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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

It turns out that our kids learn better from humans than machines.

Ever dealt with a kid who has had too much screen time? It’s fucking awful.

True, a kid who has had too much screen time is not good, just like a kid who has had too much lunch is not good. That doesn't make lunch bad, it just means the kid needs the right amount.

Screens can be helpful for kids (mine have learned a ton from Khan Academy and other online tools), but kids will have different thresholds. Some will only be able to learn a little from screens because they can't work independently. Others can learn a lot. Blanket statements like "kids lean better from humans than machines" are not helpful. They obscure the fact that there is typically one teacher for 25 kids, whereas there might be 25 screens. Even if a screen is only 1/10 as good as a teacher, it could be that learning from a screen is better than learning from a teacher (who is busy with your classmates almost all of the time).

My kid learned more math when she was doing AoPS for 2 yrs than when she was in class listening to lectures she already knew, followed by worksheets she had already mastered. Machines enable much more differentiation.

Your anecdata has a gigantic blind spot of you being a capable and engaged parent that monitors and guides your children’s screen time to be educationally productive. That time is a luxury, and your expertise is rare.

To take it back to the lunch analogy that you provided, it’s a bit like saying, “I don’t know why everyone’s kids are hungry at school, I pack a nutritious and filling lunch that I know my kids enjoy every morning.”

Logically speaking, this is incorrect. OP said that humans teach kids better than machines, full stop. To disprove this claim, I do not need to show that all kids learn better from machines, just that some do. I have shown this, and even admitted that it doesn't work for all kids.

Also, I didn't need to monitor/guide my kids so they could learn from AoPS or Khan Academy. Those platforms are self-guided. But regardless, my kid learned pretty much zero from school math, so the threshold for "better than the teacher" was very very low.

I’m going to sidestep your pedantry and focus on why we’re actually having this conversation: it is obvious from data and observations at scale that children struggle to learn meaningfully in the presence of technology, i.e. screens, in the same way that children learned with educators of the quality that taught previous generations (higher salaries).

Techno-Utopianism is such a grating ideology, especially when thrown into the ring alongside all of the other garbage that education experts have to deal with when trying to enact meaningful change in the education system.

If basic logic is pedantry in your book, I think we're done here. Looks like you're new here, but perhaps won't last long if you're allergic to logic.

In my country every few years a bunch of people invent some new method to teach kids how to read. Completely ignoring that humans have been doing exactly that for at least 5000 years.

Education is a business.

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