Capitalism went so hard it fucked up its future workforce
It’s breathtaking how quickly the President of the United States and his good South African buddy can topple a superpower.
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.
- 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.
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 ^_^
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Survivorship bias and privilege. We never had phones in our classrooms.
Yes indeed. You should ask your parents about the aunts and uncles you would have had if only smartphones had been invented 2 decades earlier. I am sure they will have tons of stories to tell /s.
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.
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.
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.
Plenty of schools do that
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.
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.
This is survivorship bias. Many weren’t fine but you don’t get to hear from them today.
Lol… yes my classmates died en masse.
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.
(after all, it said “for educational purposes only”)
The FCC hates this one simple trick
Violating federal laws is awesome, everyone should do it.
If it’s good enough for the President! /s
“Removed by mod” haha
Fuck YES (says a middle school teacher)
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.
The “evan at home” part is 100% more important than the school part. Making sure your kid gets educated at school is a parent’s job.
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.
You, uh, might want to talk to someone a little more qualified than anonymous people on Lemmy.
Yeah I’m not really here for therapy, just needed to get that out I guess.
Clearly I do need to talk to someone, but that’s a scary thing and not cheap.
You are correct on both accounts.
Sending you good vibes and money for therapy (only half of the last sentence is true).
Good vibes is what makes life bearable so I appreciate those my friend.
I had great, loving parents who tried their best to get me interested in my education. It didn’t matter. ADHD meant I was never going to be a good student.
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.
Sometimes the process of answering the question is more important than having the answer. For example if AGI is writing your essay from first draft on you will never learn how to communicate a concept from beginning to end without assistance which will make it harder for you to think.
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 taxation 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
awesome, I’ll check that out
I can’t imagine dealing with a room full of kids, especially ones with phone addictions.
Well it’s better than them throwing things at each other like we used to do, I suppose.
Can’t you just make them turn off the computers/phones and do it by hand?
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.
When I need them to, I do, but then suddenly everyone starts needing to go to the bathroom way more frequently.
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.
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.
I don’t care that much. I live on an island and most of my “students” are actually just tourists pretending they’re there for educational purposes.
It’s really fucking depressing
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.
Is there not a way to plan the assignment so that it’s not doable in 1m with ChatGPT?
• 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.
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.
I don’t understand how you are not paid for planning time. Without providing that the school just makes their teachers glorified babysitters.
Yep. I totally agree. Hopefully I’ll find a school that does pay me for planning time eventually,
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.
Do you have a suggestion?
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!
Thanks. It’s motivating to hear that.
Educators are the future for us all. Knowledge and how to apply it is everything even more so the faster humanity accelerates.
I think it sucks your care and compassion isn’t financially rewarded from a school level but the effort, care, and value of going the extra mile always gets noticed/remembered and should be rightfully encouraged and appreciated. Respect.
*We all know these hellion kids are a handful to deal with 😂
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.
Good god, if you went through an entire education and don’t realize how fucked of a take that is I don’t know what to say. Go try again at a different school maybe?
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.
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.
Except that personal finance (which of what I’m referring to) is mostly arithmetic, while high school (and a good chunk of middle school) math is mostly algebra.
The moment letters come into the equation (no pun intended) is when you start to lose me. And its usefulness on a day-to-day basis.
Sorry but financial literacy requires more than 5+5. And if you can’t understand the concept of a variable there are more problems then the course work here.
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.
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.
Holy shit, thank you, finally someone in this thread is still living in the same reality as I am.
I’ve been to 7 different schools and the answer is horrible pipe lines. But the true answer isn’t so black and white. It’d largely dependant on area, class, state and local Govts. School fails people everyday, the govt and its systems fail people everyday, medical fails people everyday etc. Systems are not perfect they just allowed humans to organize. Subsequently also disorganize too by adding too many layers.
You’re right, I was too hyperbolic when I said 4th grade was enough. Biology was indeed useful and so was history. Likewise, learning a second language from 5th grade was crucial for the conversation we’re having right now.
Still, I’d put the usefulness “cut off” point at 9th grade or so.
On a side note, I know people who did the whole of university with me who today are anti-vaxers. I know IT BSc graduates who think Trump totally isn’t yet another fascist dictator, and I know a doctor who believes name brand ivermectin cures cancer.
Turns out more education isn’t necessarily related to coming out the other side of the pipeline not being any of the things you mentioned. It’s maddening.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
In what universe is an electronic device being handled by children going to last 20 years? Not ours
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.
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.
I teach at a community college. I see a lot of AI nonsense in my assignments.
So much so that I’m considering blue book exams for the fall.
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”.
Importantly it is hand written, no computers.
Biggest issue is that kids’ handwriting often sucks. That’s not a new problem but it’s a problem with handwritten work.
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.
I love this idea.
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.
I can get the essay done in time or it can be easy to read it cannot be both
keep at it. it is worth the pain.
This is why we have accommodations offices at colleges.
No problem giving an alternative for those who need it.
In the 1980s that wasn’t really a thing. Besides, it taught me a valuable skill: I partnered with someone who was good at taking notes and I was good at paying attention without taking any notes - she, too, had a problem understanding what she was writing down while writing it down, but took beautiful copies of the lecture. So, afterwards we’d get together and I’d explain her notes to her - which helped me to cement the concepts in my head, at least long enough to get through the exam, and she got her notes explained.
Man, the US has a handwriting problem. It sucks sooo much. In other countries it seems to be only doctors, but in the US? Fucking everyone.
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.
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.
Only if the first draft is the student’s own creation otherwise they will never learn how to analyze a work and construct the argument theu want to make beginning to end.
A lot of people “have trouble getting started” - in all kinds of endeavors. Once you get them rolling, they can see the pattern and do it for themselves next time. If the AI glop gets lucky and copied decent argument from beginning to end (something I’ve seen it fail spectacularly at many times), then that can help jumpstart people who are stuck, but only if they can recognize when it’s just a bunch of glop.
Really, if would be better for them to read a bunch of samples for themselves (which is what the AI does) and hopefully they can get the pattern. What I think is a horrible approach is to sit in a lecture hall and listen to a little guy down front drone in a monotone about the theory of what you are supposed to do, then try to synthesize from the fragments of what you understood from that what is expected. Samples to work from are much more efficient.
Open book and calculators would seem reasonable. No communication or searching devices.
No communication - of course, but about search - I don’t think having a Wikipedia snapshot with search is bad.
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.
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.
Sadly, that may be the best we can hope for.
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.
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.
Fair distinction. Arguably, writing isn’t about thinking.
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.
Why do you need to learn reams of facts when you can get an answer in the fraction of a second ? Seems pointless anyway.
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.
Lmao. I’m guessing you don’t work in any of those fields. Got some bad news for ya bud. It’s been that way for decades. Probably centuries.
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.
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.
more like 200
More like 1000
Wait wait, can this be where we get “a load of Bologna (baloney)” from? Or is that because no one knows what’s actually in bologna…
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.
How is this kind of testing relevant anymore? Isn’t it creating an unrealistic situation, given the brave new world of AI everywhere?
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
I’m not sure what you’re implying. I’ve used it to solve problems that would’ve taken days to figure out on my own, and my solutions might not have been as good.
I can tell whether it succeeded because its solutions either work, or they don’t. The problems I’m using it on have that property.
The problem is offloading critical thinking to a blackbox of questionably motivated design. Did you use it to solve problems or did you use it to find a sufficient approximation of a solution? If you can’t deduce why the given solution works then it is literally unknowable if your problem is solved, you’re just putting faith in an algorithm.
There are also political reasons we’ll never get luxury gay space communism from it. General Ai is the wet dream of every authoritarian: an unverifiable, omnipresent, first line source of truth that will shift the narrative to whatever you need.
The brain is a muscle and critical thinking is trained through practice; not thinking will never be a shortcut for thinking.
That says more about you.
There are a lot of cases where you can not know if it worked unless you have expertise.
This still seems too simplistic. You say you can’t know whether it’s right unless you know the topic, but that’s not a binary condition. I don’t think anyone “knows” a complex topic to its absolute limits. That would mean they had learned everything about it that could be learned, and there would be no possibility of there being anything else in the universe for them to learn about it.
An LLM can help fill in gaps, and you can use what you already know as well as credible resources (e g., textbooks) to vet its answer, just as you would use the same knowledge to vet your own theories. You can verify its work the same way you’d verify your own. The value is that it may add information or some part of a solution that you wouldn’t have. The risk is that it misunderstands something, but that risk exists for your own theories as well.
This approach requires skepticism. The risk would be that the person using it isn’t sufficiently skeptical, which is the same problem as relying too much on their own opinions or those of another person.
For example, someone studying statistics for the first time would want to vet any non-trivial answer against the textbook or the professor rather than assuming the answer is correct. Answer comes from themself, the student in the next row, or an LLM, doesn’t matter.
If you want to compare a calculator to an LLM, you could at least reasonably expect the calculator result to be accurate.
Why. Because you put trust into the producers of said calculators to not fuck it up. Or because you trust others to vet those machines or are you personally validating. Unless your disassembling those calculators and inspecting their chips sets your just putting your trust in someone else and claiming “this magic box is more trust worthy”
A combination of personal vetting via analyzing output and the vetting of others. For instance, the Pentium calculation error was in the news. Otherwise, calculation by computer processor is understood and the technology is acceptable to be used for cases involving human lives.
In contrast, there are several documented cases where LLM’s have been incorrect in the news to a point where I don’t need personal vetting. No one is anywhere close to stating that LLM’s can be used in cases involving human lives.
How exactly do you think those instances got into the news in the first place. I’ll give you a hint. People ARE vetting them and reporting when they’re fucking up. It is a bias plain and simple. People are absolutely using Ai in cases involving humans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/well/ai-drug-repurposing.html
https://www.advamed.org/2024/09/20/health-care-ai-is-already-saving-lives/
https://humanprogress.org/doctors-told-him-he-was-going-to-die-then-ai-saved-his-life/
Your opinions are simply biased and ill-informed. This is only going to grow and become a larger and larger dataset. Just like the auto driving taxis. Everyone likes to shit on them while completely ignoring the truth and statistics. All while acting like THIS MOMENT RIGHT NOW is the best they’re ever going g to get.
It often is. I’ve got a lot of use out of it.
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.
It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.
Specialized AI like that is not what most people know as AI. Most people reffer to it as LLMs.
Specialized AI, like that showcased, is still decades away from generalized creative thinking. You can’t ask it to do a science experiment with in a class because it just can’t. It’s only built for math proof.
Again, my argument is that it won’t never exist.
Just that it’s so far off it’d be like trying to regulate smart phone laws in the 90s. We would have only had pipe dreams as to what the tech could be, never mind its broader social context.
So tall to me when it can, in the case of this thread, clinically validated ways of teaching. We’re still decades from that.
Show me a human that can do it.
The faulty logic was supported by a previous study from 2019
This directly applies to the human journalist, studies on other models 6 years ago are pretty much irrelevant and this one apparently tested very small distilled ones that you can run on consumer hardware at home (Llama3 8B lol).
Anyway this study seems trash if their conclusion is that small and fine-tuned models (user compliance includes not suspecting intentionally wrong prompts) failing to account for human misdirection somehow means “no evidence of formal reasoning”. Which means using formal logic and formal operations and not reasoning in general, we use informal reasoning for the vast majority of what we do daily and we also rely on “sophisticated pattern matching” lmao, it’s called cognitive heuristics. Kahneman won the Nobel prize for recognizing type 1 and type 2 thinking in humans.
Why don’t you go repeat the experiment yourself on huggingface (accounts are free, over ten models to test, actually many are the same ones the study used) and see what actually happens? Try it on model chains that have a reasoning model like R1 and Qwant and just see for yourself and report back. It would be intellectually honest to verify things since we’re talking about critical thinking in here.
Oh add a control group here, a comparison with average human performance to see what the really funny but hidden part is. Pro-tip: CS STEMlords catastrophically suck when larping being cognitive scientists.
So you say I should be intellectually honest by doing the experiment myself, then say that my experiment is going to be shit anyways? Sure… That’s also intellectually honest.
Here’s the thing.
My education is in physics, not CS. I know enough to know what I try isn’t going to be really valid.
But unless you have peer reviewed searches to show otherwise, because I would take your home grown experiment to be as valid as mine.
And here’s experimental verification that humans lack formal reasoning when sentences don’t precisely spell it out for them: all the models they tested except chatGPT4 and o1 variants are from 27B and below, all the way to Phi-3 which is an SLM, a small language model with only 3.8B parameters. ChatGPT4 has 1.8T parameters.
1.8 trillion > 3.8 billion
ChatGPT4’s performance difference (accuracy drop) with regular benchmarks was a whooping -0.3 versus Mistral 7B -9.2 drop.
Yes there were massive differences. No, they didn’t show significance because they barely did any real stats. The models I suggested you try for yourself are not included in the test and the ones they did use are known to have significant limitations. Intellectual honesty would require reading the actual “study” though instead of doubling down.
Maybe consider the possibility that a. STEMlords in general may know how to do benchmarks but not cognitive testing type testing or how to use statistical methods from that field b. this study being an example of a few “I’m just messing around trying to confuse LLMs with sneaky prompts instead of doing real research because I need a publication without work” type of study, equivalent to students making chatGPT do their homework c. 3.8B models = the size in bytes is between 1.8 and 2.2 gigabytes d. not that “peer review” is required for criticism lol but uh, that’s a preprint on arxiv, the “study” itself hasn’t been peer reviewed or properly published anywhere (how many months are there between October 2024 to May 2025?) e. showing some qualitative difference between quantitatively different things without showing p and using weights is garbage statistics f. you can try the experiment yourself because the models I suggested have visible Chain of Thought and you’ll see if and over what they get confused about g. when there are graded performance differences with several models reliably not getting confused at least more than half the time but you say “fundamentally can’t reason” you may be fundamentally misunderstanding what the word means
Need more clarifications instead of reading the study or performing basic fun experiments? At least be intellectually curious or something.
It’s already capable of doing a lot, and there is reason to expect it will get better over time. If we stick our fingers in our ears and pretend that’s not possible, we will not be prepared.
If you read, it’s capable of very little under the surface of what it is.
Show me one that is well studied, like clinical trial levels, then we’ll talk.
We’re decades away at this point.
My overall point of it’s just as meaningless to talk about now as it was in the 90s. Because we can’t convince of what a functioning product will be, never mind it’s context I’m a greater society. When we have it, we can discuss it then as we have something tangible to discuss. But where we’ll be in decades is hard to regulate now.
Alpha Fold. We’re not decades away. We’re years at worst.
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.
I really hope I’m dead before we have androids.
