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Comment by moffers | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate attempts to disrupt things, but education seems to be one of those verticals that seems to be allergic to disruptive technologies. Education seems like it can either be very specialized, or very generalized, but at the end of the day it should be egalitarian. If this approach to education works, would we be able to have every teacher in every school in America adopt it? I have to imagine the resources needed to train the teachers, distribute the technology, acclimate the parents, and then do this all on a scale such that no one is left out or treated better if you didn’t happen to go to an “AI” school makes for a tough hill to climb.

I think a lot of the real issues with solving problems in education is that they have trouble applying to the larger picture of compulsory education.

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> Education [...] should be egalitarian

It is self-evident to me that this is not true in the U.S.

There is very little about education that is egalitarian. An inner city grade school in Michigan is in no way comparable to a grade school in the Palo Alto suburbs.

> Such that no one is left out or treated better if you didn’t happen to go to an “AI” school makes for a tough hill to climb.

To drive this point home, in the real world we do not hold this standard for air conditioning. Tens of thousands of schools in the U.S. do not currently have adequate HVAC systems. If we are not currently applying this standard to A/C, I don't know why we would choose to selectively apply it to AI.

Attempting to gate innovation behind complete social conformity and universal adoption doesn't strike me as a rationale stance.

Nit: you’re replying to what “should be” with what is. Those two concepts are not the same. Our property-tax-based educational funding system is widely seen as a tragedy.

An inner city grade school in Detroit gets 16,500+ per child a regular child in Michigan gets 9,500. Palo Alto spends 25,143 per child. New York spends $29,873 per child. The states that spend the least Utah, Idaho are around 9,000.

Part of the cost is localized like salary, utilities costs.

Detroit isn't necessarily being under funded compared to Palo suburb when you normalize regional cost differences. It does affect the quality of teachers one can attract but so does the location in general. Bumping up Detroit to Palo Alto's spending wouldn't have much effect on the education for the average student.

Palo Alto is home to many immigrant from many places who self select and place education as extremely important for the next generation. For the average Detroit kid education isn't cherished and valued over everything else. Until you can equalize those believes things won't change. You won't be able to buy a higher educational rate by painting the walls twice as fast or by hiring more educational assistants.

> Bumping up Detroit to Palo Alto's spending wouldn't have much effect on the education for the average student.

Are you sure about this? It seems suspiciously self-reinforcing.

there’s pretty good evidence that outcomes are largely in correlated with per pupil spend. would take me a little while to find since i haven’t looked at it for a while

I went to an inner city public school that was better funded than your Palo Alto numbers once you account for federal funds.

I agree that funding is not the only problem, the money could be spent much much better (and teacher unions should unfortunately probably not exist). Another large problem is that I do not think we as a society have agreed on what the actual goal of public education should be.

The comparison to HVAC systems in schools highlights the complexities of implementing new technologies.

I think a good place to start is “anyone in the world who wants to learn and is hindered by their school and teachers”. Not “this must work in every American school from the start”.

A smart kid with a phone in Kenya should be able to have a shot. Wikipedia allows this. Khan Academy helps. This in the extreme is Khan Academy but potentially for every course a kid (or adult) could want, generated on demand from scratch if need be.

The next optimal study session generated for your current state of knowledge, energy level, learning goals, by the teaching agent who is provably the best at delivering that lesson for you, using the optimal mediums for your context. Video at home or in a class, audio when on a bus, printouts if you want. Add in spaced repetition and a few fun quizzes, gamify it. Let each person fulfil their potential unhindered by the resources of their school, parents or country.

Even if this ends up being nothing more than "Khan Academy but I can ask questions and get answers and it's all in my local dialect of Urdu" it is a huge step forward for educations AS LEARNING.

Khan Academy already has a robust AI chatbot/features (https://www.khanmigo.ai/) - they have an ongoing relationship with Microsoft/OpenAI

To me, the good place to start is "what do teachers want that they feel would make their teaching more effective" rather than "the entire community of teachers is a barrier and we must work around them."

If delivering a good education can't be achieved because there are parts of our education system that continually resist adaptation, then whatever those parts are they ought to reach their breaking point and be pushed beyond it.

Those parts have reached their breaking point - the teachers are ready to quit from lack of resources and support, and parents can't do their part because they have to work far too hard to keep a roof and food for their families. AI doesn't solve that.

But if teachers could use AI to grade exams and automate the boring work, then they could take a second job and be able to afford housing. Sounds like an easy win for AI.

I love the idea that no one is 'only' a teacher. Teachers that live in the real world make much more sense to me.

My ideal work week:

10h administrative work (figuring out what and how for the rest of the week) 10h technical job 10h teaching in a classroom 10h 1:1 mentoring

I read this comment and it struck me as excellent parody, but now I'm worried it's in earnest.

This was my club in university: https://daviswiki.org/Students_for_an_Orwellian_Society

I think that 20 years later it is much harder make effective satire, so I rarely do it now. More extreme positions are taken pretty regularly by folks online, so even people like you in my target audience are never sure if something is satirical or just extreme.

That’s why most satire is pretty lame. The more obvious it is, the less funny; the less obvious it is, the less interesting. And the whole thing is built on an inside/outside dynamic that is pretty basic.

Realising the promise of AI, freeing teachers from the drudgery of 'boring work' so they can take on a second job as a food-server, burger-flipper, shelf-stacker or Uber driver (at least until robotics and self-driving tech eliminate those jobs too).

People will read your comment as sarcasm (and you probabaly meant it), but this it the way to go.

I got an excellent education from the public school system and had passionate, committed teachers throughout, and was well prepared to pursue an engineering degree at a top university. The solution to education is not to try and scale up some absurd and ineffective AI system that is worse than teachers, it's to pay teachers an actual proportionate salary that is in line with their impact on our society so we can retain good people. Just because people like Karpathy understand AI doesn't mean they understand education.

It's not zero sum, we can do both.

You're right lets divert millions if not billions of dollars that could be used on known working solutions for these problems to an unproven technological bullet that is famously capital intensive.

The incentives just are not properly aligned. I went to an urban school system that paid many teachers quite well (upwards of $130k 10 years ago for many), but the pay was just totally ubcorrelated with teacher performance.

Many of the worst teachers were the best paid because they had seniority and that was how the union had structured pay agreements, whereas many of the younger better teachers were paid very poorly (around $50k in a major metro) despite having left very high paying professional jobs to give back. The problem is that there is little-to-no economic incentive to do anything to improve student performance.

You touches on a critical aspect of educational reform

This is the fundamental problem with education: everyone treats it as some problem to "solve" with tools, and technologies. The issues with education are human ones -- interpersonal and policy -- not because it's lacking some tool or technique.

They just installed some state of the art AI-enabled, "smart" mega drawing screens w at my daughter's schools touting all the supposed immeasurable benefits it will bring, and most of the parents, including myself, just rolled our eyes.

I'm curious to see how this all plays out across different disciplines. The process of learning calculus is different from learning a language, which is different from learning the history of science, which is different from learning ethnographic methods.

There are all kinds of self-interested reasons educators might resist some of these technologies. But this also seems to be one of the areas where people from the tech world impose some idea that could potentially work for their limited domains of expertise but don't work at all for others.

> Education seems like it can either be very specialized, or very generalized, but at the end of the day it should be egalitarian.

This is the approach I'm taking.

There are a few psychological and technological tricks here or there, but in my opinion the hardest part is getting the incentives right.

It's very easy to build an educational system that incentivizes for the wrong things. And even if we all agree what the "right" things are, something like universal education is a collective action problem with all the difficulties that come with that.

Whew! Yes. Education is allergic to disruption because education shouldn’t be treated like a business.

Educational goals are to educate people not make money. Education requires countless failures. Business models are composed to be failure averse or reduce risk.

Education has and will likely continue to be a money and time sink because it is an area that requires constant failure from its participants to grow in knowledge.

Thank you for setting this.

Out of curiousity have you worked in education or EdTech? Trying to get the context of this.

Is just a complex and challenging process

> Education ... should be egalitarian

Why?

We shouldn't have to explain that it's plainly obvious that society massively benefits from an educated populace, especially one that claims to be a democracy. There are incredibly broad benefits from a reduction in crime to the expansion of the skilled labor pool.

I've noticed that many people in tech seem to disregard or disrespect educational institutions. So I'll turn it back on you. What draconian reason could you possibly have to make the argument that we shouldn't try to give every child an equal opportunity for a high quality education? Do you hate living in an educated society that much? Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare?

Very uneducated so I can’t comment on this but I’m living in a Malthusian nightmare and definitely wouldn’t recommend it :)

>Are you interested in living in a malthusian nightmare?

Some of them live in such an environment already. I don't know if it's a hallucination or not, but judging from what I've read here over the years a lot of tech people seem to live in the most cutthroat of environments and see everyone as competition to be eliminated or obstacles to be cleared. Some of them live in an environment where you can rely only on yourself, requesting help is seen as weak victim-like behavior, but giving out for free is worse - detrimental because that other person might see what you're doing and take credit for or steal your work; some say helping another with your skills/time and not charging money is peak cuck behavior, and some of the more organized (I'd like to say 'coeficient-driven') members of our community really believe that money is the greatest measurement tool ever invented and we should measure everything with it, including a person's worth.

That being said, generalizing is bad and there really are some truly golden individuals here who have done humanity a net benefit while charging nothing for their work. Like Fabien Sanglard, for example (you likely will never read this but I take my hat off to you and I hope if you get the chance, you should clone yourself in the future - humanity could use at least 10 of you).

I'd find quotes for all of these but I don't think I need them, you've seen these messages if you read the HN comments enough.

Edit: In the 10 or so minutes I took to write my comment, yours went from all black to almost unreadable. It shows better than any treatise would on the opinion HN denizens have on 'free' or 'equal' anything.

What draconian reason could you possibly have to make the argument that we shouldn't try to give every child an equal opportunity for a high quality education?

Opportunity, sure. But an opportunity to get a good education is not the same as actually getting good education. Because every child is different and we want to spend a lot more efforts to educate a child who shows genius level potential than on a child who has zero interest in anything. This is assuming limited educational resources - an assumption challenged by AI education initiatives.

If I have two sons, and one is bright and curious and hard working, while another is dim and lazy, the first one will get 95% of my attention.

The biggest predictor of whether or not a child is "gifted" is the amount of attention they receive as children from their parents and from the education system. Actual genetically driven genius is rare. The kids that gifted child programs benefit are largely the children of affluent parents and not the so called geniuses of our generation. They mostly serve to create a two tier education system within public schools. I'm not saying we tolerate disruptive kids or that we shouldn't reward merit, but this kind of rich kids get the resources and attention system is counterproductive to the outcome you seem to want.

Furthermore, there is zero proof that AI will give us the kind of system that will allow us to shore up the limited education system. The actual solutions to many of these problems are things like paying teachers more to retain the best people, giving kids free lunch, funding after school programs and one on one tutoring etc etc etc.

But doing those things is hard, so tech bros who believe in the myth of the gifted child, who don't have any background in education at all, come in with these systems that they think are silver bullets, then are shocked when they don't work, blaming the unruly children of the proletariat on their failure to fix anything.

And what will you do with the lazy one? Kill him? Let him die when in problems? Maintain it throughout his live? Ignore him and let him live a miserable life?

The lazy one gets exactly the same *opportunity* to have a good education as the bright one. Do you see the difference?

They often don't have the same opportunity but I'm glad we as grown adults are sitting here and judging a child on their dedication to academic rigor.

> I'm glad we as grown adults are sitting here and judging a child on their dedication to academic rigor.

In a conversation about academic performance, what were you expecting?

I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know: in a conversation about resources being poured into academic outcomes, why is a child's athletic ability, or artistic ability, etc relevant?

We are comparing outcomes of investment into academic performance - do you expect this conversation about ROI to be completely without judgements?

We're talking about changing the entire trajectory of someone's life when they're a child because they find school boring when they're 8 years old. Talking about ROI and hard numbers about this makes your look like a ghoul. I think aggregate measures over years are required to accurately measure the impact educational investment, but we should pay teachers more and hire more of them to reduce class size because we have a moral obligation to do so, not just because we'd get an ROI.

> We're talking about changing the entire trajectory of someone's life when they're a child because they find school boring when they're 8 years old.

Maybe you are. We are not. No one is suggesting decreasing the resources made available to a cohort of children. We're suggesting increasing the resources for gifted children within that cohort.

> Talking about ROI and hard numbers about this makes your look like a ghoul.

How else are you going to discuss what is obviously a very important investment into humanity? Personal attacks, maybe?

Is it better to be egalitarian in education or is it better to focus on raising the floor, or raise the median, or providing equal opportunity? They aren't the same thing, and it's very possible that the education system that focuses on one will miss out on parts of the others. You can make moral arguments in favoring each of those options (or even focusing on raising the average).

You can optimize for economic benefit, innovation, fairness, or passions. Their is plenty of non-draconian reasons for preferring each.

It's better to be egalitarian. The clientele of hackernews is predominantly people working in high paying industries, who were lucky enough to get the resources and opportunities to get there, in addition to a considerable amount of hard work. I pushed hard to get where I am today and personally benefitted from gifted child programs. What terrifies me is the idea that being born to slightly different parents or in a slightly different area could have had drastic effects on my outcome. I believe we should make policy decisions assuming any one of us could have been born to the poorest and most negligent parents imaginable. Making any other assumption is being dishonest about the benefits afforded to you by your upbringing.

Wouldn't it be better to raise the floor? If given the choice of a higher floor but a higher ceiling of education quality vs equal but lower quality for everyone, I would prefer the former.

Would this raise the floor? Or would this be "we can hire 5% as many teachers and make the students interact with robots to save money."

Evolution.

The human species has only existed as such for ~100,000 years. Almost all human societies have failed.

We should spread knowledge far and wide for the same reason adaptive mutations spread through a population: shit happens.

Rocks fall out of the sky.

The Earth is jelly with a thin "crust" of congealed goo on top. So-called "solid ground" is thinner relatively than the paint on a globe. It shakes.

(As a kid I lived through Loma Prieta[1], I've seen the earth roll like Santa's belly. We are small!)

We should go through life like "an old man crossing a river in winter", and things both precious and free, like knowledge, should be the treasure of every person, no matter how poor or weak, for tomorrow they may be all that's left.

That's why Wendy, that's why.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Loma_Prieta_earthquake

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