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> We've seen this before: use hype and techno-optimism to sell a bill of goods.

Yep, after reading a piece on ed-tech failures of the decade 2010-2020[0] here on HN[1], I've become pretty convinced that big-scale education is hard (if not impossible) to solve with IT might only.

Sure, one person alone can learn something through Wikipedia, Coursera, YouTube, Khan Academy or tutorials, but that can't replace structured environments if your missiob is to educate lots of people.

[0] http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21948132

Well fucking said. For a lot of kids, their teacher is one of the few stable adults in their life. There's a ton of social and emotional things kids learn from good teachers beyond just book knowledge.

Though there are plenty of people who could provide the social side but aren't equipped to teach the curriculum. Perhaps you could use an AI teacher to deliver lessons that the class teacher was not qualified to teach. This could be done with the real teacher in the room.

One of the best teachers my child ever had was limited to teaching first grade due to a lack of maths ability. Everything else about them was fantastic. Maybe AI teachers can help in cases like that.

There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere doing a job that is considerably less stressful. Education needs to be funded so that it can attract people and it needs to be reorganized to reduce the stress.

The vast majority of what is taught in primary schools doesn't need a lot of subject matter skill, what it needs is the ability to teach and the toughness to survive the environment. And it has to pay well enough to attract people who have those qualities because those same qualities make those people attractive to other employers.

> There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere [...]

Yes.

One problem I come across repeatedly is: how do you identify whether someone has the technical competence to do the teaching? Is there any way of knowing if they're doing a good job?

As an IC they are implementing features and shipping products. As a teacher...? Test scores going up is uncorrelated with teaching quality, apparently. (NYC, just look at the scatterplot in [1].) So it seems like there's a deep problem here.

Now imagine someone in K-12 hiring a CS teacher. Who do they have that is competent to evaluate the skills of the person they want to hire? Probably nobody at all.

[1] https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/analyzing-re...

> One problem I come across repeatedly is: how do you identify whether someone has the technical competence to do the teaching? Is there any way of knowing if they're doing a good job?

Classroom observation. It's really not that complicated.

There's something called Math for America that offers a substantial stipend to math teachers in New York with an application that involves a written portion, observation reports, recommendations, Praxis test scores, and interviews.

> There are plenty of people who can do the technical side of teaching the curriculum. Most of them can earn more elsewhere [...]

It's funded by a billionaire former mathematician who wanted to address this exact issue.

I'm very worried about this.

We spend an absolute shitload of money educating children. This is paid for by society. But it is also so incredibly worth it. I'm worried that politicians will see an opportunity to shed costs without considering the implications and we end up with children raised online by robots.

And the divide may further increase since kids whose families can afford personal human instruction may get ahead even more.

I'm cautiously more optimistic. Education is already chronically underfunded in most places. If it became cheaper to give personalized attention then maybe the quality of education delivered might actually improve.

It won't. You don't get attention; you get a reply.

MOOCs have terrible performance in comparison with even huge audience lectures. Online teaching during COVID proved that that doesn't work either. A machine doesn't have the authority and conviction of a real person. The combination means that the levels will have to drop only to sustain the idea that this could work.

If some country is going to push this, the sunken cost fallacy and the impossibility to hire new teachers will finish education off, once and for all.

Optimism should NEVER be a basis for fucking with something as important as school.

I'm not convinced a MOOC is necessarily worse than a pure large lecture class if the material is amenable to auto-graded problem sets. (Leaving aside a regular class would typically have TAs and other students you could get help from.)

But they sure didn't live up to the hype. They didn't democratize education in any meaningful way. And I'm not sure even the people with undergrad and grad degrees who made up the majority of MOOC students use them much these days. I know, for me, they were mostly a novelty for a while. Maybe if I want to dip into a topic I'll watch some online video but I haven't even signed up for a MOOC for years at this point.

It is actually an interesting point. Journalists seem to be catching up to the fact that running ( or at least training data ) is not exactly a cheap task and kids aristotle probably shouldn't be trained on 4chan.

Naturally, some analysts would say that means there is tons of consulting money to be made..and it seems like spending is easy and profitable.

>it will be used to cut costs by replacing human teachers for low-status students with poor substitutes

most public school teachers are glorified babysitters at this point anyway, I can recall only a single teacher during my 12 year public school attendance that was actually helpful. From what I've seen from GPT-4 so far, I'd have taken a ChatGPT Plus subscription and laptop over dedicated teachers. YT and Khan Academy were far more useful than my actual teachers

I've mentioned this before across HN, but I'll mention it again - human-to-human interaction is critically important for young children.

You basically have to teach young kids how to act like a human being. Kids will get this teaching in daycare and through their parents, but that alone isn't enough and it is important to reinforce this through schools.

People often forget this because you don't really remember it and then you end up making assumptions on how you act now - not realizing that a teacher may have taught you when you were younger.

I think the best example of this is handing out worksheets to kindergartners. An average person may think that you just give them pencils and paper. An experienced teacher knows that they have to teach the kids where to write their name, how to follow along the line, to read instructions, flip the page over to check for more, etc.

This is practically true for all children. Again, many may argue that you can receive this teaching through your parents and day-care, but once a child gets old enough they are spending most of their time in school. Think of it like language learning. You'll learn more of the language if you are being taught it all day, rather than only at home with your parents.

You also experience more interaction with kids your age at school. There are many situations that come up where a teacher guiding you is important, and these same situations may not come up at home (especially if you are a single child).

I do think after a certain point you can rely on technology more for learning. I just want to emphasize that having a human teacher trained for working with children is critically important for the growth of a child.

We live in a world that's dominated by staring at screens. You're doing it right now. This wasn't true when I was young. The world changed.

It stands to reason that the education system should also change to reflect the world that we live in. Screens, AI, all of it. Children will learn how to become members of the society that they were born into, not the one that we were born into.

This is true, but I don't think this directly disputes my point of having human-to-human interaction and trained professionals working with young children.

Would it be possible to do all that's needed for young children with just a screen? I'm not so sure. The issue isn't necessarily the content, but the behavior of the child and having a person there to teach and correct behavior.

Technology plus teachers is effective. I apologize if my argument came across as no technology for young children - I'm just saying that having JUST technology for young children is difficult.

I know many people that are teachers of young children and they use technology. Kids have Chromebooks at first grade and are learning things like programming, using the internet, determining if an article on the internet may be lying to you, determining if a website's main goal is to sell something to you, becoming a good digital citizen, etc. All of that is very important!

It's also important to have a teacher in the room to teach students how to use their Chromebook, how to open it, how to physically interact with technology, how to ask each other for help, etc.

I like this comment, its thesis deserves a fuller defense.

> most public school teachers are glorified babysitters at this point anyway

That's a common but pretty twisted bit of logic: "we've made it shitty, so we should make it shittier because it's already so shitty."

No, he said we should make it less shitty. And outlined a way to do so. Why misrepresent his words?

> No, he said we should make it less shitty. And outlined a way to do so. Why misrepresent his words?

No, he didn't outline a way to make it better. He denigrated the people involved, in a way that is (most charitably) an oblique reference to low education budgets (e.g. not enough money to hire enough teachers or attract talented teachers). Then he held up some references to a few techie things.

Maybe he's a genius autodidact that never really got much benefit from his teachers. There have always been people like that, but they've never been common. A system tailored to people like that would fail the vast majority (e.g. be shitty).

teachers do not want to be babysitters, but when you have overstuffed classrooms, no prep time, no equipment, hungry kids, etc etc what are you able to do?

Not to mention state-mandated testing regimes that have nothing to do with actual student learning, hyper-local control of education in elected school boards whose members are often as dumb as a box of rocks, extreme pressure from administrators to get kids through so their performance numbers are juiced rather than actually taking whatever time is needed for those students to accomplish what they need to, etc. I’m a public school teacher. I never cease to be impressed how very little people who don’t work in education understand about the realities of education.

I don't see what point you're trying to make. Sure, we could make education better by spending more on it, but the voters don't want to, so it's not going to happen. Given that society is not willing to spend more on education what can we do with the budget we have?

I think we've tried the "we could make education better by spending more on it" method. Based on the current state of public education, I don't know that this approach has been proven correct.

1. Citations for the claim that we are spending more for the same results would be productive... but I believe it.

2. I believe the problem is that the extra money is not going to proven-effective programs and teachers. There is some question to me whether anything is proven effective... in spite of whatever you read in books written for teachers.

3. The parent comment is pretty nihilistic. Try to propose something that you think might improve the status quo. (E.g., the comments about the highest impact of extra spending being in social services instead.)

> Try to propose something that you think might improve the status quo.

Use LLMs to compliment class activities so that students can receive the individual attention they need.

Sounds like you were self motivated. What about all the other children who have been told over and over that scholastic achievement is only for the weak and those whose early years were spent gazing vacantly at television. A teacher's job is not merely to recite the material but also to somehow make the student receptive to it.

Did you do an AB test with your clone and checked how it fared without going to school ?

Very US centric point of view. If the teachers are fine, leave them be. If a place doesn't have the resources to hire said teachers, use tools that help.

Or in the US, if teachers are that important, maybe give them more resources to do their job. i.e. buying supplies, computers, etc for your kids class.

> ..."We don't care enough about you to actually bother to interact with you."

"Thank you for calling customer support. We value your business. Please enjoy this...music...while you wait. Thank you for calling customer support." M U S I C ! ! !

The best part of this post is that it comes from a supposed PhD in neuroscience. Either they were born yesterday or that PhD wasn't worth two shits. What's more concerning is that they also run a school.

Not sure if an AI tutor is a “poorer” substitute for ALL human teachers given there are many teachers who aren’t be try qualified teaching

Remember MOOCs? Some would do well reviewing a bit of history before taking on Medium posts.