- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmit.online
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It’s breathtaking how quickly the President of the United States and his good South African buddy can topple a superpower.
- 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.
Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Is it a time problem?
Paper is a renewable resource, rare metals used in computers aren’t, and the contents of the dictionary will be the same either way
That’s really not true. Paper production takes a lot of (often non-renewable) energy, ink usually consists of non-renewable chemicals, paper is often harvested from nonrenewable destruction of forests (especially in the US with Trump’s plans to cut down national forests), paper production belches a lot of pollution into the air and pollutes a lot of water, etc.
The energy can be obtained from renewable sources any time we decide to quit fucking around and make it happen, wood pulp can be replaced with hemp far more easily than that and requires less chemical treatment in the process. There are no similar options for mitigating the negative impact of mining or making our supply of those metals any bigger.
Yes but the process of obtaining the information is significantly more difficult. We can, you know, reuse the same 20 translation devices for years, and all kids have a laptop… I feel like you’re focused on the wrong thing.
In what universe is an electronic device being handled by children going to last 20 years? Not ours
No, it’s only more difficult for those without the skills to use the Index or Table of Contents in a book. Which is not really much of a difficult skill to learn. You pretty much need to know about alphabetical order and how one is at the front and the other is at the end of the book.
You sound like my teachers that bitched about calculators and the internet.
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.
I work in industrial bureaucratic institution and yes, I wouldn’t expect any kind of good results or quality for a very long time if they suddenly pivoted to creative video making.
But we know it’s very possible, if you look at crash course or khan academt and the like, to have something not as tedious as book reading or sterile whiteboard live lectures.
There are simply not enough people for personal individual instruction on everything you need to know.
We have computers, we have on demand video, we have AI, I’ve watched Khan academy and the countless others, it is not a tenable position to tell me this can’t be RADICALLY different because I’ve seen it. I know it can be better. We need to take out the old models and break the mold, the old business model is finished, has been finished for decades and decades but it lives on unchanged because of its own self-healing bureaucracy. It’s institutionalized way of doing things. This is the fuel behind the vapid and dangerous chainsaw wielding freaks who want to privatize it all.
It HAS to change and it has to STOP fighting against progress and change. And for that we have to make this future livable for the people who will be working there.
Capitalism went so hard it fucked up its future workforce
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.
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.
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.
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 ^_^
Yet they keep shoving it down our throats forcing us to delete entire systems to be rid of it
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.
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.
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.
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How are other countries different?
