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Comment by dumberquestions | Hacker News Reader

Students have always had the curriculum and standard study material, it was always possible to study alone, but the teacher mostly provides an interactive gap-bridging layer, and the classroom setting provides some level of obligation, I could be wrong but I don't know why AI can't fulfill the interaction layer part.

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Sunk-cost, social pressure and obligation are probably the most salient points for educational success in a classroom setting with a teacher of median-skill versus an AI trained on the same corpus.

The sad reality is that many of the most senior professors and lecturers in top universities are their for their research rather than teaching ability, and that the success of the elite institutions is somewhat self-selecting as regards their cachet and filtering done by their admissions process (i.e. Ivy League institutions do not offer athletic scholarships).

This is such a terrible implied indictment of the schools you attended that I feel sad for you.

Some teachers do genuinely make a difference, and maybe that's good enough, but unfortunately there are many more who struggled to add value to the original material, and I don't really think this is a unique experience.

Of all the teachers I have ever had, at school and university, I can think of only three who struggled to add value to the original material. One was in the middle of a nervous breakdown (of a kind that genuinely would not have been out of place in the John Hughes movies of the day, but that contributed to him passing the following summer); the other two were in the middle of significant crises of different forms.

So that's about 0.75%.

The rest were either competent, good or amazing.

(Then again, one of the remainder was internationally famous for being a (self-acknowledged) media whore and while I know he added value it wasn't always to the subject at hand)

2.5% I meant to write there. And I know this because I just found that 2.5% elsewhere that I meant to write 0.75%.

School is now distant enough for me that I have reached the brain fog age where I cannot be commenting on internet things intermittently while writing documents…

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