AI in education may require us to return to 15th-century pedagogy
chatterpulseai.com
chatterpulseai.com
This would be an incredible improvement to educational systems around the world. I think back to that time there was a big scandal in Asia where kids were taking an exam and parents were like climbing up the walls to give them the answers. That's an education system way too focused on fact memorization over practical life skills.
It also reminds me of Stephen Johnson's book `Wonderland: how play made the modern world` and the importance of a little bit of fun in the learning process.
Nuts that self-direction is barely even entertained before a college level. Someone can graduate high school without even the ability to look through Google search results.
The skills that we learn tend to be fairly specific and doesn't always generalize. If you learn chess, you're just good at chess.
There's the meta of learning how to learn, but that is its own skill-set. Most people get by with instructors and classes.
I gave one example which is critical thinking, but I'd also say it includes things like self-awareness. Some people just are not. I don't know how else to describe it other than it seems like they literally just do not think before they act. There's a level one worse than "doesn't consider the consequences of their actions" and that's "doesn't consider their actions at all". Of course, any definition I use for this is going to be met with "but that can happen on its own in people who think perfectly fine". That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about when there's simply no sign that thinking happens. Like the only thing their brain does is habits and shortcuts. They're simply not an intellectual, curious, open-minded, or rational individual. I don't mean to be insulting to anyone, but when someone is simply none of these things and there is absolutely no openness or desire to improve, then I conclude that there may as well not be any thought. This isn't equivalent to a lack of intelligence, skill or talent. It's just wasted potential that most likely can no longer be realized.
I would say anyone who enjoys HN probably doesn't have a lack of thought. It's difficult for me to precisely define what thought even is, because I'm not talking about the subjective experience of thinking (internal monologue/dialogue or so on). I'm talking about whatever holds the fundamental ability for consideration of basically anything. You don't necessarily get that for free. Brains are generally extremely good at optimizing and especially neurotypical ones can indeed find a way to live without thought. (I would say autistic neurotypes could find it more difficult due to the detail-oriented thinking. It's more difficult to put smaller blocks together without developing the ability to think about them.)
> There's the meta of learning how to learn, but that is its own skill-set. Most people get by with instructors and classes.
See, how to learn can actually differ by neurotype. That's not really what I'm talking about, though. It's not people who are incapable of learning, I'm sure they can learn all sorts of things. It's that they're incapable of thinking about what they've learned. You can show them how to do something and they'll do it, they can have goals and executive function (even if they can't explain it), and they can probably still figure things out by trial and error. But ask them to explain any of these things and chances are they won't even know why they did them, just that they did and it got them what they wanted and that's all they care about.
I concur here, and it is (to me) terrifying how common this is. Just even basic first order cause-effect evaluation.
It isn’t popular to suggest this though, and I’ve learned to tread lightly with this observation of mine because 1) it gets me labeled as “fun at parties” or associated with worse 2) there are plenty of people with high paying jobs or powerful positions who are in this category who will not let it slide without some form of retribution.
It’s also really hard to explain without coming across as an arrogant jerk in normal company. But it’s there — like “head empty no thoughts” isn’t just a meme it’s a real thing. And you say some really basic, almost rudimentary critical thought in their company and you get met with “omg you’re so smart how did you think of that” and I’m like 1) that wasn’t worth any sort of praise 2) uhhh, I … did some thinking?
I don't think they're going to be particularly good at putting together that they're included in that group unless they're mentioned directly.
The thing is, intelligence is almost entirely separate from thinking ability. There are some extremely intelligent people who nonetheless have very low capacity for thought, because intelligence is defined as the ability to store and recall information. That's what's taught up to high school.
These intelligent people don't deserve to be considered any less of human beings, and it's very difficult to speak of not being able to think without implying some level of inferiority on their part or superiority on mine (ours?). I don't mean to imply that such people aren't conscious. They could pass any Turing test.
But there is somewhat of a difference between thinkers and non-thinkers. For example:
- Those without thought are given responsibility that they shouldn't necessarily be trusted with, for example settings that might break something if changed. Customer support representatives can probably tell you how common it is for someone to bypass any number of warnings or layers of obscurity to access things that they have no idea how to operate, then make it someone else's problem once it bites them later and they have no idea what might have happened.
- Due to the above, mainstream products are often designed with primarily non-thinkers in mind, leading to those with thought potentially feeling restricted or that they lack control thanks to the changes designed to limit how much mistake someone who doesn't think can make.
I wish there were some way to fix these problems, but it'd probably be too discriminatory for most of the non-thinkers to recognize the utility, and it seems impossible to classify people like this, since thinking ability isn't binary.
I think that's the point of the GP: There's usually none.
And it leads to some interesting places. How do you motivate students to do pick up a shovel and do the work that they need to do in order to learn the material? And if they're picking up a shovel and doing the work, what's left to lecture about? We assess the work, motivate the student to fix it? How do we motivate the student who has the entirety of the world's knowledge at their fingertips? They're not skilled enough to do work that AI can't do, and AI has all the answers. And yet they have to do the work in order to learn the thing.
How to motivate the student in such circumstances, in my mind, has to move beyond fear of the exam.
And it forces to question what skills we want the students to have coming out of school.
I'm actually pretty excited about it all. And ChatGPT is a great learning tool when used correctly. (Even with 4o I get it to offer contradictory answers, though, but this is all part of educating the student on how to get the most out of the tool.)
"Leadership is the art of getting someone to do something because they want to do it." --Eisenhower
"The primary goal of early education was to enable sound thinking, not aggregation of facts, because there just weren’t that many facts to be known."
In lieu of reliable facts, being able to suss out facts becomes more important. In our house, we've been focused on Trivium and Quadrivium à la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education and our favorite book is https://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Trivium-Christian-Homeschool... (don't sweat the Christian bit, just focus on the education)
Strongly enforced standardized languages were established as part of this process. I don't think public education/nationalism/identity based on language can be separated. It will be interesting to see what happens when all of this is placed under a new filter/resynthesized via AI.
I think removing individual teachers that change year after year, and who add additional thoughts than the 'national boards' and replacing them with an AI teacher that stays with you as you grow, feeding the same basic digested generic education as everyone else gets, will be incredibly powerful (because it will be able to teach each at their level) but also increase the move to a monoculture/nationalist education (in that the entire nation is fed the same thing, having a single, agreed upon set of 'truths' from the same 'source' removing that final divergence that was individual teachers changed up quarterly/yearly).
exams with no electronic devices allowed are not 15th-century pedagogy - it's been the norm for over a decade now, and it's the ultimate solution to virtually all cheating
Or, for that matter, the invention of writing.
[Writing], said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Phaedrus, by Plato. Circa 370 BC
By "sophisticated" I mean potentially better than private tutoring because an AI tutor will have a superhuman span and depth of knowledge. Some nation-state is going to grasp the potential and create an economy and culture enabled by a super-educated population while many other places will struggle with giving up what seemed to be axioms of how education should work.
This is true of pretty much of almost anything. Programmers started with syntax and basic concept, and once they sufficiently gain enough skill, the syntax essentially become invisible.
https://www.graduateprogram.org/2023/10/is-rote-learning-sti...
We try to teach bodies of knowledge that allow people to make inferences within those domains and with analogy to other domains.
We also try to teach, within those bodies of knowledge, very specific facts that are required to be able to work quickly and without losing too much state. Knowing 6x9 or that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 or how you name organic compounds are in these categories--rote.
But we also try to teach reasoning, forming sound arguments, debate, academic discourse, systematic research, etc. And, sure-- we need some rote knowledge and some bodies of knowledge to have some arenas to play with these concepts in. But too much of the direction in recent education has been to pile more and more knowledge into educational standards and less of these types of synthesis and higher order reasoning.
I find this frustrating in particular in that one subject I teach is AP Microeconomics, which is just crammed absolutely full of material that students will not retain most of after the exam. I'd rather go really deep in a couple of sub-areas and really have the students show they've thought deeply, but that is not what the system incents. I have 36.5 block-period-equivalents with the students and about 34 block periods of content, which means that I can't just spend a couple of extra periods on game theory, which I love and students tend to love, too-- it's a very small part of the exam.
The confound, of course, is that it's very easy to measure the difference that a teacher has made in knowledge, but a lot harder to measure the efficacy of an intervention in higher order thinking.
The reality is it is terrible, and always has been; arguably, by design.
A learning aide that gives you an “answer” is a good thing if you value questions over answers.
We should be improving our educational standards regardless of these new toys.
It is difficult to believe that they got 500 years ago right when they didn't get 50 years ago right.
AI writing is garbage; if you're a good writer you can shepherd it to having good results.
But my 6th grade students cannot tell the difference between garbage AI writing and good writing; it's very difficult to articulate to them why they need to struggle at communicating now in hopes of getting better, when it looks to them like perfection is already effortless.
Would love to be proven wrong.
If you externalize all the knowledge there's nothing left to be learned and to build upon.
I don't like it don't get me wrong. Especially in subjects like math or coding where it really makes no sense to purely memorize without understanding - but the practice is absolutely necessary for understanding and mastery.
Research (in prepublication right now) done by my wife has shown that students are more engaged with the study of history the less it has to do with Jeopardy questions and the more it has to do with situating their life experiences, goals and passions into the flow of humanity through time, often letting them choose to focus on aspects of history that are traditionally ignored, like fashion, household labor, just to name a few.
There is extensive literature on how rote memorization is counter to many of the goals of education, which I can point you to if you have access to an academic digital library (and after consulting with my wife and her peers as this is not my area of expertise).
Higher education recognizes the unimportance of memorization in that the frequency of open-note and open-book exams increase through undergrad to graduate education.
1) Those to whom memorization comes easily without much drilling, so such experiences in the classroom was an exercise in pain and drudgery.
2) Those to whom rote memorization is nigh impossible or only happens with herculean effort. Such experiences in the classroom was an exercise in pain and drudgery.
Both want to eliminate this pain for future generations. I will put forth that both camps are severely wrong.
1,000% no.
This is, and will continue to be, the model of many expensive elite prep schools.
Public schools? They already have a staffing crisis due to a couple decades of stagnating wages while both inflation and Baumol’s cost disease ran rampant, with Covid as an acute stressor that made things even worse very fast.
Are they looking to fix that? Not really, no. They’re coping by reducing the school week to four days and looking to replace as many teachers as possible with computer programs and cheap teaching assistants (why have foreign language classes when you can stick kids on DuoLingo? Real example).
The next step, which they’re already talking about, is how to start using AI to take pressure off staffing for core classes. This means fewer teachers per student, not more.
This is happening in lower-paying rural schools first, for obvious reasons, but it’s the future for the whole system.
> There are less radical options that we can also begin to employ now without re-hauling our entire education system; the ‘flipped classroom’ is a simple modification where students watch videos (or, perhaps use an AI) to get the basics of a concept down, and participate in hands-on projects in class.
Yep, this is what public school kids are going to get, though the “hands on” part with a real teacher isn’t making it as a major feature of the system.
Is it as good or better than what we had before? Doesn’t matter, we can’t afford that anymore, this is what we’re getting.
Fancy private school kids will continue to get the thing we already know works well, but is expensive.