It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System
Thanks to a new breed of chatbots, American stupidity is escalating at an advanced pace.
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TBH, I'd AI can screw up the education system so fast then it is the fault in the education system. AI is bad, but our education system is not good either.
but our education system is not good either.
No Child Left Behind has fucked us for over 20 years...
People are blaming these college kids, but their entire k-12 was under No Child, they were never taught critical thinking, what the fuck are they supposed to do? No one ever taught these kids to think for themselves.
We failed an entire generation, and it's too late to fix it for them now, the best we can do is fix it for the kids that will start public education in a few years.
But we'll be paying the price for decades
Like all things republican, you ruin the public service, then tell everybody we need to get rid of this public service cause only the free market can provide that service in good quality.
Vouchers will save us our children!
It’s simply easier to exert control over society through private corporations than in the light of day with public goods and services. Especially when what you desire is of minority opinion.
You are mixing up transparency and legality with the private\public category. When one side of this category is more popular, the other side is often described as the solution to the problems with the former two. But there's no causation.
I would go further back than that. Our entire education system has failed to adapt to the fact that rote memorization is not the most important form of learning and that any question that could be answered in a multiple choice manner is not really worth asking to verify if someone understood the taught material.
We have an education system that has failed to adapt to the easy availability of references which should have resulted in a focus on teaching a "skeleton" of knowledge to students since the exact details can always be looked up as long as you know the information exists and how to interpret it (e.g. you don't need to memorize which element carbon is and how much it weighs, you need to understand what an element is and what important properties of chemical elements are).
We have an education system that failed to adapt to the availability of video recording which would have meant it would be easy to have every student understanding the same language watch the most engaging individuals instead of the average ones, presenting the content in a way designed by entire teams of top teachers, falling back on the average ones only for the interactive parts of education.
We have an education system that still struggles with the teacher for a subject as a single source of failure, both in terms of absence and in terms of that teacher not being very compatible in their explanations with the way specific students think instead of having some kind of online forum or matching of teacher to student for one on one questions in a more flexible manner.
We have an education system that still rigidly adheres to categories like physics, chemistry, mathematics, languages, history, geography,... designed in the 19th century for its degrees even though many jobs require more flexible mixes of knowledge and many also require learning for the entire life, not just at the start.
Students today learn for exams a few days before they happen, then purge that knowledge again a few days or hours afterwards.
There are many, many things wrong with our education system and we failed to even acknowledge that there are possible alternatives.
On the other hand, people don't realize how far we've come especially for rural areas.
I got an uncle still alive and kicking whose school had to combine grades because there were so few kids.
So for the bulk of his public education it was just him and another girl like 2 years younger than him. That was the whole class, and it was literally a one room school. Not "one classroom" it was a one room log cabin with an outhouse. One single teacher "teaching" literally everything to 1st graders and the rare person who stayed till 12th at the same time.
Oregon Trail generation really looks more like the exception than the rule every year. It seemed like a terrible education at the time, but we're sandwiched between complete farces of an education system.
2 person classes would be a dream compared to the overburdened 30+ person classes of today. You get half of a private tutor? Hell yeah.
half of a private tutor?
That teaches everything. You think every one room schoolhouse was staffed by someone who knew every topic well enough to teach others?
If something wasn't in the handful of textbooks, there was no way to get that information.
I don't think he ever made it to algebra, definitely nothing like chemistry or physics. Biology would have been a joke, and astronomy likely limited to memorizing the order of planets.
It was not a good education.
And I’m guessing in the era of no internet where you couldn’t easily self-teach subjects you didn’t know so that you could pass that onto the kids.
The only point I will disagree on it's about video. Today's teaching actually over relies on video media precisely under the hypothesis you suggested. Unfortunately modern science knows that showing and telling is the lowest and most primitive form of learning. Effective learning happens when the student starts using the knowledge in interaction with others. For example practicing using said knowledge to solve problems and later teaching others about the topic. The old medical adage has been proven to be true: see (hear), do, teach. Video is less effective at knowledge transfer than reading and for the worse, reading proficiency is at an all time low. Precisely because of pedagogic inertia in adapting evidence based strategies and depending on tradition based strategies.
The same argument could be made of every point in their post. But you're missing the main point. You're seeking perfection and ignoring progress in the search of.
I'm the last person to ever ask for perfection. The problem is that educators are being told that video is so great. Then their schedules are crammed full by administration with hundreds of hours of video to show the kids. Leaving them with no time for reading, discussion, or project work. Time that is already taken by tests. So in the end, good educators who are probably way better than some of the awful standardized slop shown to children, have to waste hours showing mandated videos. Bad educators sit on their hands knowing they don't have to become better because the video is babysitting the kids. This dulls the kids to learning and sends them into a false impression that learning is 100% passive. Sorry, but this way of using video is a net negative to education.
The better option is to recognize that just like everything in education, you need diversity and play to each strategy's strengths according to the group being taught. Video is good to show things that cannot be demonstrated in class or to showcase highly specialized topics. But it has to be mixed with other strategies to be truly effective. What you must not do is pretend that video is always the better option for everything. Because that is absolutely not true. Specially since OP's assumptions are wrong.
watch the most engaging individuals instead of the average ones
This has no impact on education. If the teacher present in the class is average, a better instructor on the video has a marginal effect, if any at all.
presenting the content in a way designed by entire teams of top teachers
This has not happened and it's mostly unnecessary. Specially as the mythical “team of top teachers” has never existed, it is not a thing that exists anywhere. Education all over the world is usually designed by committee, with all the associated flaws and setbacks.
falling back on the average ones only for the interactive parts of education
The worst person for the most important part of the process doesn't sound good to me.
We have the science, we know that in order to have a positive effect videos must be short, display things that cannot be ordinarily experience in everyday life, and present concrete single topic lectures that can feed interaction and discussion in the classroom, or provide guidance to project work and problem solving. They are a tool that makes good educators better, but for average educators who don't know how to take advantage of it, it won't have much impact.
Well, video of an actual good teacher is still better than having to passively listen to a bad one in front of you though. I agree that something more interactive and involving the students more actively would probably be even better though.
You nailed it.
And this is why my wife and I homeschool our kids. It’s all about teaching critical thinking. They’re so far beyond their peers in public schools it’s not even close. NCLB was one of the worst decisions for our society in centuries.
This 100%.
The education system was not OK, and has not been for a while. Its main goal is limiting liability, not educating kids.
I will take limiting liability and running with it. Not just the schools, but the kids and parents too no one wants to be responsible and step up to fix the problem.
One of my professors had an AI policy. Using AI for an outline or to find resources was okay, as long as it was cited with the exact prompt used. I think having rules for how to use AI on her assignments actually cut down on use compared to professors who outright banned it.
Sounds kinda similar to how Wikipedia was approached by instructors. I remember an English teacher proudly proclaiming she had participated in a "Kill Wikipedia" seminar at a convention. Just a few years later, they're instructing students on how to properly use Wikipedia as a starting point and not a primary source.
I’m literally teaching a course to teachers on how to use AI in the classroom so that the students don’t use it as their magical answer dispenser.
What are the headline recommendations?
I had the class build a database of ideas, but one I really liked went like this:
You put a bunch of quiz questions into an AI song generator. The students listen to the song and try to provide the answers afterward.
You can make it really stupid and funny if you want.
Another would be to have AI produce a “podcast” about some topic, maybe Elvis interviewing Churchill about who Darwin was. Tell it to use some key points you want the students to take note of, then let them hear it and talk about it afterward.
Sounds like very inventive ways to include AI in teaching and make it fun and interactive.
How are you modifying what you teach? Wikipedia reduced the focus on learning facts, what does AI remove from the syllabus? What areas should be strengthened to leverage AI?
Well in my case, I leverage AI to extract specifics in long texts, such as level-appropriate vocabulary and collocations related to the topic. I can do this with YouTube video transcripts, for example,then use a different tool to quickly spit out learners definitions of all the words extracted, example sentences with fill-in-the blanks (emphasis on the topic of the lesson), and whatnot. I have to verify that the definitions and example sentences are suitable, then I slap everything together in a handout template I have in Affinity Publisher, along with some topic-related discussion questions. The students watch the video, and then I give them the handout afterwards.
That’s just one example.
I know of a company producing experimental AI tests, that basically put you in a D&D role playing scenario. It shows a scenario on screen, narrates a situation, then asks you to respond. Based on your response it’ll take you in one direction or another, the whole time grading your skills behind the scene. The students don’t even know they’re being tested. At the end, it prints out a score, but it feels more like the end of a video game match than a test.
I think that’s cool af.
We are certainly entering the young lady's illustrated primer stage of education.
A physics accurate D&D where you play as macgyver could be really cool.
