AI in schools – The choice we keep making

Hahah, smart boards. I remember pushing back hard against my school on those. The fact they evolved into short throw projectors that occasionally have ok touch monitoring is a win, even if it took a bunch of $5-10k surfaces that no one could draw on, but inevitably ended up with a few whiteboard marker smudges to get there.

Open gradebooks are amazing. You just need to have school leadership that sets realistic expectations with students and parents and backs up their teachers rather than caving to helicopter parents. I've had nothing but good feedback from parents and students about timeliness and transparency on marking feedback. Standardised testing on the other hand is goddamned menace that has done more to damage the value of assessment than transparency ever has. The value of open gradebooks is the feedback, not the numbers.

AI in schools feels like more of a fait accompli. Who provides most of the software infrastructure to schools? Microsoft and Google. Who is busy stuffing AI into all the things? Oh look, it's Microsoft and Google.

The writer focuses on the education of children, in a school context. He does jump around a bit in age group - young children, late teenagers, college students. He is persuasive that young children /in a school context/ are best educated by one or more adult teachers, in small groups.

But then, the only alternative in that context would be the same but with a higher pupil:teacher ratio (at the limit that might mean zero physically-present teachers, like the tv example he gives). And yes, that will generally be worse, holding the student, the peers, and other variables constant.

One case he omits is a 1:1 teacher:student ratio, perhaps because that isn't school. It's tutoring.

The results of personalized 1:1 tutoring are actually a lot better than mass education according to the quasi-industrial institution of 'school'. This is well-studied, I don't think it is controversial among educationalists.

The same goes for other approaches to education, whether of children or adults.

School is actually a fairly historically specific phenomenon, and it may not be the best approach we can take (even as a system for compulsory mass education of children to legally prescribed minimum standards, bundled with free daycare).

If technologies generally fail to improve school-based education, perhaps that says more about the inherent limitations of that institutional framework than it does about the scope of those technologies. Perhaps the right technology might unlock better results: for self-education, for students paired with individual tutors, and for whichever other models might exist. But the actual model of education might need to be different from traditional 'school'.

To paraphrase Henry Ford, the education system will only consider ways to develop a 'faster horse', rather than embracing approaches that might replace equine transportation altogether. Fair enough, but we don't have to share their assumptions.

This article resonates with me, even if it is sort of an ad for a school.

Has anyone had success opting their children out of a Google account/Chromebook in a public school setting?

I agree with the article - I don’t see how exposing children to AI in school ends well.

I don’t think we should expose developing minds to much tat we haven’t had a lot of time exposure understanding the impacts of coughsocial mediacough. The downsides just aren’t material.

Thankfully kids seem to already be jaded towards AI. Perhaps that buys them time to let their brains develope a bit more.