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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but feel that people are completely missing the forest for the trees with AI and education. Which isn't particularly surprising when you realize most people haven't ever made the connection that the primary point of education is to make effective economic contributors in your society, rather than just being something you do because it's just what we do.

We are going to use powerful AI to teach kids to do jobs that AI will almost certainly do better in 10-20 years?

Like I get that there is a notion of "What else are we supposed to do?", but it still just feels so silly and futile to go along with. Like "Lets use AI to teach kids how to program!"....uhhh, the writing is on the wall

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It's been so long since calculators hit that I guess we all forgot what that was like, but Wolfram Alpha can solve all of the problems in a typical math textbook. Now writing based classes have the same problems, but the solutions are pretty similar:

- Make kids show their work (outlines, revision histories)

- Retool to focus on the things where the tools can't do all the work (proofs, diagrams, word problems for math; research, note gathering, synthesizing for writing)

- After kids learn the basics, incorporate the tools into the class in a semi-realistic way (using a TI-whatever in the last years of high school math education)

ChatGPT can also "show work". Requiring students to show work doesn't prevent cheating.

Show work in the context of chatgpt means show each prompt and response and any edits or collation that you performed.

What would be particularly nice is if it became the norm for LLM users to be expected to not only supply the log of prompts that produced a given output, but also the specific LLM, making the entire process reproducible and verifiable.

Of course this would possibly exclude using SaaS-based LLMs like ChatGPT in places like schools, and as such it might make sense to require students to only utilize open ones. Or maybe, if OpenAI provided a verification service whereby a prompt could be checked against the output it supposedly produced in the past at some point (even if the behavior of the chatbot had since changed).

> Wolfram Alpha can solve all of the problems in a typical math textbook

I mostly disagree (and I used WolframAlpha thoroughly during my engineering education). Wolfram can solve well encapsulated tasks (solve for X, find the integral, etc). Even then often it gives you a huge expression, whereas doing it by hand you can achieve a much simpler expression.

It doesn't really handle complex problems, at least like the ones you'd find in a college level math or physics course. It can be a tool for solving certain steps within those problems (like a calculator), but you can't plug the whole thing into Wolfram and get an answer.

GPT4 is kinda OK at this, like 50%+ success rate probably, highly dependent on how common the problem is.

> It doesn't really handle complex problems, at least like the ones you'd find in a college level math or physics course

Those complex problems are taught and asked in college level classes because of Wolfram Alpha. Like the parent commenter mentioned, classes had to adapt to new technology and since Wolfram Alpha could solve the straightforward questions, college classes started asking more complex ones with multiple steps and where the problem needs to be reframed in order to actually solve it.

Nah, you can check any math or physics book that's many dedcades old and they had this same kind of problems.

> - Make kids show their work (outlines, revision histories)

I don't like this. It seems to me that this would lead to teachers forcing formulaic approaches to writing on children (even more than they already do). No uniform process is going to work on everyone and having students write using a process like that produces bland, uninspired and unmotivated essays.

Furthermore, outlines and revision histories also seem easy enough to fake with a GPT-like AI: you can just ask the AI to write an outline and then have it iterate on that.

What is the point of making kids do all this work if at the end, there will be zero career for them and the computers will be doing everything, I mean why learn any arithmetic at all if you can just ask your phone to sort out your personal finances for you ?

I have a feeling that the outcome might be that we actually become dumber and lazy. I personally won't be bothered learning as much if the machines already know everything, it just would seem like a waste of energy. I'll probably just continue to learn survival skills and first aid in the event of some type of catastrophic event and I happen to survive.

If these systems don't workout to replicate, build and themselves really quickly then we're headed into some very uncharted waters. When they do workout how to replicate, build and run themselves, we're probably fucked anyway.

We're at an interesting point in history here where populations are rapidly declining and the youngest generations are so fucking distracted by technology and new shiny they aren't going to be as interested in developing it as the boomers were. Going to be interesting to see where it goes.

> make effective economic contributors in your society, rather than just being something you do because it's just what we do.

That's your utilitarian take that would eliminate many things you would consider superfluous. Social sciences, history, art, useful personal skills that might not be directly to the economy (like home related stuff or questioning authority)

It should be about empowering citizens in many ways regardless of how much they'll end up contributing to society. As for historical examples, women and wealthy people who studied and couldn't or didn't need to work still studied.

If you subscribe to the purely resource exploitation view, you end up on the road to optimize for the elites in power through lobbying and corporate manipulation.

Having a population that thinks for themselves may actually lead to more unrest and economic uncertainty of all the KPIs that corporations usually love.

Of course, corps will want education to be a specialized training ground for future human resource exploitation and govs might want to create voters for their party (or nation build through ideology and principles) but just because either might get their way to a hig degree doesn't mean that "the primary purpose" is what they get away with.

>the primary point of education is to make effective economic contributors in your society

I see zero evidence that this is true. This is not the stated nor revealed preference of a significant portion of the population.

People don't spend thousands of dollars and spend years of their lives to get a degree because the process is inherently fun. The reason to go to college is so you can get a good job that pays more than if you stopped at high school. Same thing with getting a high school diploma (though, less so).

What more evidence than that do you need?

I think you conflate economic contribution and good job too much. They often don’t overlap much.

You might want to watch this video for a different perspective:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3g5HkfUrna0

For one thing, a lot of people spend that money and get a degree that will not meaningfully help them in the labour market.

I see your point though, I was thinking about school, not university.

"We are going to use powerful AI to teach kids to do jobs that AI will almost certainly do better in 10-20 years?"

I think understanding how to work well with AI and what its limitations are will be helpful regardless of what the outcome is.

Even if silicon brains achieve AGI or super-intelligence, I think it's highly unlikely that they will supersede biological brains along every dimension. Biological brains use physical processes that we have very little understanding of, and so they will likely not be possible to fully mimic in the foreseeable future even with AGI. We don't know exactly how we'll fit in and be able to continue being useful in the hypothetical AGI/super-intelligence scenario, but I think it's almost certain there will be gaps of various kinds that will require human brains to be in the loop to get the best results.

And even if we do assume that humans get superseded in every conceivable way, AGI does not imply infinite capacity, and work is not zero sum. Even if AI completely takes over for all the most important problems (for some definition of important), there will always be problems left over.

Right now, just because you aren't the best gardener in the world (or even if you're one of the worst), that doesn't mean you couldn't make the area around where you live greener and more beautiful if you spent a few months on it. There is always some contribution you can make to making life better.

Assignments are usually just a proxy for the skill which we're actually trying to teach or evaluate. The fact that a course assignment can be done by using a chatbot does not mean that the skill which that course is teaching can be done by using that chatbot.

If a coach assigns someone to repeatedly lift heavy weights in order to become stronger, lifting them with a forklift doesn't achieve the goal, because in real life that strength is intended for situations where you won't use a forklift. The same goes for exercising various "mental muscles".

I agree, except all those kids just go on to work in an Amazon warehouse driving a forklift anyway.

We need to start valuing human intellect more otherwise it will simply become a thing we have outsourced to machines like washing clothes and transporting our bodies.

I'm glad I learned how to figure out the shape of a function, even though graphing calculators were already a mature technology at the time I was learning that (and had been even more obsoleted by jupyter notebooks by the time I entered the workforce).

It's al very tricky to figure out what foundational knowledge will be useful in 15 years (that's why we pay educators the big bucks ... oh wait ...), but just because it's hard and uncertain doesn't mean it isn't valuable to try to figure it out.

Its not certain we'll get to that point, and if we do we'll probably need to rethink society as a whole. We have a lot of training data on human knowledge, discussion and Q&A, but very little on humans actually working and going through their thought process, which I suspect is why projects like AutoGPT aren't really that good [1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AutoGPT/comments/13z5z3a/autogpt_is...

Relatively high fidelity and public data for some domains does exist, however (think all github commits, issues, discussions and pull requests as a whole). For those domains, it indeed might be only a matter of time.

Indeed, the problem is AI puts the whole education system into question. Even before AI it could have been argued (Case Against Education/it's mostly signaling etc). At this point I'm weary of putting my 5-year old through this pointless 12 year exercise, unfortunately in our country there is effectively no choice and home schooling is not allowed. If I could I would offer an environment where he could pursue any and all interest together with other kids under the guidance of competent people (and AI). Cultivating your strange passions is probably the only way to contribute and thrive in a post-AI world.

It's hard to stare in the face of the abyss.

Especially when the abyss stares back at you and it's chatty and apologetic.

The purpose of education is not labor preparation :)

It absolutely, unequivocally is. People can romanticize it anyway they want, but formal education is very different than religion camp, painting class, or spiritual retreat training.

I feel for people who don't get this or perhaps never contemplated it, but the system is designed to breed good workers and sort them into bins. And its not a bad thing either. Sure there are non-economic self contained benefits, but those are perks, not purposes.

>> The purpose of education is not labor preparation :)

> It absolutely, unequivocally is. People can romanticize it anyway they want, but formal education is very different than religion camp, painting class, or spiritual retreat training.

No it isn't "absolutely, unequivocally." What specific formal education are you talking about?

Especially in the past, but continuing somewhat into the present-day, formal education has mainly been about enculturation, and not "labor preparation." That can seen clearly by the former emphasis on dead classical languages and the continued (though lessened) emphasis on literature and similar subjects. There's zero value in reading Shakespeare or Lord of the Flies from a "labor preparation" standpoint.

However, I do see a modern trend where many people are so degraded by economics that they have trouble perceiving or thinking about anything except through the lens of economics or some economics-adjacent subject.

> There's zero value in reading Shakespeare or Lord of the Flies from a "labor preparation" standpoint.

There is zero labor prep value in learning to extract information from text (that you possibly have no interest in reading)?

Enculturation is just to make it so people who otherwise cannot bear much economic fruit can at least not be producing negative value. Studying the classics, if nothing else, should at least produce a well adjusted human. That in and of itself has value.

But those are the fringes of the education system. The core focus is on producing high value citizens that will produce far more than they take. This is abundantly clear if you look at the social valuations of high caliber students with fruitful degrees.

Ok it’s hard to say anything “absolute” about the purpose of education since it’s a philosophical/political stance and not a physical phenomenon, but I appreciate your cynicism. I see how the rich and powerful have shaped our public education institutions, and agree that American schools at least often push students into rote labor-focused paths.

That said, the discussion is about the purpose of classrooms in a world of AI, and I think it’s a good time to remember the less economic purposes of education that have always been there under the surface. I think few teachers are more driven by bringing economic benefits to their students than enriching/exciting/interesting them, and secondary and post secondary education has always had a huge variety of non-occupational courses, from ancient history to obscure languages to nice math.

Overall, I imagine we agree on the most important thing: if education does end up changing immensely as AGI gains footing, we should change it to be less economic

I share your view on this. I guess it all hinges on whether AGI is possible and if so then how fast is it coming. If we won't achieve AGI then education is still necessary to push knowledge further and since we don't know who is going to achieve this it makes sense (right now) to still push education for all as social obligation.

It is one important purpose, but education has lots of stakeholders who each have their own purposes.

The students want to learn things and socialize with peers.

Teachers want to teach, earn a living, get respect of society.

Parents want their children to be taught, but also want their kids to be taken care of by other adults so they can go to work in peace. Poorer parents in particular also need their kids to be fed and sometimes schools have to do that too.

Governments want an educated citizenry that is productive, pays taxes, knows the basics of law, civics and so on. They also want to monitor and protect unfortunate children who have bad parents.

If schools only had one purpose you wouldn't see the stakeholders fight each other so often. But in reality parents fight governments over the curriculum, students fight teachers over the amount of work, teachers fight government/parents over their wage and so on.

> The students want to learn things and socialize with peers.

No. Students want to socialize with peers or play sports/video games. Not learn.

> Teachers want to teach, earn a living, get respect of society.

This is correct

> Parents want their children to be taught, but also want their kids to be taken care of by other adults so they can go to work in peace. Poorer parents in particular also need their kids to be fed and sometimes schools have to do that too.

Also correct. Parents want schools to be daycare, or for elite families, schools are networking opportunities

> Governments want an educated citizenry that is productive, pays taxes, knows the basics of law, civics and so on. They also want to monitor and protect unfortunate children who have bad parents.

Correct. But a population can be productive while being largely uneducated (see China)

But despite the different priorities of the groups, “the student learning”, is not one of them

> But a population can be productive while being largely uneducated (see China)

China's a terrible example in trying to support your point. If the pitch is "education makes better workers" then you shouldn't be looking at GDP, you should be looking at GDP per capita, aka "Are the workers more productive in more educated countries?". And China has a terrible GDP per capita. It ranks 64th in the world to the US's 7th. Applying slightly more rigorous comparison across the world, there's a clear correlation between GDP/capita and average educational attainment.

And you have a very dismal view of students. In my area, at least at the honors level, students were pretty well engaged in learning. Now, that was mostly in order to get into good colleges and appease their parents' desire for them to learn, but they definitely were eager to have the knowledge that was being taught. By the time you get to college, a fair fraction of the students are truly engaged with the material for the material's sake. Even moreso in degrees that aren't glorified trade school programs.

> No. Students want to socialize with peers or play sports/video games. Not learn.

This is frightfully incorrect. Students definitely love to learn. They do not like to be stuffed in a chair and lectured at and forced to do rote activities. But who does?

I don't think the population of China is "largely uneducated" in the sense that began this thread. It is not rare for Chinese kids to go to school, and those schools are not only used for job training.

And most of that fighting goes away when parents assume the responsibility of teaching their own children. This particular responsibility is presently only available to those who build their lives around the idea of a nuclear family and home schooling. I used to think that one had to achieve some middle/upper class financial status to make this viable (and having money does make this easier), but I've seen poor families manage home schooling quite well. This requires community (a church with others who are home schooling, a home school co-op) because the kiddos will age out of your ability to teach rather quickly (10-12 and suddenly they're doing math you haven't touched in 2 decades, or more involved history or literature that the average parent may not be equipped to teach well, or electives that fall outside the experience of the parents).

> And most of that fighting goes away when parents assume the responsibility of teaching their own children.

No, because you've forgotten one of the important stakeholders here, which is society at large, which has a interest in ensuring a general level of shared education. Which once again results in fighting, as parents who are teaching their own children run up against government requirements that they may not agree with.

One of the initial proponents of public education in America, Horace Mann, saw education in a two pronged manner.

First, a functional democracy requires that the citizenship be well informed and capable of critical thinking: "A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people, must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one."

He also saw the economic side, saying that education was an equalizer for people in terms of helping them to reach their full potential.

I quite agree with his assessment. In a system where everyone has a vote, it becomes quite important that everyone have a sense of things that extends beyond their career vocation. His imagery of an uneducated republic being a madhouse makes much sense from this perspective.

Insofar as we have given up any optimism about the democratic enterprise, then certainly we could look at education as purely to put people into economic bins, but at least in my own public school education in the US, every student did get significant doses of math, history, science, etc., outside of their expected career direction.

This to me suggests that there is a tension, not fully resolved and HOPEFULLY never fully resolved, between education-for-economics and education-for-democracy. I think it's quite pessimistic though to give up the ghost on the education-for-democracy aspect.

> It absolutely, unequivocally is.

This is a category error. You're talking about the education system as though it was designed from accurate first principles towards a specific intended outcome. Like, you can say that the absolute unequivocal purpose of a nuclear reactor is to heat water. But when we're looking at sociopolitical organizations, that have been codified through various political forces over tens of generations, through the demands of ever-shifting stakeholders, etc this is not a useful framing.

> but the system is designed to breed good workers and sort them into bins. And its not a bad thing either. Sure there are non-economic self contained benefits, but those are perks, not purposes.

I think a more accurate framing is that the system is currently evolved into strongly emphasizing this mode of behavior.

This is true, and it is puzzling how people think that there are geniuses, evil or otherwise, who have planned the educational system so as to achieve some sort of results for the society at large that go beyond the mundane.

Where the mundane is keeping young people out of the streets, maybe teach them arithmetic and some grammar. And the leaders, that is, the teachers, want, most of the time, just to bring home a salary, not funnel the masses from schools to office desks or assembly lines.

I think, and this does not directly contradict your post, because I do think you are not far off, but formal education is supposed to help a person find their place in society. Not everyone becomes plumber, electrician, lawyer, mba, or engineer. Some become artists, activists or, heavens forfend, politicians.

It absolutely, unequivocally, is one of the reasons universal education to a general level is a valuable investment for a society.

But it is not the only reason, or (in my view) even the most important reason.

Maybe before assuming people haven't contemplated what you're saying, you could try to contemplate what else general education might be buying us. Maybe by imagining how it would look if school was actually just job training starting in elementary school, rather than covering all these other things.

Depends on who you ask.

"Purpose" in an entirely subjective thing.

Workaccount2 beat me to it. But it's well documented, e.g. https://qz.com/1314814/universal-education-was-first-promote...

"Much of this education, however, was not technical in nature but social and moral. Workers who had always spent their working days in a domestic setting, had to be taught to follow orders, to respect the space and property rights of others, be punctual, docile, and sober. The early industrial capitalists spent a great deal of effort and time in the social conditioning of their labor force, especially in Sunday schools which were designed to inculcate middle class values and attitudes, so as to make the workers more susceptible to the incentives that the factory needed."

I really take issue with describing this as some sort of well documented absolute fact that education is about labor. It isn’t the 1850s! Just because capitalists interested in skilled labor were “some of” the biggest supporters of English public schools in the 1850s doesn’t mean we should forever commit our society to their designs.

From the Marxist paper backing that article:

  England initiated a sequence of reforms in its education system since the 1830s and literacy rates gradually increased. The process was _initially motivated by a variety of reasons_ such as religion, enlightenment, social control, moral conformity, socio-political stability, and military efficiency, as was the case in other European countries (e.g., Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland) that had supported public education much earlier.15 However, in light of the modest demand for skills and literacy by the capitalists, the level of governmental support was rather small.16
  In the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, consistent with the proposed hypothesis, the demand for skilled labor in the growing industrial sector markedly increased (Cipolla 1969 and Kirby 2003) and the proportion of children aged 5 to 14 in primary schools increased from 11% in 1855 to 25% in 1870 (Flora et al. (1983)).17

Sorry if I sound challenging or rude - just hurts my soul to imagine people giving in to the capitalist’s desire for us to interpret our prison as a fact of nature

Pre AI today it seems like we’re in some weird place where IQ scores are dropping in ways that don’t match the Flynn effect and people like Bryan Caplan argue that education is just virtue signalling to gain access to higher status and paying bullshit jobs (David Graeber). Everyone here talks about how real that is in the world of whiteboard interviews and rest and vesters. It seems pretty true elsewhere in the world of white collar nepotism.

What are we really educating kids for these days? To have advantage over other kids because we have no fair meritocratic way to allocate resources or meaning in society?

Won’t AI just make this infinitely worse.

Like, one vision is more teachers and more students learning better, and another is less teachers and more baby sitters and lower government budgets for education leaving students with the equivalent of an automated telephone answering service menu instead of a real human call centre?

Nah, POSIWID.

Depends on how you define "purpose".

To me it means "the reason why <person> does <thing>", so the phrase "purpose of a system" doesn't make sense without a particular human subject who's interacting with the system.

Funny, I was going to use exactly the same acronym to explain why schools have little to do with labour preparation.

It is today. It used to not be. Blame Reagan when he was governor of California: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-day-the-purpose-of-col...

Certainly a major purpose.

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