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Comment by smatti | Hacker News Reader

A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland. There are schools that use almost exclusively paper books (instead of digital ones) again. The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids, all the way up to high school. Hand-writing and free drawing with pen and paper provide many advantages to fixed screens. You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book. The significance of these things is finally recognized now. Parents are also worried about the short video brain rot and psychological "capture" of our kids by social media companies.

Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject but that should not ruin the way kids study other subjects where there are proven old ways to get to great results.

Source: I have 10 Finnish kids

Edit: FYI: an old (2018) link to an article about a finding about the matter: https://yle.fi/a/3-10514984 "Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds"

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I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'. I am in the US and there seems to be a FOMO plague infecting our school system when it comes to technology. In practice it seems more destructive to the child.

I keep hearing this at work but so far no one has explained what “learning ai” actually means. It seems to just be nonsense like those people selling prompt recipes or claiming to be prompt engineers.

No one needs training in prompting AI. I could understand if they meant a deeper layer of integrating tech with systems but all they ever mean is typing things in to a text box.

Especially since kids these days aren't even very good at using computers:

http://www.coding2learn.org/blog/2013/07/29/kids-cant-use-co...

It seems to me that if someone can read and think critically-- they can RTFM and get much better much quicker at computers and AI than people who spent all their time tapping an ipad to watch the next video.

I'd think really the only AI skill you need is the ability to think independently and be able to verify the results you are getting or spot when something is wrong in the response.

It would take a few sessions at most to take someone from 10 years ago and get them fully up to speed with AI tools since they have zero learning curve.

I think exercises when student is given pre-generated AI output and told to identify as many issues or mistakes as possible might be sensible. Not sure how long creating such exercise would take and what should be the tools or sources to verify the output but that might be helpful excersise.

Similar to Google and Wikipedia lessons back in my day.

We had something like this when I was in school but it was reading a news article, or the same story covered by different people and identifying the bias or missing information.

Evaluating AI output it’s not a skill on its own. It’s just general critical thinking and literacy.

You also need to understand the limits of AI and that it has limits that a human that gives you usually correct and authoritative answers does not have.

I think it comes easily to the sort of people who comment here. Moat people have a very vague understanding of computers in general.

I suspect that, in practice, what many enthusiastic advocates mean by “learning AI” is actually “learning to need AI”.

In other words, the aim is to get kids used to using AI as soon as possible, so that they do not learn the skills to function without depending on it.

If you’re smart AI saves you time getting to something you could probably achieve anyway. If you’re… not smart… then it will be a necessary crutch for you to get through life.

I can see the angle for making sure kids start using it before they develop the skills to become independent of it.

Presumably prompting skills like https://github.com/califio/publications/blob/main/MADBugs/CV...

I’m not sure anything was clarified. Nothing about that conversation is special or unique?

Are these supposed to be the "skilled" prompts? This just reads as a basic conversation and not as particularly well-written or well-defined prompts. So far everything I've seen about prompting "skills" has just come down to being able to articulate and critically think a bit.

Yeah, my post was kind of sarcastic and it doesn't show.

As someone who sells AI... You'd be shocked at how bad people are at using AI.

My 6 year old kid who watches me is a better prompter.

You absolutely need prompting skills to use AI usefully. You need to know how to eliminate sycophancy, how to ask for and check primary sources, and how to use follow-up questions.

I've been using AI for some legal issues, and it's been incredibly good at searching for case law and summarising the key implications of various statutes - much more efficient than web search, with direct links to the primary sources it finds.

I'm still the one gaming out "What if...?" and "Does that mean..?" scenarios and making sure the answers are grounded in the relevant statutes, and aren't mistakes or hallucinations.

It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.

> It's not so much a prompting problem as a critical thinking and verbal reasoning problem.

And that means you have to learn without AI to understand when the AI is wrong. This is just how its dangerous to use a calculator without knowing math since you wont spot when you entered things wrongly etc.

Learning those prompting skills was very useful for you, but in the context of schools it's a lot more difficult to make the investment worth it.

Schools are slow, by the time the teachers get around to teaching the sophisticated techniques you use today, those techniques will be obsolete, the new AI models will require completely different style of prompts.

As for critical thinking and reasoning, those are even harder to teach. How can teachers teach what they don't know?

It would probably be useful to learn how the models work under the hood - particularly about high dimensional vector spaces - as a counter to magical thought. But I doubt that's what is meant.

It's not FOMO. The line level people actually educating the children don't give a crap about the technology. They will generally make the best of whatever resources they have and procure wisely. Like everything else in government it's an administrative racket and all the suppliers fan the flames because they make money. Ain't no different than how your local building or environmental inspector finds himself screwing people doing nothing wrong and approving absurd stuff because that's what the rules big business ghost wrote and paid to have the government adopt say he must do.

Kids are using crappy subscription education services for homework and doing all their reading on screens (and educators are toiling away to work with these systems) because the people who make money off the services and screens paid to have the incentives distorted such that buying their products is the least shitty option.

I don't think they need to learn 'AI workflows' (whatever that means). But I think it makes sense to use the LLM's as a resource.

I've used them when studying new languages (human languages not programming languages) and ML algorithms and they've been really useful.

Learning to check the citations it gives you is a useful skill too. I wish many adults were more sceptical about the things they are told.

It's true that you can use LLMs as a learning resource and to unblock you. But students just aren't. They are using them as a way to avoid thinking, avoid research, and just spit out an answer they can paste in to their homework.

They should at least require handwritten work, the kids will still be AI-stupid but will at least be able to write.

You remember better when you write, too.

Because the students learned that school is designed by old morons, without understating why writing book reports and doing math drills has the intent of creating students that can read and write or learn other transferable skills.

I assume "AI workflows" means knowing how to split up a task to create a chain of agents that can complete a specific task reliably.

A bit like software development.

The problem is that the task you've defined "split up a task to create a chain of agents" has changed dramatically in just the last six months, nevermind the last two years.

You're wasting effort and teaching an obsolete technology if you try to make primary/secondary education too topical. Students can learn how to decompose a task and how to think critically without ever touching a Large Language Model.

Also when the subsidies go away it will be prohibitively expensive for most businesses, and is probably already too expensive for schools.

AI “workflows” share the same addictive characteristics of web surfing online virtual media, which can be counter productive. In this regard, we do need some serious learning at all the levels in the workplace. Otherwise we will become addicted to the slot machines.

Addiction is a much harder problem than distraction.

> I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.

This would be just the modern version of "Computer class" back in the day when we learned to use word, excel, etc. Just another tool among others that is helpful to learn but should be limited to that specific class.

Though actual sad thing learning from friends with kids is that the modern "computer class" does not actually teach kids to use computers much these days.

Yeah I'd be happier if they learned how an Apollo computer worked (even though it has virtually no relevance) than how to use Excel.

This reminds me of Harvey Cragon's intro to computer architecture textbook...

When it introduces Harvard vs. Von Neumann architectures, it doesn't invent some dumb RISC computer to illustrate the difference... No... it makes you learn the actual von Neumann machine! Also Conrad Zuse Z machine.

Cragon's argument is that students will not learn the concept of engineering trade-offs, if presented with a clean "textbook" architecture.

I hated MIX for various reasons, it's sort of in-between simple and kludgy.

[0] Cragon was professor at University of Texas Austin ca 1980. Also the architect of TI's ASC in the 1960s.

>I don't see the advantage of learning 'AI workflows'.

Eventually everything that can be learned from a book will be done much better by machines, so for humans to have any chance of being employable they'll need to develop the soft skill of working with intelligent machines.

Just as "there is no royal road to mathematics", no AI can do your learning for you. The need for memorization of essential math identities (like multiplication tables and use of fractions) or rules of grammar (like verb conjugation or use of anaphora) will never be enhanced by AI. There is an essential role for good old fashioned rote learning that can't be avoided. To pretend AI will not impede that learning is a fool's errand, literally.

I do not see the point of either of your examples of rote learning. What do you lose if you do not know the? You will pick up enough of multiplication tables through doing maths, native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising (you do need to do it if learning foreign languages). Anaphora is a technique which cannot really be rote learned - and most people to try to use it do so badly and just sound repetitive.

> You will pick up enough of multiplication tables through doing maths

You will not do maths casually until you have memorized enough multiplication to make it not torture. You will not pick up multiplication from using a calculator any more than you will pick up programming from using a computer.

> native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising

They do not. They have memorized, through massive, constant, and forced practice, and now they conjugate correctly. The alternative of consulting a computer every time they need to speak is not a realistic one.

> You will not pick up multiplication from using a calculator

Sure you will, at least assuming we're still talking about memorizing multiplication tables here and not how to do long division or the like. I don't think algebra or even basic calculus has any convincing need to involve rote memorization.

I've ended up unintentionally memorizing many things due to frequently needing to consult various lookup tables.

> conjugation

Competent ones will. Wrong conjugations usually "sound" wrong to me even when I haven't seen them before and that's in English of all things.

Both observably false. I know people who are counter examples.

Doing maths is not torture if you do not know multiplication tables if you have a calculator.

Native speakers of a language do not memorise conjugations through forced practice, they memorise through hearing them repeatedly from others.

If AI is still too stupid to show people how to work with it, and to notice their lacks and anticipate their needs, it can't have become that indispensably useful.

The entire point of AI is to accommodate the user. AI doesn't do anything that people can't do, is worse at most of those things, but is a lot faster at some of them (basically looking up things.) The point of AI is natural language UI.

Teaching people how to use AI is just teaching people enough about the world to give them something to ask AI for.

Luddite move.

Buddy AI is here to stay. You remind me of my 2nd grade teacher who said 'we wont have calculators in our pockets'.

AI is important but we don't know what skills will be relevant in 10+ years to harness AI (I can't imagine prompt engineering is much the same). Anyway, would a typical teacher be ahead of the curve on what pedagogical tack to take here even if it was appropriate?

The best thing to do is to set the kids up to learn the most important thing - which is how to teach oneself. If a kid can read about something, and then understand what was important from the reading, and then write about it, and then know where to go next they will be well served in the AI world.

And s/he was right. Most students who were brought up with calculators in math class cannot do basic math without one today. When shopping in groceries, they have no idea if one product costs more than another by weight. They're easy to bamboozle with the simplest misrepresentations of numbers. Is one choice of product really better than another, fractionally, or corrected for a shifted baseline? They don't know and can't use basic algebra to find out.

This is bad -- an F grade for the education system that let them slide by without learning an essential skill. The chinese aren't this lazy. And if we persist in not learning this, America's future will regress to us asking them, "Do you want fries with that?"

That is poor teaching. My kids were almost always allowed calculators (always after the age of 8 or 9) and they can do all that and a lot more (my older daughter is an electronics engineer, in R & D).

For one thing you do not need to do much arithmetic to do algebra, for another estimating and getting a feel for numbers is not the same skill as learning a bunch of arithmetic techniques. No one is going to do long division while shopping.

Um... there's always exceptions.

I can keep enough digits in my working memory to do long division in the grocery aisle.

I also compulsively factor numbers on license plates..

> they have no idea if one product costs more than another by weight

In proper countries the price per kg is displayed under the price

AI is here to stay. But learning to copy-paste homework into a chatbot is not really a skill one needs to learn.

Had a buddy who works at a prestigious university teaching film history tell me their big boss is basically forcing all classes including his ones on film history to incorporate AI education in some way. So silly.

As much as I would have disagreed as a kid, I very much agree now. Laptops were used more for flash games and reddit than learning in the classroom in my experience. And likely the act of reading physical books and handwriting is better for learning.

That anecdote sounds like a problem with discipline and ethics, not with technology.

You can put a candy bowl in front of kids and tell them not to touch it. Or you can just not put it there. Ultimately kids will be less distracted when you remove the source of distractions. Phone bans in schools are showing this already.

Are we talking about laptops in grades advanced enough for students to waste time on Reddit, or smartphones in the hands of young children?

My contention is that it's feasible to use laptops in classrooms productively, especially considering the value in applications like word processors. Of course it's necessary to balance the educational value with the potential for distraction. A way to minimize the latter is to extend classroom management to address device use, e.g., instilling discipline. I've personally seen it done well and done poorly (often not attempted at all), and given an otherwise healthy classroom setting, it comes down to discipline and ethics that address device use. That comes after tailoring the specific device format (e.g., tablets lending themselves more to entertainment, socially and habitually) to the appropriate grade level (maturity, responsibility, and technical potential increasing with age).

Some classrooms are too disruptive for device use, but that's not inherently a tech problem, even if you blame disruptive classrooms on broader cultural problems stemming from tech's role in society. Other classrooms exist in cultures that reject the necessary classroom management strategies.

It's not my contention that any device format should be used at any grade level and that distractions can be managed by simply saying "don't" and expecting success.

To address your other point above, yes, reading a book is different, often better, than reading on a screen, even for adults, so I'm also not arguing that devices should replace books.

> Laptops were used more for flash games and reddit than learning in the classroom in my experience

Are you sure it isn't both? Learning how to bypass the school's internet filtering so that I could get to flash games and reddit probably taught me more than anything in the lessons.

~20 years later on all the "Digitalisation of Schools" brought us is waning attention spans for children but billions of sells to Big Tech for software, and e-devices that after a few years become electronic waste to be shipped to a poor country stripped for rare earths and finally ending in landfills in Africa or Asia to poison the ground water.

But think of all the shareholder value that was created, surely that makes it worth it /s

That's because our idea of "Digitalisation of Schools" is putting a textbook into pdf form, let student use a computer to open it and call it digitalisation.

I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation

Absolutely. When I was in college, I had to stop using my laptop to take notes, as I would just always end up scrolling reddit for half the class. I switched to pen and paper, and while I almost never ended up looking at my notes, just the fact of manually writing them down helped me remember them.

That was my experience as well. I did best in the classes where I didn't have a laptop out. I had no temptations to be distracted and simply writing down the notes by hand was a huge benefit.

I suspect the people I see saying they were able to not get distracted when using a laptop in class are either outliers or liars.

The same thing is happening in Norway now too. The general attitudes have shifted quite a lot in the last few years. In recent months the Department of Education has committed to reducing screen usage across the board, but particularly in grades 1 to 4.

https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/endrer-skolehverdagen-... [link in Norwegian, no English source available]

About "all the way up to high school", what about the rest? I'm in the camp that it's better for all people, regardless of age actually.

Well in university you are typically an adult and so what your parents think about the study material isn't a great concern, except for the case they are a subject matter expert.

Most university students still behave like kids. I don’t think you can expect under-20 students to behave as adults, honestly. I went to university again around 30 . And my wife teaches first year students. Maybe I am just old now but those students are just kids and behave like large children.

Transitioning to adulthood but there is still a long way to go for most.

there's no evidence on scientific pedagogic literature that "analog ways" are better than digital when you control variables like "your kid being able to open a tab to watch a non-related Youtube video". you can't use your sample of 10 kids to say anything, nor use poor journalism done into the topic, which cites single research with less than thousand participants and bias from the author by other scientists on the field

no meta-analysis done into this topic could conclude anything beyond the digital medium being a bit more efficient on reading speed. and these studies do not account when comparing one way to the other on the plethora of ways a digital medium can expand knowledge (videos, gifs, images, interactive visualizations and so on)

You assert a pretty strong view, on what basis? but your hypothesis is directionally wrong, as found in these trials:

Screen readers take longer.

Feis A, Lallensack A, Pallante E, Nielsen M, Demarco N, Vasudevan B. Reading Eye Movements Performance on iPad vs Print Using a Visagraph. J Eye Mov Res. 2021 Sep 14

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8557948/?utm_source...

Another

https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~srikur/files/HCII_reading.pdf?ut...

Tangential: One study finds few significant effects of disruptions on just on-screen reading, no printed books.. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

Cited in Card Catalog , Hana Goldin, "What scrolling did to reading" here:

https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...

you managed to gather with all the research you cited minus the blog post, less than 100 participants. if you think this is enough to conclude anything i may warn you are tripping balls

i suggest you do some read, specially of effect sizes found in many studies showing "better performance" (minuscule effect size). there's a plethora of political things you'll ignore by thinking books are better. i gathered you some stuff (there are more than 200,000 people studied on the links i'm sending to you) and i truly hope you don't try to counter-argument by pointing some meta-analysis i linked concluding the analog is better. they admit the effect is minimal to negligent and if you actually consider studies done on text that user doesn't have to "scroll" but rather advance the page with a tap/pgDN and the user don't have their social media hooked on their device (muted or absent), there literally NO EVEDIENCE of any difference between paper and digital learning

[0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-16892-001

[1] https://futureofreading.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/1-s2.0...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10606230/

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10639-025-13843-8

[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277250302...

> The overall consensus among parents is that books are way better than screens for kids

Any scientific backing that screens are at fault? I don't think so. E-ink tablets do exist. When I'm having children, I'm buying them a remarkable with all the books scanned. Sure, they still need physical sheets of paper and a pen, but they don't have to carry 2-3 kgs of literature.

The major reason against digital literature is that it's free, book authors wouldn't get paid and books wouldn't get sold (Wikipedia / OpenStax / pirated books). Money. It's always been about money.

remarkable also, as the name implies, can be used as a notebook ;-)

Yes, but you aren't going to give your teacher a remarkable to take home. Hence a sheet of paper comes in handy :)

It's not that simple, at all. Any kind of electronic device adds a complexity that many HNers tend to underestimate. Giving an e-ink device would probably be the best approach but you have to manage them at scale, and I don't think there is any solution out of the box right now. But to give a general computing device like an iPad or a Chromebook to teenagers was going to end like this from day 0.

See Hana Goldin, MLIS: What Scrolling Did to Reading.

Lots to think about there.

https://open.substack.com/pub/cardcatalogforlife/p/what-scro...

I have personally found it is often easier to find things in a physical book. Say I want to look up an equation that I remember learning about from a particular book.

If it was a physical book there is a good chance I will remember a place for the equation, say about 3/4 of the way through the book, near the top of a left hand page and the right had page had a graph showing solutions of the equation.

I can then quickly riffle through the book to find that spot.

With an ebook I get much less sense of place. If what I read on has consistent paging so I've always seen that equation at the same place on the screen I might remember that but not much more. If the "search" function in the reader software isn't good enough to find the equation and I can't think of enough prose that was around it to find it by searching for that it is going to be harder to find than it is in the physical book.

I think the physical books is activating the same mental facilities that are used to organize memories of a physical journey through a space. An ebook doesn't do that for me.

"screens" can be great for research and there is a lot you can learn online.

The main problem mentioned in the article you link to seem to be distraction from what they were supposed to be doing.

Distraction is not always bad and kids can learn a lot by being distracted by something that catches their interest. it depends on the approach and its more of a problem following a fixed curriculum in a classroom. Probably more of a problem for uninterested or younger children.

I think video can be a big problem, particularly given the tendency of sites to try to keep you there.

Well, the school of our kids blocks a lot of urls. Now they play the games via some url that goes like https://unblocked.something.something. These kids are not crazy.

This is written with what feels like the peak understanding of my kid's school's IT department: "well, they're just so smart, we can't find any way of stopping them!"

An allowlist might be a good place to start.

That might slow them down.

Could any of the IT professionals, here, think of a way around it? Then likely the kids could.

They don't even have to think of a way around any of it. They just need to search online to find someone who has found a way around it. Or prompt AI to come up with a solution. And even if someone is so dull that they don't think about that, it will probably make it to them as the info spreads by word of mouth.

That Source: drop of 10 kids is one of the best I have ever seen on the Internet. Sending respect your direction as a Dad of 3

At what point do we stop and admit that paper books are superior in all cases.

It's like social media ban for children. If you stop and think about it there is nothing special about children, it's terrible for everyone.

> You cannot open a new tab to Youtube in a book

If such a basic distraction in a digital device isn't fix, it means the experiment wasn't even tried!

Even with books, stuff happens, you can skip ahead a chapter, consult the index, follow a footnote... or put another book on the table.

> A very similar development is going on in neighboring Finland.

Same in neighbouring Norway. Hi, neighbour! :)

It's clear that there's growing recognition of the drawbacks of too much screen time

if you need to "learn AI" - your AI sucks.

Could say the same about language, driving, and writing systems?

Steve Jobs popularized among startup/HN audiences that intuitive interfaces are the best interfaces, but I have yet to see evidence for that. Are systems that work without education truly better than those where you might be a lot more effective with some amount of study? Probably there's an optimal point, like a year of full-time education to use your OS won't pay off at median longevity, but whether <5 minutes of learning is the optimum...

It's great for onboarding people to your tech product, though. Incentives may be misaligned between what's best for the users and what's best for the cashflow

Wait you have 10 kids !!?!? Much respect

>Naturally, the kids should learn AI and AI workflows also. And personal AI assistants can probably help many kids in their studies. Learning AI should be its own subject

What? Why? And why "naturally" as if this is an entirely uncontroversial statement?

> Source: I have 10 Finnish kids

Wait what?

This guy alone is trying to raise Finland's birth rate.

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