Comment by daxfohl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daxfohl | Hacker News Reader

The education system is already a relic of the past. All the points mentioned in the article assumes that a classroom full of students writing five-paragraph essays on The Red Badge of Courage in 12-point TNR with one-inch margins, hastily graded by an overworked, underpaid public school teacher is still the best way to teach kids in 2025 about critical thinking.

I picture going forward we'll have much more personalized AI-led curricula that students work on at their own pace. The AI systems can let you use as much or as little AI autocompletion as they feel appropriate, can test your understanding real-time by adding some subtle mistakes or opportunities for improvement, and iterate until you get it.

The main issue I worry about is perhaps the opposite. With education actually becoming more effective and interesting, what happens to kids' social and collaboration skills? And maybe that's where human teachers can still add value. Or in discipline and motivation, etc. IDK exactly how that plays out, but I imagine there's still a role for human teachers to play, and perhaps that aspect is even more important than "lecturer" and "grader" that takes most of their time now.

Are you a parent? Have you ever seen a kid growing up? 90%+ of kids wouldn't care at all about any work or learning without social pressure from parents, teachers and peers. That's the whole point of schools – to create a social pressure to put all this knowledge into heads of kids in hope that some of this would be useful for them. And to do it through all these awfully messy years we call childhood and adolescence.

I don't know where you grow up but in most of the developed world kids mock kids for putting effort into study; peers provide social pressure against learning, not towards it.

That depends on peer quality. And it's why so much of education outcomes depends on peer quality.

It's also why there's a considerable opposition to tracking.

If you evaluate academic ability, inevitably, the students who want to learn things are going to be closer to the top, and the ones who don't want to learn things are going to be closer to the bottom.

Now, group students up by ability aggressively: the "top end classes" are going to devour the school program - while the "bottom end classes" would devolve into a pandemonium.

Naturally, the parents of the bottom end students would want there to be zero tracking, so that the average "peer quality" pulls their children up, and the parents of the top end students want there to be the most aggressive tracking possible, so that the average "peer quality" doesn't drag their children down.

A big part of what the rich parents pay for when they send their kids into those expensive private schools is access to better "peer quality". "If a kid's parents are rich" isn't a perfect proxy for "if the kid wants to be learning things", but it outperforms the average. And if a private school is actually willing to expel the most disruptive students, then it's going to tip the scales even further.

Yeah, but that's not the point I was trying to make. My main point was that traditional thinking is that schools need to fight AI or students won't learn. But I think we'd be better off working with AI instead, customizing education according to each student's interests and needs, providing immediate feedback, etc. And I expect school buildings themselves will still be used, if that wasn't clear. I'm not pitching a "school from home" campaign, not after 2020 forced one on us.

Of course teachers still have a role in maintaining discipline, motivation, and things that computers can't do, as well as validating that the AI systems are behaving correctly for the things they can.

The biggest thing I don't like about that approach is it's yet another bump in screen time, which, eh, if I think hard enough on that aspect, it maybe makes me hate the whole idea, so.

It doesn't work for many reasons. For example it's completely normal for a young people to do things only because they are forced to. It doesn't matter how you customize it, how immediate your feedback is etc. I know that I'd used AI to do a lot of school work without learning anything because why not? Fortunately I hadn't any chance for that in seventies. And who/what determines each student's interests and needs? And is it even OK to align for these? I can very confidently say that if my school would align to my specific interests and needs back then, I'd be dead by now. I wouldn't have knowledge and experience to survive changing times.

It's ironic we assume a technology that hallucinates random garbage will be any better than underpaid and overworked teachers. The solution, to me, would be better paid and better supported teachers.

This comment feels like it was written in 2023.

Underpaid, overworked, and also often the unemployable dregs who would take such a horrible job. In the US we destroyed education by whining about taxes and public employee unions, and cutting the legs out from under it with charters, but that doesn't mean that the teachers that are left are worth anything; in fact it makes it more likely they aren't.

If there's anything I'm both hoping that LLMs will replace, and also think of as one of the most vitally important reasons to have locally running, open models, it's teaching. I'm from the age when teaching was "good," and it was bad. The reason why people remember the teachers they were in love with was because of how distinct they were from the rest.

Teachers can be used to teach hard things, like socialization, cleaning, cooking, and how to do backflips.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com