It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System

AI is bullshit and has no place in a school curriculum outside of computer science. Keep that shit away from children if you want them to have any critical thinking skills.

The key concern with reforming social programs like public education is that they are ongoing concerns with impacts that extend decades into the future. "Creative destruction" in public education is liable to cause far more harm than good if the transition is not handled with knowledge and care.

Well yeah the education system is the burning tire fire and AI is tech bros pouring gasoline all over it

only the wealthy kids will be well-educated

You could argue we’re already way too far down this road. Quality of education is very dependent on location. Some of it is rich districts but also richer states. Whatever level of granularity you want, there’s always sone more willing or more able to spend money on better educating their children.

For all its faults, Department of Education was at least trying to set minimum standards for those areas unwilling to invest in a good education system and minimum investments for those unable. We desperately needed to raise this bar, not remove it

Anyhow my kids school leaned into ai a bit and taught the kids some valuable lessons about how it works, where it helps, and especially its limitations. There’s nothing wrong with ai as a tool, as by long as you don’t treat it as a magical thing that can think for you

Man, I am 38. When I was in highschool I was in an alternative curriculum Math program called IMP, and it is/was literally what your talking about.

Instead of memorizing equations we were instead given a hypothetical situation and learned to solve it socratically both through conversations as a class with the teacher, and in small groups to try and figure out how to solve it. It made me love math so much I almost made it my life, it was literally everything I needed as a severely ADHD teen. Everything was a puzzle to be solved, and when you solved it you gained not just knowledge, but the perspective to know where the knowledge applies.

As someone with adhd the public school system was hell. My local community college had a program where you could get your ged and learn a trade so I left my junior year to do that instead. I really wish the public school system was better but sadly people just don't care enough.

know AI in 10 years will.

That kind of the main problem: there is no indication that it will. I know one thing: current way LLM works, the chances that the problem of "lying" and "hallucinations", will even be solved are slim to none. There could be some mechanism that works in tandem with the bullshit generator machine to keep it in check, but it doesn't exist yet.
So most likely either we will collectively learn this fact and stop relying on this bullshit, which means there is a generation of kids who essentially skipped a learning phase, or we don't learn this fact, and there will be a society of mindless zombies that are fed lies and random bullshit on a second-to-second basis.
Both cases are bleak, but the second one is nightmarish.

This could be complete bullshit because im not an expert but i sometimes think that we could have a future where without testing and nurturing peoples critical thinking skills we end up with people who dont know how to create a rational argument or assess information they are given for its accuracy and authenticity, or to know when they are being deceived by malicious actors.

English writing assignments as simple as a book report require you to take different views and angles on something to understand it better and the nuances of the whole, but tell a LLM to write it for you and you are not developing that part of your own mind where you may learn to do things like see the whole story above the individual events noise, see things from others perspective/feelings and understand alternate world views. These are critical for having empathy for others and understanding the world around you.
And that is just one small example i came up with.

Came here to say that. If AI has the leeway to affect things in a negative way, then we're not focusing on the right things to begin with. If kids are graded sometimes for the amount of (not necessarily coherent and sound) text they're able to spit out, this is what you get.

The corrupt cheapskates trying to nickel and dime every ISD in the country to bankruptcy absolutely fell over one another at the opportunity to fire staff and replace them with Clippy.

Twenty years ago, state officials were all fawning over the idea of turning every university in the country into a pile subscription based Udemy online courses. Ten years ago, letting Pearson hijack the lesson plan of every classroom in the country was the dream. This has been a long time coming.

That sounds like a way to make a generation of students wholly reliant on AI, much to Altman's delight. People are going to still need to know how to do stuff in the future and not just how to request the answers to things from somewhere else.

If students did useful things, self directed things, were allowed to discover and create, can you imagine how ducking crazy that would be ? Imagine if we didn't largely waste the bulk of everyone's youth on boring 1800s style lecturing toiling in mass education factories ?

I regularly advocate for banning phones from schools but people here in Lemmy (same on Reddit years ago) completely lose their shit with that idea, start talking how that'll leave them defenseless in an emergency, how it is torture, how they absolutely can't live without them

Not thirty years ago nobody had cellphones in school, they barely existed, and everything was fine, everyone was fine without and with cellphones I see so much shit going on. Yes, it's the Future, kids need cellphones, but they also need to learn to be without cellphone, and they need to learn responsible use.

Ngl. I bought a signal jammer for my wife to use in her classroom (after all, it said “for educational purposes only”) and the kids could never figure out why the signal sucked so bad in her classroom during class times. She never got caught using it and never had to worry about them being on their phones.

If there was an emergency, people would just call the front office and they could always reach her on the land line in the classroom.

I was uninterested in school because nothing was ever done to make me interested, even at home.

Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD and now I’m a software developer. Sadly school isn’t for everybody and I just thought I was stupid and lazy, it turns out I was fine I just needed the right help.

Edit: Votes don’t matter but I’d love to know the reasoning for the 5 downvotes on this. Like why don’t you put across your opposition.

You gave them a task, they used their imagination to apply it, in a different way than you expected, by using a new tool which is a non traditional method you asked for but the task still got completed. They still loosely completed the task 30 times ahead of schedule by using their imagination on how to constructively solve your problem, utilizing a tool in their imaginary bag.

I don't think it's wrecking the system as long as the LLMs could be trained and ensure strict accuracy (yes I know they can be inaccurate but again so is any tool in its infancy), the system fails people everyday as a whole. I think it's changing the traditional paradigm. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Time will tell. I think ChatGPT is a tool in its infancy. It's changing the way minds think fundamentally like for isntance critical thinking skills decline by relying on "AI" but it frees up the mind to grow in other ways to adjust to the new paradigm.

I think the true point here is fear from breaking traditional values. Humans have never accelerated faster with current technology thats with or without LLM usage.

I can't imagine dealing with a room full of kids, especially ones with phone addictions.

Can't you just make them turn off the computers/phones and do it by hand?

If your school is not supporting teachers with a cell phone policy you should try to find another place to teach and tell them exactly why when you leave.

Edit: this is also something your union should be pushing for. I'm surprised parents haven't demanded it.

Is there not a way to plan the assignment so that it's not doable in 1m with ChatGPT?

Because school is boring, that's why.

Most people don't need to learn beyond the fourth grade, especially because calculators and now GPT exist for instant answers.

And I say this as someone who wasted his time all the way up to a Master's degree just to show society I too followed the beaten path. It's time I'll never get back.

Lmao. I'm guessing you don't work in any of those fields. Got some bad news for ya bud. It's been that way for decades. Probably centuries.

I am having flashbacks to the scene in Idiocracy where the doctor is talking about his wife.

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

This 100%.

The education system was not OK, and has not been for a while. Its main goal is limiting liability, not educating kids.

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.

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.

Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?

The only serious method of evaluating critical thinking and creativity is through peer evaluation. But that's a subjective scale thick with implicit bias, not a clean and logical discrete answer. It's also not something you can really see in the moment, because true creativity and critical thinking will inevitably produce heterodox views and beliefs.

Only by individuals challenging and outperforming the status quo to you see the fruits of a critical and creative labor force. In the moment, these folks just look like they're outliers who haven't absorbed the received orthodoxy. And a lot of them are. You'll get your share of Elizabeth Holmes-es and Sam Altmans alongside your Vincent Van Goghs and Nikolai Teslas.

I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers.

I agree that we're flush with think-pieces. Incidentally, the NYT Op-Ed section has doubled in size over the last few years.

But that's sort of the rub. You can't get a well-defined answer to the question "Is Our Children Creative-ing?" because we only properly know it by the fruits of the system. Comically easy to walk into a school with a creative writing course and scream about how this or that student is doing creativity wrong. Comically easy to claim a school is Marxist or Fascist or too Pro/Anti-Religion or too banal and mainstream by singling out a few anecdotes in order to curtail the whole system.

The fundamental argument is that this kind of liberal arts education is wasteful. The output isn't steady and measureable. The quality of the work isn't easily defined as above or below the median. It doesn't yield real consistent tangible economic value. So we need to abolish it in order to become more efficient.

And that's what we're creating. A society that is laser-focused on making economic numbers go up, without stopping to ask whether a larger GDP actually benefits anyone living in the country where all this fiscal labor is performed.

For anyone who is also not from the US:

A blue book exam is a type of test administered at many post-secondary schools in the United States. Blue book exams typically include one or more essays or short-answer questions. Sometimes the instructor will provide students with a list of possible essay topics prior to the test itself and will then choose one or let the student choose from two or more topics that appear on the test.

EDIT, as an extra to solve the mystery:

Butler University in Indianapolis was the first to introduce exam blue books, which first appeared in the late 1920s.[1] They were given a blue color because Butler's school colors are blue and white; therefore they were named "blue books".

I have a friend who has taught Online university writing for the past 10 years. Her students are now just about 100% using AI - her goal isn't to get them to stop, it's to get them to recognize what garbage writing is and how to fix it so it isn't garbage anymore.