This is objectively false. AI stunts and reduces the learning process. Banning it is 100% the right move.
Secondly it’s unclear whether shortcuts to many “answers” are wholly beneficial in many cases outside the academic sphere. Hence scandals when for example video educators use AI in their material. Or the general push back on AI writing, website design, etc. These answers are being pushed back on.
AI can give you 1000s of exercises and explain in great detail exactly how to solve them, and what you're doing wrong, as well as where you suck, explore other ways of solving and where you should improve. Learning to integrate or solve differential equations with Gemini is 10x better than even the good teachers I've had. It beats bad teachers because it's just simply better than them, and it really increases what you can learn from good teachers.
And the same goes for critiquing writing, whether code or prose. I do prose like 1/10th of the time, code much more often, but the problem with my writing is usually relatively basic grammar and consistent style problems. Also using codex with "I've written X, break my code" usually gives ... I should say usually more insight than I was ready for.
But yes one could argue that using AI not as a means for answering a class's problems but rather to generate more exercises could be valid. Though I doubt students have a lack of practice problems these days.
I find AI is a bad communicator. So it is quite awkward to take advice on prose from a system that generates bad prose, though that could be possible. Still it is unclear, one would have to judge what benefits arise.
Now my earlier point was not that AI is not useful in any way. It is useful with code. Though there is the larger conversation on developer enjoyment etc in the age of AI coding--where the speed of AI generated code is expected, and developers are more alienated from aspects that made coding enjoyable.
I sadly have to disagree.
An algebra book from (long) before 2000: https://archive.org/details/practicalmathema00castrich/page/... (yeah it's not a perfect example, but it's pretty clear what type of books I mean I hope. This book has at minimum 800 or so exercises, including a few at the end of every chapter that are at least university level. And that was typical)
Algebra books from nowadays: https://openstax.org/books/algebra-1/pages/quick-start (100 - 200 exercises maybe, and most are total crap)
And if the exercises are not in the book you use in class, good luck getting a teacher to help you.
Though we've had great educations for many years before AI. The cost/benefit is still up in the air for ai use. I for one would not want to spend my time learning from the bot. I find the way it puts words together tiresome. To rely on it for my education, not withstanding its addicting affirmations etc. is not a clear win for me.
Both books you mentioned exist for the curious student. And a plethora of other books. With a good text book you aren't left on your own to figure these things out, the chapters explain the process you need to take to arrive at a correct solution. Combine that with working with your peers, office hours, educational videos, and so much more, and there is a lot for the student. (I mean these bots are trained on an already existing corpus of information)
Mostly agree, but there is nuance to it.
People who engage with problems, think about them, reason about them, can ask AI AFTER that work, to get fruitful results - as in: increase insight. I'll have to find the study I'm referencing (might be a second)...
The issue is that isn't anyone's default mode of interaction with these systems...
Channeled correctly it could be a fantastic educational tool. And will be in my opinion.
You are not going to put the genie back into the bottle.
I don't mean "AI" like generating quizzes or whatever. But people fooling themselves that LLMs are a "bicycle for the mind" with little kids are delusional.
i dont really think ai should be in most schooling, but calculators and computers also offload thinking. books offload memory.
Seriously? Idk about you but we weren't allowed to use calculators until long after we had already learned how to do whatever the calculator did by hand, except in cases where that was never the point of the lesson to begin with (like calculating cosines). And even then, sparingly. The reason they eventually let people use it was that it had nothing to do with the lesson being taught, and it was a waste of time at that point to make us do arithmetic by hand. Not because it suddenly became OK to turn off your brain and become lazy.
Yes, I remember those days all too well. "You need to learn to perform long division by hand because you won't always have a calculator with you."
LOL, no.
It will play out pretty much the same way this time.
Learning to do long division by hand trains the mind. It prepares you to understand polynomial division. It teaches you the deep connection of division and subtraction. So, mastering it should be part of the curriculum. As soon as it is truly mastered, it should be allowed to use a calculator.
I don't think I've ever had to do polynomial division by hand. It comes up in control theory and a few other subfields, obviously including mathematics itself, but for me it's always been handled by software. It's safe to say that any given clanker will have better odds of doing it right than I will.
But I think that this is foolish. Firstly, the fears weren't baseless! There's no question that the replacement of an oral culture by a literate culture meant the loss of certain cognitive skills for some people.
But more importantly, even if those fears were baseless, a fear in the past being baseless does not mean a similar one in the present is baseless. From our vantage point we can see the benefits of a literate society, but are we confident that what comes next will be as beneficial? Maybe it will be far more beneficial than literacy was, or maybe it will heighten inequalities to feudal levels. Either way, it's moving at a much more rapid pace than the spread of literacy, so we have much less time to reflect. It pays to be prudent here.
The number of people that cannot calculate a tip in their head, or have a basic grasp of how interest works is constantly shocking to me. Yeah, we all carry calculators around, but you should be able to reason about numbers enough to know when an entry error has been made on a calculator
We have seen how damaging these tech companies already are to society and children.
Why should we continue trusting an industry that has shown no inclination to well being of children and not merely trying to pursue more profits in the form of corporate welfare.
Absolutely not the same at all and shame on you for saying so.
The biggest tell is how none of these tech executives ever subject their own children to these supposedly "great tools." Because they don't help children, they're made to extract profits by whatever harms as necessary.
Harsh language is required because they are killing us.