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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.

I think it's more complex than this.

AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.

The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.)

On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.

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The obvious way to square this circle is to go back to how things used to be: less emphasis on coursework and more on old-fashioned tests in an examination environment with just pen and paper.

You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams. On the other hand, students who use LLMs to augment their learning will do fine

This is definitely what's going to happen. But there is still a problem - people (not just children) are fundamentally lazy and put things off. People always leave assignments until the last minute. I used to smoothly transition from "I've got plenty of time, no need to start" to "there's not enough time to do it, there's no point starting".

They will 100% just use AI for the whole year and then panic and fail the exam when the time comes.

So I think not only will we see more invigilated exams, but they'll become more frequent and shorter. Which I would say is a good thing anyway. I always hated learning a whole year of stuff for a 3 hour exam.

In what countries were the exams only once a year? When I grew up in the 90s in Sweden we would have tests and exams frequently, usually at the end of each module. This continued all the way through university. I think we had 3 separate exams for the first math course (which lasted a quarter of a year, so roughly one exam per month).

(Though they didn't give formal grades for the first several years of elementary school, which I'm not sure was a good idea.)

In the UK. In high school (age ~11 to 16) the only exams that mattered were SATs at ages 7, 11 and 14 (though I just checked and apparently they've scrapped the 14 year old ones for some reason), and GCSEs at 16. After that you have A-levels for two years (age 17 and 18) where IIRC it was just one big group of exams at the end of each year, and then university where I guess maybe it varies but at least at Cambridge it was one big group of 3-hour long exams at the end of each year.

Though Cambridge does have "tutorials" which are 1:2 tutoring sessions where you probably couldn't completely rely on AI.

Your way definitely sounds better to me.

In Poland, that's how it worked at unis. We had a lot of subjects where we had only one big exam at the end and your grade depended on it.

Before uni though, we would get a grade or two every week, be it from short tests, classwork, homework or exams.

It’s a good point. I could see a world where exams get cheaper to administer.

I also think we can use project work as an ongoing assessment.

> You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams

This might sound principled, but we need to recognize that school administrators are incentivised to have as few kids as possible fail their exams; and consequently, so are the teachers. Either exams will change, or the teaching will change.

People keep bringing this up as though it’s a counter argument.

Yes, things will have to change. That’s the idea.

It’s one dimension, I agree. Though, for essay-based courses I’m a little skeptical about writing under time pressure.

My thinking here is that you might want to also introduce more “viva voce” (verbal defense) style tests. These have been expensive to administer but my hunch is that you can scale these with AI administering the first round, random human review or participation. This feels like a better endpoint than essays under time pressure (but also maybe you can elect one or the other?)

My other angle is to break completely from the past. I want to see more project work. If AI makes it easier to fake or attain any given level of knowledge, we need to ask more of students, ie ask them to demonstrate mastery by building real things. More open-ended projects are harder to grade (use AI to scale grading), but more fun and engaging for students.

This doesn’t just refer to STEM of course; why not ask students to write a play, compose a symphony, etc?

My core thesis is that most students would work harder and engage with things that interest them, and the fundamental problem with Taylorized education is that one-size-fits-all is only interesting to some.

I studied in a French Lycée in Spain. We did dissertations, brutal 3h live writing tests. There was no problem with it other than the difficulty. Kids didn’t come out screwed up or impaired.

I agree it’s an option. I did some essay exams at Uni too. I just don’t think we should assume that the old cost/benefit calculus still applies and this is the best way to test e.g. English Lit or Philosophy.

Exactly, “write an essay under time pressure” used to just be called… an exam.

It’s normal and was done for centuries (and still done in many countries) for a reason, it works and it’s equally hard for everyone so it’s not unfair.

(3 hours straight is brutal though)

... and teachers will just not do this. So maybe having AI grade a million tests instead can help.

I mean is this being done to help kids? Or to protect the jobs of teachers who have no real interest in teaching?

There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.

LLMs are able to talk for a very long while now. Have you ever used Gemini as an assistant? It can even put in related images about your query and while it can use an improvement it can spell more or less.

It's far from clear that this helps you to learn anything. More likely it's a way for most people to avoid having to think or learn.

I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.

I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.

The thing I think is underspoken in this space is that LLMs will always hallucinate a bit. How will you know as a 13 year old that an LLM is not conversing truth at you?

My teachers were frequently wrong too and spoke with authority on subjects in hindsight they were frankly ill equipped to teach. Part of learning is understanding how to reason through these types of issues. It's a common problem solving problem in the work place just the same.

Yeah but the teacher says you're wrong even if you're right. The AI tells you you're right either way. The former can facilitate an important lesson, the latter doesn't ever give you the chance to.

I've been doing things like accounting where I upload receipts and have the LLM adjust a Google sheet with the money balances. The error rate over the past year has dropped from occasionally to never. That is because there's sub agents now running that check the work. If you have multiple LLMs running with a 94% success rate but you throw them into a group that requires a consensus suddenly the number basically hits 99%.

We simply need to run sub agents on the children's learning, then we will maximize pedagogic efficiency to 99%.

I think this is a false equivalence, by some extreme margin. Teachers may occasionally have some fact or whatever incorrect, but especially at lower levels it's going to be exceptionally rare, and often based on a logical foundation that is otherwise invalid for some reason, like whether 1 is a prime number or not.

By contrast LLMs constantly get things wrong and once they get something wrong will begin weaving that into everything create entirely fake realities of the sort that is more akin to a schizophrenic than somebody being mistaken on this fact or that.

My own experience from elementary school was that teachers being wrong was shockingly common. There is no subject in which I would trust any of my elementary school teachers more than a state of the art LLM. This was in Norway. I’m guessing you were privileged to grow up in a place with better quality elementary education.

> I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.

I am not sure. It would be like sending a kid to a beautiful garden with full of life and stuff, and then micromanaging what they can do there!

The beauty of the books is that the books talk to you, and you cannot talk back. You have to talk to yourselves, go down some wrong path, and course correct on your own at some point, and that is where true learning happens..

Hallucinations aren't going anywhere. So you're having a conversation with a stochastic parrot that occasionally says something completely wrong but completely viable and in a highly compelling fashion.

The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.

> The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.

Agreed. With the way LLMs often are quite artuculate and confident sounding, it's only a matter of time until kids will be suspicious of actual people that are articulate and confident from putting effort into improving their speech and speaking about things they are right to be confident about due to being proficient in the subject.

Either that or kids will see that LLMs aren't "getting punished" for being "convincing liars" and will grow up convincing the socially correct way to interact with others is by speaking to them respectfully while going all in on long-game gaslighting.

I understand the first part, but I don't understand the second one. It's probably my ignorance for not having children and being out of touch with schooling. When I was in school very little grading was based on homework, mostly was grading by testing in class. For example math, I'm absolutely sure it was 100% a few grading tests every semester. You could cheat by copying the homework of your classmates, it was the same set of problems for, but with 0 understanding, you would not pass.

This is what schools enforce, second, even more important part is what parents do/allow/pay for at home.

Every single household I've seen benevolent use of phones/tablets/tv/computer/consoles (quite often all of it), kids were unruly, had shitty grades, living empty lives without good role models and very little passions or hobbies, and overall were more depressed than happy.

I do get why - its supremely easier to just throw tech at them and let them drown in endless cheap dopamine content, triple that for already-addicted parents. The whole principle of active screen itself is so overpowering and addictive compared to good old physical toys, drawing, paint, reading etc.

As a parent of young kids, its much harder to come up, continuously, with good motivating program out there, or even indoors, ie climbing. But - I didn't get kids to have easiest possible life, coursing through our short lives deep in comfort zone is a failure IMHO, thats not life well lived, that's life avoided. I am not kind to such parents - its the biggest achievement, or failure, in one's life, biggest challenges bring biggest rewards. Rather few people put in corresponding effort continuously, compared to careers, relaxing and other aspects of adult lives.

And then folks wonder why so many old people are sour, seeing in more life-successful others all the stuff one could/should have done if not so lazy is deeply depressing, usually amounts to biggest life regrets.

Learning is also impacted when homework/test questions are created and graded by AI.

The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map…

Why have teachers?

The AI might as well grade itself.

Hard agree. AI generated questions should be absolutely forbidden. In our university I helped a instructor set up a custom Gemini Gem to let students grade themselves in recording because we did not have time to read the final scores in time, It was a nightmare to restrict or get consistent results.

It’s not complex. One must first learn HOW TO LEARN before they can use any tool to help them learn.

There’s no substitution for human connection (social media) and there’s no substitution for traditional learning (robot teachers).

Everyone who wants to “disrupt” this fundamental human quality is chasing delusion. If you want to help, pay teachers a couple billion from the hundreds-of-billions going into AI maybe?

I agree that the human touch is valuable.

I disagree that humans are required to bootstrap meta-learning; I think it is quite deeply wired into the human brain and there is no reason that we can’t create digital gyms that give opportunities to learn the same insights.

I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.

Well, what we’re seeing in society is the opposite effect. Kids with phones and AI bots are doing, on average, terrible in school compared to folks who didn’t have those growing up.

University professors will likely agree that AI makes students worse at learning overall. No need to cite this there are articles all over the place.

So whatever solution you’re talking about, even when purpose-built, should be replaced by higher paid teachers. Ultimately the AI-First model is about moving money into mega-corps and paying teachers less.

I agree that we are seeing the negative effects of AI-done-wrong. (The best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, as I said.)

I don’t agree that this means all potential or current uses of AI are harmful.

I also don’t agree that simply paying teachers more is a solution. This lever has always existed and as a society we fail to pull it. So for the majority of people who use public schools, improving quality at current spend levels would be a major win, and we should explore the obvious possibilities here.

I’m also pretty skeptical about your culture-war assertion that this is about wealth transfer to mega-corps. This can easily be a sovereign AI product. (I also never proposed “AI first” FWIW, I am a proponent of humans augmented by AI for this and most use-cases. Banning AI entirely operates at the margin of forbidding mostly-human use-cases from using any AI.)

>very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.

Where is the data on this?

> I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.

You seem to think you're making some kind of valid argument here by backing up your opinion about one thing by providing evidence of something unrelated aside from both things happening to involve AI. I'm guessing only reason it seems obvious to you is because it's not obvious to you that what you're disagreeing is something different than what's going on to begin with.

I haven't seen anyone say the best education would be pure-human provided. The entire point of the article is that the effect AI has had on the education of children so far has not been beneficial.

The fact that AI useful for GPs for getting relatively simple yet time consuming administrative work taken care of has nothing to do with children's education. GPs aren't doing paperwork to develop their fundamental reading and math skills. Less time dealing with the non-medical portions of running a practice means they can spend more time with their patients. Spending more time with their patients allows them to better understand their symptoms and make a better informed, more accurate diagnosis even if AI is never used in a patient-facing capacity. In no way does that indicate that AI is currently a suitable to deploy in education.

I don't know if you used AI to learn about what you were arguing with and gather information to back up your argument, but if you did then that's another example of why there's so much concern about little kids using it. Eventually it will be worked into something without such a double edged nature when applied to early learning. Everyone already knows it can be an educational boon for people who have the skills to use it properly. So far, statistics indicate students do not have those skills. The rate of failure among undergraduate students is only continuing to accelerate.

> I haven't seen anyone say the best education would be pure-human provided

I took GP to be saying exactly that, and the OP’s full ban on AI in schools is also enforcing pure-human.

> I don't know if you used AI to learn about what you were arguing with and gather information to back up your argument

Accusing someone of mindless AI slop is a bad faith read. It’s also against the HN community guidelines. Please don’t do this.

> take-home essay assignments

Typically there's not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7 anyways.

Homework levels between elementary school and start of junior might look something like this:

    Division I / early elementary - no formal assignments should be made, though 5–10 minutes of systematic study or reading was recommended.

    Division II / upper elementary - formal homework could be assigned at the teacher’s discretion, but generally should be reading or study-type work and not exceed about 20 minutes.

    Starting from junior high - students are expected to study one-half to one hour per school night.

What do you mean there is not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7?

We had a fuckton of homework at every grade, here in Hungary.

I remember that whole "expect 30 to 60 min a night" nonsense. I always assumed that was a scare tactic or something. I mean, in high school i was awake until around 4 am playing games every night so I'd wind up using half of each school day compensating with well-timed napping. Even then, the only homework i had to actually take home was the stuff meant to be turned in a few weeks later like tests and projects. Sure, we had daily "homework" assigned; there was also more than enough time during lectures to finish it. The only students that i really ever saw complain about having tons of homework were the ones that didn't put any effort into learning stuff at school to begin with.

I presume kids still learn to add 1 and 1, do their multiplication tables and long division before being given a calculator ?

Bloom's 2 sigma problem solved at last! But that's overestimating LLMs, our zeitgeist.

AI can't detect AI, not because AI undetectable, but because it lacks judgment. Its shtick is random generation; the proverbial monkey on a typewriter.

> and the best technology ever invented for learning.

This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement.

Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.

Dude, just use it to learn something. It's obviously true.

Everyone uses AI all the time now. People's impressions are not mediated by marketing.

> Ask a question.

> Ask two follow-up questions.

> Ask about a seeming contradiction between the original answer and the answer to the second follow-up question.

> Get congratulated for raising such a great point and get parroted back your objection as a "correction."

Useful as a learning aid if applied cautiously but maybe not the "best thing ever."

Useful as in “better than nothing” but lacking as in “inferior to almost anything else”.

I thought the dichotomy would make this clear, but the claim was not that however you use AI, it’s the best thing ever. To be more explicit:

_used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities, AI is the best technology ever invented for learning. If you don’t believe this as a technical HN person at the epicenter of this technology’s capability set, I probably can’t persuade you. But you can do a lot better than your transcript.

Used in the default mode, or with a desire to take shortcuts, or a desire to minimize what is perceived (often correctly in the case of many school curriculae) as BS fake work, it is the best technology ever invented to avoid learning.

FWIW, I liked the way you expressed it through a dichotomy.

>_used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities

How often do children do things the "correct way" or know how to get the most out of a thing?

That’s our job as educators, not the kid’s. “The correct way” obviously requires scaffolding.

It's the same old argument about knives and technology. But we don't give children knives.

But we do give them bicycles, so the lesson would be “give them technology that is safe to use”.

And then we are back to the discussion at hand none the wiser; what forms of AI are safe to use for kids?

The kind that doesn't allow a child to anthropomorphize it, or rely on it for learning.

AI is a terrible teacher though. It makes stuff up all the time, and for some subjects it has a remarkably low accuracy rate

I would argue it has gotten way better. Depending on the subject it can be really helpful and some tools even have a learning mode built in now that can generate questions and tests. They are often way too easy to solve but it does not demotivate i guess.

It has always gotten better, just like how self-driving cars have gotten better, and how the case for bitcoin is always getting stronger.

Many people have stopped believing this lie. Yes AI has gotten better by some metric which AI companies are pushing. It has not gotten good enough to be a qualified teacher, and it never will.

I have never claimed it to be good enough to replace a qualified educator, however for self learning it is a good tool with no hustle. You also consider how qualified some educators are...

It's far superior in many cases. Teachers get tired, lose patience, etc.

I'd prefer a grumpy teacher over one that cheerfully gaslights me.

Better then what for self-learning though? Better then textbooks? Better then an online course? Better then watching youtube videos from Khan academy, or just better then nothing at all as described some metrics which the AI companies came up with them selves?

I suspect it is the last one. This is a trillion dollar industry and if the AI companies claim this, then they should be able to to show it with quality research, they however have not, and the reason is that this is a lie. AI is not better then anything for self-learning. Go to the library and check out a chess book, go to r/trumpet, join a weekly meetup to practice you Spanish, etc. etc. all of these are vastly superior then AI.

You claim self-learning via is hustle free, perhaps you are right, however I suspect that there is no such thing as hustle free learning. If you want to learn something you have to use your brain, and you have to struggle. AI will just act like you got this, flatter you for a minute, and in the worst cases, you may start to believe the AI when it lies to you about how much you’ve learned.

>Better then textbooks? Better then an online course? Better then watching youtube videos from Khan academy, or just better then nothing at all as described some metrics which the AI companies came up with them selves?

The value of all of these self-learning routes has increased enormously due to existence of AI assistants. At least the way I do it now, I get the initial structure for a subject from YouTube/Udemy/textbooks and then fill out my personal comprehension gaps with the help of AI. You can even point AI to a specific material you're trying to grasp and usually it will rephrase a point you failed to get in a simpler language.

Previously, you'd need some trained person to explain to you something that led you to hit a roadblock. Now, the level of understanding you get easily beats most of the tutors in public schools or community colleges.

> The value of all of these self-learning routes has increased enormously due to existence of AI assistants.

This is a lie and most of us know it. AI companies have been lying and lying and lying and lying. If you believe this then the AI companies have successfully lied to you and are making you pay money for an inferior product. If this weren’t a lie then the AI companies should have the research to prove it, they have not, because it is not true. AI does not help anybody learn anything better then using traditional methods.

So my personal experience apparently is a folly that requires some bureaucratically approved scientific study to validate?

Yes, it is well known that people trying to sell you stuff lie about your experience with the product. A good salesmen will make you extremely happy to pay 10x more for a worse product. In fact a good salesman will convince you those bugs are actually feature, and you should be happy to pay 10x for so many “features”.

What exactly am I selling here?

I agree with the last part, however I disagree with the others. To learn something you can't just watch or just read, I personally try to do both, first watch to get a basic grasp, then read to get some of the finer details. It stimulates a bigger area of my brain and lets me remember it faster. AI comes in as a helper to this cycle, creating me a study plan letting me know what to focus on, finding me videos on the topic and sorting them on their success rates based on their comments and finding sources. It lets me ask it questions about parts i find difficult or don't comprehend fully. To go beyond it can create an hour long audio discussion about the topic, create flash cards for me to import to Anki, it can create video summaries for me, it can transcribe the videos and let me know which time mark is a topic i want to focus on is at. These are not lies these are self experience. I am a student too, you know.

How exactly is AI better at coming up with a study plan then you? How exactly does AI provide a better structure then your textbook? Better at finding resources then your friends, studdy-buddies, random strangers on reddit, etc.

That last part I actually know from experience. A couple of months ago I tried to use Qwen AI to help me study Japanese for exactly one week, my prompt specifically asked to link to sources with every grammar explanation. I know very well how to find grammar explanations using traditional search engines, it is rather easy actually. However Qwen AI would hallucinate non-existing links 3 times out of every 4. After 2 days I removed it from the prompt it was so useless, and it still kept hallucinating links to non-existing resources.

If you want to go beyond and read outside the material using a library or a search engine is much much much better for your learning. If you want to have a discussion, try web forums, discord servers, join a group class, hire an tutor on e.g. italki etc. etc. Pick anything at random which we have been doing for decades and is a proven solution, it will be better for your learning than using AI.

It lets me focus on learning rather than preparing to learn which takes motivation away from actual learning for me personally. For the second part I really personally think that is a big case of AI misuse, ever since I have hooked up MCP servers and let AI do web searches and even just letting Claude use Chrome it has never hallucinated a single link ever. The specific AI model you use and your enviroinment changes a lot. You cannot expect much from a 4b model compared to a 31b model (though we are getting better at that with time). I personally used Googlr Gemini for some of my exam subjects and easily passed with high marks, did not have any of the said issues. You may want to check out NotebookLM too.

For myself though, I have found a friend who will be helping me learn a new language this summer. I will of course use his help and sources and AI to supplement my learning. I don't just tell AI to teach stuff I use it as intended, as a tool.

Ok so you are using an llm without web search, ask it to give you links, and are confused why the links are hallucinated... ?

At this point it's just PEBKAC. You're holding it wrong brother.

>> It makes stuff up all the time

There are a few reasons AI is not the best teacher, but this is not one of them because teachers are also frequently wrong. I say that as someone who comes from a family of teachers, ranging from kindergarten to PhD.

And here is the problem: unlike AI, a lot of teachers don’t like being questioned or challenged. If your teacher doesn’t know a subject well, and you realize this, your options as a student are pretty limited. This is especially true at lower grades.

I don’t believe that AI can replace teachers. But, if used well, it can supplement them. I think Norway is making the right call here with elementary schools, but I wouldn’t support this kind of policy at higher grades where levels.

> AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.

Yeah, right. Did you forget a /s

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a363b6d-92ac-83ea-a619-41b2ecd9f5...

This is a popular game, still doing sales almost 18 years after release, with dozens of wiki fansites containing all the information, and with hundreds, if not thousands, of reddit postings... and it falls apart on the first answer!

No. Kids in school should not be using AI, because:

1. They won't be using the latest models, and

2. They can't tell if the info is accurate

Stupid people never have the appetite or ability to 'tackle' anything. It's their defining characteristic.

It's not more complex than stupid people in charge, stupid results follow. Smart people with integrity in charge, good things follow.

AI changes nothing.

AI has existed for decades. The average person has just discovered it / had it forced upon them. And just a small-subset of AI. The average person does not use real AI. And AI is not even well-defined.

Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning. AI will be used as a tool as a way of 'shaping' the mind of young people. Similar to using standardized textbooks. AI is too much of a political tool to be useful.

AI is a tool for propaganda.

> AI is a tool for propaganda.

In my experience so far it's less of a propaganda than basically any other medium massively consumed today. It might become it one day though, like all othe media became it.

> Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning

I am curious where you were educated to come to this conclusion. I don't think your statement holds generally true for all education as it is by definition teaching knowledge.

Sure, there might be institutions that do teaching and propaganda, but I think it shows a lack of awareness to generalize this to all education.

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