TechTakes

I extremely much want the details on how this all works.

Something tells me they’re not just slapping chatGPT on the school computers and telling kids to go at it; surely one of the parents would have been up-to-date enough to know it’s a scam otherwise.

If people with money had that much good sense, the world would be a well-nigh unfathomably different place....

Seems to be like an awesome way to get tech millionaires with weird ideas about education from reading too much Ayn Rand to cough up 27 grand a year to educate their unfortunate kids.

I actually don’t get the general hate for AI here.

Try harder.

You can ask it very specific or even "dumb" questions and it will explain in great detail and spend way more "time" with your individual questions than a teacher normally could, leading to you being able to learn at your own pace.

Yeah, but there's 0 guarantee that it explains you anything factual or if it just makes shit up, either fully or partially. LLMs are absolutely not suited for this, which with them used as search engines and fact checkers has already shown. Teaching a bunch of generations possible false things and to rely on the word of machines that are just pretending to know things is just a terrible idea.

VR assisted teaching could be cool though, as there's a lot of additional tools that could be used in a digital space. But I don't see this becoming the norm, considering how expensive HMDs alone already are, let alone all the other equipment needed. People in many places already struggle affording the needed school books & general school stuff like blogs and pencils and teachers everywhere are almost always out of budget for their classes too.

you’re identical to the other poster in both tone and content so either you’re using the same LLM to write your posts or you’re otherwise extremely familiar with each other. either way we don’t particularly need you here, but before you go:

Also, from my experience as a student current LLMs are better at explaining than the average teacher is.

Overall, I think our education system is largely outdated and schools of the future won’t look like one teacher explaining and 25 people more or less not listening

one day you’ll hopefully grow old enough to realize how lazy this shit looks to other people

This isn't the UK government or UK public education policy, to be fair on the UK. It's a £27,000-per-year private school in London - the sort that helps ram the possibly-not-so-bright kids of the wealthy through their GCSEs and A-Levels.

Unfortunately this trend is happening in the States even without the AI buzzwords (though it is there). You give every kid a tablet with educational apps that feed into a curriculum algo. Teachers are told by the algo which student needs help on what, basically they become facilitators to the app. Then you also have "student summarizers" which will "analyze" a student written or audio submission and flatten it down to some unform stats.

so the thing is this is a private school at the sort of fees that attract really good teachers and use them as a selling point, so I don't actually think being cheap is the goal here. I think some idiot thinks this is actually a good idea.

They could just have the kids read actual books designed by actual pedagogic experts which actually help to learn through studying it.

Now nobody knows if the "AI" is even teaching real things or if it is only using properly vetted material, if the structure it proposes makes sense.

Yes teachers are fallible, but they are also human and can emotionally understand what is going on during learning that a trained algorithm just cannot get. In so far also it means there needs to be a clearly defined "goal" of knowledge and competencies and the algorithm can only fill the holes, rather than encourage students to maybe seek knowledge beyond the established set.

Also i am skeptical how much of it is even "AI" in the sense of needing a machine learning approach, or it is just regular computer tests of which "level" is reached in each category and where to improve still. Chance is, this could be done with an excel sheet.

In some areas of the USA, teaching degrees aren't required to actually teach. I hope I don't see this world-wide.

There is a lot of benefit to be had though. It will likely suck at first and I think the tendency for outsourcing this kind of thing is idiotic. The gov needs to be the AI administrator AND the company because AI is extremely privacy invasive and should never be commercialized in any capacity with kids. I don't support even the school having full access to a child's prompting. I say this because I have intimate knowledge of what kind of information can be accessed using this and how invasive it is. I only run my own open source models on my own offline hardware. The only persons within a school with full access to a child's prompting should be someone bound to confidentiality and a Hippocratic oath like a licensed psychiatrist with no obligations or bias towards the school's petty interests.

The education system is largely antiquated presently. I'm all for supporting my community with living wage jobs. Our reductionist culture is a big part of why we are falling apart. When we are presented with efficiency improvements, we are too stupid to adapt, and too stupid to use them as a resource. We flush out that newly created value instead of investing it immediately within ourselves.

The world has changed from an era when a traditional teacher is relevant. Audio visual information is our primary form of communication. With readily available video, it is criminal to continue live lecturing and presentation of static information. There is no chance that the live presentation of information is anywhere near the quality of a polished and edited video. There is very little chance that any given lecturer is truly the best at presenting such information. Such a statement glosses over the fact that there are an enormous range of personalities and functional thought processes. It is extremely unlikely that any given teacher connects well with each individual student. We have had readily available video communication for over a decade. Some university professors readily use the medium and offer class time as more of a workshop or lab environment. Most primary schools lack this kind of adoption of technology, complexity, and efficiency to keep up with the changing world. In truth, we lack the requirement for a teacher to be a life long learner too.

I expect much the same Luddism with AI. With teaching kids, this is pushing AI to the point where it needs serious supervision to be effective. Maintaining a child's autonomy and right to privacy is absolutely critical for the future of society as a whole. However, the ability for AI to adapt to any functional thought and help with individualized problem solving is something that no teacher is capable of with more than one student at a time.

Most of us had to persist through our frustration in order to learn. AI can directly and individually address that frustration and find a solution. It is not always correct, but it is in the same realm of accuracy as an above average teacher. Maybe you too were aware of just how many teachers did not even know the subjects they were tasked with teaching in primary school, I certainly was.

Aren't there laws about who gets to teach kids? I know there are strictures on teacher to student ratios, but how can that exist without a written definition of what a teacher is?