I'm father of three daughters and they grew up almost like this in nineties. My grandchildren don't have this chance any more. It's a little bit about changing times, but mostly because of public – it's just not acceptable for others to do all these things and parents would get into real trouble. When I was 10, I drove tractor, had already several scars from knife and axe and visited my grandmother more than hundred km away alone. My daughters would be arrested if they would let their kids to do any of it.
I'm in my sixties and my experience is same. But now we live in the world, where my granddaughter (12) got into real trouble because a birthday present I gave her – a real Leatherman (pink of course). Of course she brought it to the school, it was confiscated, she, her parents and I was questioned by police etc.
Sorry, but this is just horse shit. I grew up in Soviet Union and we "didn't understand" open source, IP etc either. It wasn't because of some cultural or whatever reasons, it was purely by economical and political reasons. We didn't have money to buy any software. When I got my first ZX Spectrum clone in 1990, any game would cost me my monthly salary, university I worked for ran stolen SCO because it was illegal even to have in Soviet Union etc etc. And of course everyone was used to steal anyway and it was even more acceptable to steal from them. But it took only a decade and all this stuff was left behind.
And Chinese government and companies clearly understand Open Source. They support open licenses, standardsm, software and hardware wherever it benefits them – mostly by making western competitors relying on IP and licensing weaker.
As a European, I don’t know what a Public school means. But if it refers to the kind of school environment you can find on YouTube by searching for “gen alpha teachers,” then I’m surprised those schools still exist at all.
The purpose of education has never been to teach specific skills. The purpose of education has always been to provide literacy — the ability to understand the world, process information, and learn. Yes, this is done through activities that are relevant in the world at that particular moment, but that is simply an inevitability. And the reason is very simple — we don’t know what skills the people currently in school will need. A child stepping through the school doors for the first time today will enter the workforce in about 20 years and will likely work there for 40+ years. Anyone who thinks they know what the world will be like in 20 years, let alone 60 years, is simply a charlatan.
I think the age of social media has made the problem much worse. People are much more focused on how to gain fame and glory, but they can easily distance themselves from taking responsibility for the consequences.
The gaps in views are certainly widening in societies in general, but my point wasn't exactly that. It was more about differences which always existed. When I was young I was often dumped into large family gatherings which lasted days (birthdays of (grand)grandparents, funerals, weddings etc). I had to practice handling cousins etc who might had very different family backgrounds than me since very early age. We had to find things we had in common and accept our differences. We learned that differences are manageable. It's not common nowadays. Many people don't have relationships with relatives at all and kids don't meet another kids with different background until school. And even then distance is kept often because of overprotective parenting.
Yes, managing relationships needs time, but there is another problem I see nowadays. When I was young (I'm in my sixties), it was normal to have friends who could be very different from you. They might have had qualities you didn't like at all, but you could still be very good friends. If I look my students (highschool and college level) now, they are extremely intolerant for differences compared to what I remember from my youth. One "I don't like it" problem is enough to dump any relationship. Why? I guess it's because of a lack of practice – you don't really need to interact with so many different people nowadays and interacting with people who are very different from you is just plain terrifying for many.
WARC is mentioned with very specific reason not being good enough: "WARCs/WACZs achieve static and efficient, but not single (because while the WARC is a single file, it relies on a complex software installation like WebRecorder/Replay Webpage to display)."
Musima Lead Star is a musical instrument, Ural "guitars" were not. I played and owned several ones during eighties. The moment I could finally afford Musima Lead Star and finally get a sound I had in my head, was one of happiest moments of my life.
> If a data science team modeled something incorrectly in their simulation, who's gonna catch it? Usually nobody. At least not until it's too late. Will you say "this doesn't look plausible" about the output?
The local statistics office here recently presented salary statistics claiming that teachers' salaries had unexpectedly increased by 50%. All the press releases went out, and it was only questions raised by the public that forced the statistics office to review and correct the data.
That's not THE problem. The problem is that they can't encode/decode text. They lack experience, vocabulary, knowledge and all these little small things needed to communicate via (not necessarily written) text. It's not dyslexia.
There is no fight actually and noone is complaining "kids these days" at the moment. KIds are not the ones to blame in current situation. It's 100% work left undone by previous generations.
Most of comments seem to assume that education system have been functioning up to this point, LLM-s appear and there are somewhere solutions ready to adapt. That's just not the case. For many reasons – parental problems, early development, phones, social media, decline of responsibility, changes in educational principles in general etc etc etc – education is already in free fall almost all over the world.
Average student even in universities is functionally illiterate now, it's not an exaggeration. Even if we assume that there is LLM which would help to learn, how these students should use it?
It's not just about parents, it's about our (western) society as a whole. While Germany has a bigger problems because of massive immigration, all this sound familiar for all teachers from Eastern-Europe to the US. We stopped treating people as being accountable for their own actions. This is true for parents, children etc. It's OK to have every possible excuse – "I'm immigrant, single mother, immature, don't have an education etc" not to take any responsibility and people take advantage of it. This is the idea that you just have to treat people well and it fixes all sorts issues in society failing.
That's what I'm really afraid of – we will be drowning in the AI slop as a society and we'll loose the most important thing that made free and democratic society possible - a trust. People just don't tust anyone and/or anything any more. And the lack of trust, especially in scale, is very expensive.
No. It might be much much worse than 38% outside of these elite schools, but a little bit different. This is in fact one of the reasons public education falls off the cliff. I've seen a teacher leaving elementary after she found out that 19 kids out of 24 in her class had some kind of learning disability needing special treatment, special help, assignments specially designed for them etc. In her own words all of them were completely normal kids except maybe 1 or 2.
I've heard people working in construction industry mentioning that quality of design fell off the cliff when industry began to use computers more widely – less time and less people involved. The same is true about printing – there was much more time and people in the loop before computers. My grandmother worked with linotype machine printing newspapers. They were really good at catching and fixing grammar errors, sometimes catching even factual errors etc.
There have always been problems like this. I had a classmate who wrote poems and short stories since age 6. No teacher believed she wrote those herself. She became a poet, translator and writer and admitted herself later in life that she wouldn't have believed it herself.
Actually no. The problem comes from society. If you think that kids should be responsible for anything, you are a bad person. If you think that kids should be punished if they do something really bad, you are a monster.
Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.
Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:
No, I don't have all the possibilities. I can own movies in physical form, but I can't own the movies I want to own. And it can be even worse. Here I can watch Disney/Pixar movies wonderfully dubbed into local language in cinemas with my grandchildren, but even Disney+ subscription doesn't have these audio tracks.
They were. I was there in edu conferences, training sessions and other events years ago and could observe all this massive FUD which appeared – "smartphones are the future", "all communication will be in social media in the future", "books will not matter", "privacy will not matter", "if we ban smartphones, we will handicap our children" etc. People didn't know better and there was genuine fear in education. Or actually, it's still very much there.
It's much more complicated than that. For example in my experience a school per se doesn't matter much for many kids from problematic homes. What matters is that they get a time away from home. COVID lockdowns killed exactly that – they didn't have to be away from home and it was very bad for their mental health.
Then there is a growing number of parents who are actively working against the school, undermine the child's trust against school and teachers etc. Most of the time a school can't do anything with these and outcome is always bad.
Then there is a growing number of children who don't do well in school no matter what. They can have a good home and good school, but because of some neurodiversity for example do very bad anyway.
I also don't agree that good home alone is enough for good outcome. It really depends from many things.
In short – education, outcome from school and home etc are hyperindividual and there is no hard rules.
Most of public schools over the world struggle with much more basic problems than methods or programs. The most important thing IMHO is a stable environment. You can use the very best methods and programs, but if teachers change frequently, like it become more and more a norm in public schools, all these don't matter much really.
It really just depends. There might short/small runs which are easily automated, and there might be a large scale production which are not and need hand assembly. The very same product might see both during production – fully automated robots and hand assembly etc.