway through a long comment and still upvoted
I would have thought marking coursework has a higher standard than upvoting a lemmy post, but turns out it’s the other way around
I’m not talking about the US specifically either. It’s a global problem.
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.
ISD
Imperial Star Destroyer?
Independent School District.
Although, given how my Houston ISD is being run after being hijacked by the state government…
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.
