This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the other. You can do it with anything and create an equally reasonable sounding essay. Here's ChatGPT on why we should eschew air travel for horse and buggy:
"We don’t need another miracle of steel and jet fuel to fling us across the sky at five hundred miles an hour.
We need wheels that creak, hooves that strike the ground with an honesty no turbine can mimic. We need the long road—the smell of manure and lilacs, the way your thighs ache after a day of swaying on a wooden bench.
Because in the air, you don’t hear the frogs tuning their throats in a roadside ditch. You don’t feel the wind peel an apple’s scent from an orchard as you pass.
And maybe—just maybe—you don’t really arrive anywhere at all.
Not the way you do when a horse brings you there, slow enough to see every dragonfly and every dying sunflower bowing in the field."
Erem · 1d ago
What fantastic use of imagery the poetic quality of these LLMs has grown considerably.
I know this is aside to the point you're making but the every dying sunflower line really got me as a reader of poems.
As an argument of course there's barely one at all which was closer to your point.
mcfry · 1d ago
Was thinking the same thing. It's impossible to take this article's criticisms of AI seriously when it's so obviously over-edited with AI itself.
ablerman · 1d ago
Has the medium become the message?
williamcotton · 1d ago
When was it not?
sebmellen · 20h ago
As Marshall McLuhan might say “The Medium is the Massage”
add-sub-mul-div · 1d ago
Maybe the best criticism of it is that it's become synonymous with bad content.
antonvs · 1d ago
> "Because this is how real learning often arrives: sideways, unscheduled, alive."
And this is how AI slop often arrives: so recognizable it hurts.
woopsn · 1d ago
It's depressing how common this accusation is become here. Before LLM idiot ruined everything, you know what? People wrote things you wouldn't like, in a way you wouldn't like. Especially on their blogs. HN so smart though they can immediately see, tenured Yale professor has no life and is trying to win the message board game with AI slop!
pessimizer · 1d ago
Nobody in this thread accused LLM of writing the OP. Instead, they are saying that it is dumb and easy in the way a lot of LLM writing is, and that LLMs wouldn't have any problem writing it. This author is being disliked in the traditional way, but with a LLM-assisted proof that actually shows that LLMs can write this crap, and write it well.
The real proposal should be that slate dot com type "Is Food Really Good For You?" or "Hands Are A Completely Unnecessary Part Of The Arm" article authors should be replaced by LLM.
I like the proliferation of LLM slop, because it involuntarily reveals the emptiness of an enormous proportion of actual human writing. You can't help but see it, even if you don't want to. You end up forced to talk about the author's resume in defense.
BobaFloutist · 23h ago
>It's impossible to take this article's criticisms of AI seriously when it's so obviously over-edited with AI itself.
Someone in this thread accused LLM of writing the OP.
antonvs · 1d ago
Are you attempting to claim that my identification of AI slop is incorrect?
If so, you're almost certainly wrong.
No comments yet
lucianbr · 1d ago
It's so weird how "AI slop" is generally recognized as a problem, as low quality and doing more harm than good, and at the same time AI is generally considered a huge great thing.
How can AI itself be so great if it's output is literally AI slop, which is basically garbage?
add-sub-mul-div · 22h ago
It's good for people who want to take shortcuts to do their work with minimal effort, good for employers who are waiting for it to mature enough to be able to eliminate most employees, and good for the people selling it. Outside of those bubbles, it's seen as garbage. None of these use cases increases quality or makes the world better.
antonvs · 1d ago
In my experience, LLMs can be pretty great at coding and math.
When it comes to writing ordinary natural language, the constraints are less rigorous, and LLM output tends to focus on rhetoric, where the goal is to fool people into accepting a conclusion rather than actually supporting the conclusion from a logical perspective.
nartho · 1d ago
Funnily enough, Diderot made this very same argument. Except it was that you should travel by foot instead of by horse. For the very reasons ChatGPT stated.
kccqzy · 23h ago
Creative writing is not the same as an argumentative essay. The former can very well just contrast particularities while getting the author's general sentiment across (or I should say, get the imageries that evoke certain feelings in readers). The latter tries to convince the reader by means of logic and reason. Different writing styles for different purposes. One appeals to your logical faculty. One appeals to your emotions. It's pathos vs logos; and it's known since Aristotle's time.
djoldman · 1d ago
Indeed; these seem to be more frequent of late. The language seems over-the-top, almost breathlessly pearl-clutching without any sort of evidence:
"Childhood itself, reframed: not as a journey to be nurtured, but a system to be streamlined."
"But what starts as adaptation ends in control."
"And when you name your school Alpha, you signal something deeper: Not growth. Not care. But dominance."
"What’s lost in Alpha’s world isn’t content—it’s interiority: the struggle, the slowness, the human friction."
"And in that shift, the soul becomes overhead."
"Human scaffolding gives way to sleek sterility."
"...we risk raising children who are fluent—but forever waiting for the next prompt."
"It’s not that it fails—it’s that it succeeds. Brilliantly. But at the wrong task..."
coldtea · 23h ago
>This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the other. You can do it with anything and create an equally reasonable sounding essay. Here's ChatGPT on why we should eschew air travel for horse and buggy
Don't know about the "without ever arguing why one is better than the other" part.
The LLM made a very strong case for horse and buggy. It just takes the right sensibility to appreciate it...
timerol · 1d ago
This article seems to be a good argument for a school that's 3/4 project based learning and 1/4 classroom instruction. The author then tries very hard to pretend that Alpha school does not follow that model, and is instead something else - a boogeyman of blitzing through lessons without any opportunity for application or reflection, as opposed to the reality of a mix of classroom instruction and project-based learning to struggle with the concepts learned.
> And some readers may ask: if schools like Alpha accelerate the basics and then give students space to explore—what’s wrong with that?
> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.
The argument, if I'm following it, is that the Alpha model is going to do well, and therefore the model will change to remove the current 3/4 of the curriculum used for exploration, which will make the model worse. But Alpha won't care, because teaching students worse in the name of efficiency is the natural end point. I am not convinced.
I think the article would have done a much better job starting with Asian cram school culture and how AI tutoring is being "fueled by state incentives and parental anxiety", instead of having that as a throwaway thought in the middle of an article otherwise focused on Alpha school.
NervousRing · 1d ago
There are a lot of things in the article that I find a bit wishy-washy.
> It’s a signpost for a broader trend—one that treats friction as failure, learning as delivery, and formation as a plug-in.
I think building something provides a lot more friction (and learning opportunities) than reading books. We had computer classes for at least 7 years in school and beyond some loops and recursion, I didn't really think I understood computers. One month of trying to build an app and that worked. Similarly, hundreds of hours of YC (and other) video content paled in comparison to trying to salvage a startup that was going bankrupt.
> And what’s the real tragedy of this model? It’s not that it fails—it’s that it succeeds. Brilliantly. But at the wrong task: a perfect system solving for performance, not presence.
I don't know why this line feels like it's written by ChatGPT. Maybe because it has that tone of trying to say something deep in a verbatim manner that is the signature style of ChatGPT.
> Training children to outperform machines may win the game, but it misses the point:
Machines don’t need meaning. We do.
And I haven't found more aimless people than those coming out of current highschools. They then go to the universities their peers go to, get the job their peers do and try to fill their weekends with entertainment. No judgement, but I don't think AI will reduce any of that.
diamond559 · 1d ago
Everyone should just invent new products, new fields of employment then? So easy to you, what have you invented? What new, innovative job do you do that nobody else does?
briandw · 1d ago
I home schooled my kids during the pandemic. It was amazing how quickly we got through the material for the year. We did all of 5th grade math in 3 months of 40 minutes a day. It not just my experience, 1 on 1 tutoring has been shown to be dramatically more effective than classroom instruction.
This article sounds like the usual ideological objections, lots of vague claims that amount to “I don’t like it”.
There is nothing more threatening to a failing institution than a solution that delivers results.
The US education sector is quick to embrace any new fad that sounds good but doesn’t work, building thinking classrooms is the latest. Productive struggle is another.
Yes learning takes time, but it doesn't have to be painfully slow and unproductive.
The education system in US is a disaster and getting worse. The response from schools like the San Francisco school district has been to lower standards and remove higher level material.
I see tremendous potential in Ai tutoring. I use chatgpt to help me learn new material daily. Why should school be any different?
const_cast · 18h ago
Well of course 1-1 teaching is more productive. That's like saying having a personal mechanic is better than taking your car to the local chain on a Saturday. Yeah, duh.
However, what remains to be seen is if 1-1 with an LLM reaches that productivity.
Humans, and especially kids, are weird. They're picky, they're self-sabotaging, and they're short-sighted.
From what I've seen from kids, they will absolutely destroy their own education in the name of fucking around. Presumably, you didn't let that happen. Will an LLM? We're already reaching the breaking point with teachers - a lot of parents just say "I don't care" when confronted with the fact their kid is illiterate.
julianeon · 1d ago
I don't think there's any conflict here.
The article is saying something is lost when the algorithm becomes the teacher, as when the AI is the instructor.
1-on-1 teaching (with the parent as teacher) is not that; whatever problems it has, it's never a problem of a too-powerful algorithm.
beej71 · 1d ago
If you use the AI right for tutoring, then sure. A really great tutor will not tell you the answer.
dboreham · 1d ago
One of the purposes of school is to keep students off the streets and out of trouble.
SoftTalker · 1d ago
Well, really the purpose is to inculcate the next generation with the common culture, history, rules and norms, as well as the practical knowledge they will need to become self-supporting functioning adults in society.
Every human civilization and tribal community does this.
It's why we in the USA spend so much time in the early grades not just on arithmetic and ABCs, but on stuff like the Pilgrims, the first Thanksgiving, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, etc. It's not really anything anyone needs to know for day to day life in 2025, but it's a set of common stories that we all can relate to, draw analogies to, and yes rally around if called to do so. I'm not sure really how much this is true today, I'm reflecting on my experience in the 1970s.
pnathan · 1d ago
Public schools are also a de facto childcare, welfare, and healthcare delivery system. Education is only one facet of the modern public school system in today's society.
peterfirefly · 1d ago
Why should kids like Brian's be forced together with those that need to be kept out of trouble?
BobaFloutist · 23h ago
Because it's important to spend time with people that aren't like you. Otherwise people tend to assume that everyone is like them, or that people that aren't like them are simply not trying hard enough to be like them.
jimbokun · 1d ago
But it doesn’t have to be the only purpose.
rufus_foreman · 20h ago
>> There is nothing more threatening to a failing institution than a solution that delivers results
Well said. Did you just make that up?
briandw · 18h ago
I wasn't explicitly quoting anything, but I'm sure I've read something similar somewhere.
pnathan · 1d ago
OP: You need to stop with the LinkedIn short paragraphs that try to reveal insight. It does you no good as a proponent of a good education to write so poorly.
Anyway -
Education is a very slow and difficult thing, because it is paired with the maturing of the individual along with sharing enough concepts to spark connection _but_ not so much as to overwhelm. Adult humans can make the individual judgment that algorithms can't - WIS not INT.
Regarding dysfunctions.
Children can absorb knowledge _very_ fast in the right environment. I'm uncertain how much that replicates across the whole population, but you can see this in the top-flight homeschoolers.
When we were looking for better environments for our kid than the neighborhood school, we realized that private schools have an advantage in that they can select the parents and effectively curate the environment. Most of the issues in the public elementary school were generated by dysfunctional parents combined with certain political choices on classroom management. The second is materially fixable given work - the first is not something a school board can fix. Much of the discourse on education needs to relate to the total educational delivery across family/student quartiles of capacity, rather than trying to cherry pick a student, or a class, or - . You see, it's very hard to teach when certain students have no self control and disrupt the class continually, and there is no facility to remove them from the class for the good of others. And as we all know- 90% of students are above average, and our kids are _definitely_ gifted. So there's no easy political way to solve the environment problem - which happens to be the key drag on education today.
JamesPark1982 · 1d ago
I think micro-learning on a consistent basis helps with retention, maybe one small thing a day consistently
datameta · 1d ago
This is proven by neuroscience. Spaced repetition.
unshavedyak · 1d ago
Is Spaced Repetition related to "learning one new thing every day" though?
I'd have thought repetition was more about retention than the described "learn one new thing every day".
I'm also curious what new means here. Is attempting to research and retain (eg SR) some small fact the goal? Or would it be learning novel modals, such as new skills or new ways of thinking - which i imagine would be quite difficult in a day of course, just thinking out loud.
wahnfrieden · 1d ago
They've confused learning new material with reviewing learned material
unshavedyak · 1d ago
Fwiw i don't necessarily think SR is not learning new material. It was a question from me, not a counter.
For SR to apply i imagine it depends on the underlying set of SR cards/etc. If you're just topping off on well known material then SR can't do much - but if it's well known material, there's often not even a review stage to have - all the material won't be flagged for review.
However if you have several items that you're reviewing then the SR algo has determined you don't know it (or perhaps they're new, but that's a bit besides the point).
wahnfrieden · 1d ago
Spaced repetition and the research behind it is about recall, not encountering new material. That's what is being repeated - actively recalling the same material over time. The spacing is determined by the forgetting curve - loss of learned information
datameta · 1d ago
Consistently reducing the slope of the forgetting curve for recently acquired knowledge/skill assists in understanding and consolidation of new related materials/methods through second-order effects.
- that the gains come primarily from the 2 hour learning platform
But actually:
- the gains come from the high quality and large quantity of adults
- only 10% of the benefit comes from the platform (according to Matt Bateman, an education thinker who now works there)
- there are definitely large selection effects, too
I like the idea of it. But AFAICT there's nothing special about the execution. It's just that public schools (both government-run, and charters):
(i) can't choose their students, and
(ii) aren't trying to maximize learning, and
(iii) have parents who want something 'normal'.
So it's easy to do something better, if you can get a few folks to pay you a lot of money, and you have investors willing to burn additional money.
(BTW at their new school in San Francisco, opening this fall, they're planning to charge $75k/year, so probably no need for VC subsidy)
They might iterate to something that can scale. But right now they're making claims that I don't think would stand up to scrutiny.
Regarding their charter school application in Pennsylvania: the fact that they're trying to get taxpayers to pay so much for their software (which Matt acknowledges only accounts for 10% of the gains) seems like a trick to extract money from a taxpayer-funded 'not for profit'.
Separately: if I were paying $75k/year for a school for my child, I'd be disappointed if they were using IXL and ALEKS for math, instead of Math Academy.
zehaeva · 1d ago
Excluding room and board that's more expensive than Harvard[0]. I feel like if you're spending that much money on a child then it should be freaking amazing. You could employ a private tutor full time for that sort of money.
0: $59,320 for the 25-26 year according to their website.
rahimnathwani · 1d ago
You could employ a private tutor full time for that sort of money.
You could hire one full time tutor per two children, though...
more expensive than Harvard
Right, but the student:teacher ratio in a typical harvard 'classroom' is much higher.
jorl17 · 1d ago
This is only very vaguely related but this title made me think of a very touching book on the subject of learning: Flower for Algernon.
I definitely recommend it for those who enjoy thinking about what life is like for people of different perceived "intelligence" levels.
ozgrakkurt · 1d ago
I don’t believe in god, but this kind of thinking feels like playing god.
It is really hard to guess what is the right way, everyone has a different idea.
Effort and resources seems like the biggest missing piece in practice.
In almost everything more effort and resources seem to be able to overcome a lot of bad decisions and mistakes but there is not much hope if there isn’t enough effort.
Alifatisk · 1d ago
I am a very slow learner, I have colleagues who learn things very quickly. Two things that have helped be speed things up is these two:
- Spaced repetitions
- Active recall
greenavocado · 1d ago
The elephant in the room that makes or breaks learning GENERALLY is encoding ability. Spaced repetition is far less effective if you don't build meaningful encodings for knowledge you are learning.
Next up is LEARNING first, then remembering. Grinding trivia is not learning.
Combine elaborative encoding + self-explanation + dual coding as your core encoding triad. Use mnemonics selectively for hard-to-remember facts. Embed spaced and interleaved practice into your review schedule via tools like Anki or RemNote.
rahimnathwani · 1d ago
"Next up is LEARNING first, then remembering."
This is true for many things, but there are exceptions.
For example, my son studied the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) using Anki, without any prior exposure. Now, when he uses a dictionary (paper or online), he can verify the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word.
Another example: foreign language vocabulary. These are rote facts. There's no meaningful distinction between 'learning' a foreign word and 'remembering' that word. You cannot say you've 'learned' a word if you cannot already 'remember' it.
pessimizer · 1d ago
> Next up is LEARNING first, then remembering. Grinding trivia is not learning.
You haven't learned anything you can't remember, you've just heard it once.
Also, this is horseshit on its face. Sometimes I just need to to remember what dots and dashes in what order mean "J," or how -ar verbs are conjugated in the progressive past. Learning things and remembering them is the same thing. Once you have the facts remembered you can abstract groups of them into parameterized functions, and abstract those parameterized functions, and test how they work in strange contexts, etc.
But these are all rewards you get for remembering things. On the other hand, I see no benefit in thing that I "learned" yesterday that I don't remember today.
edit: I agree 100% with the prescription, though. But creating lots of spurious associations around pieces of data you want to remember is a temporary measure until you can make more real and useful associations. The process of creating real and useful associations between new information and old knowledge is what I'm referring to when I say "learning." It happens whether you want it to or not. It's a product of the sheer amount of repetition times the salience of the new fact to old knowledge. [edit: although number of sleeps seems to have an effect.]
taeric · 1d ago
Something that I keep meaning to dive more on here, is an exploration of why spaced repetition and active recall work. I saw a study once that indicated it was largely the "guess and check" aspect of combining these that worked.
That is, some people will approach spaced repetition as a means to re-consume the information. But, sadly, that doesn't really work. Instead, those that use it as a means to attempt active recall, effectively "guessing" the answer and then immediately checking that result do see massive gains.
To that end, I'm curious if this describes your approach when it works?
Alifatisk · 1d ago
I think it works because if you see your memories in the brain as a road, it will make sense. Any memory or association you create between two things builds a tiny little road. Your brain scales that road based on how much you use it. Any time you recall that memory by repetition, the road gets stronger, the stronger it is, the more persistent it stays as memory. If you don't use it at all, then at the end, it will get demolished to free the space (you forget).
That is the mental model I have of it, I don't know how accurate it is though.
taeric · 1d ago
My point was that just seeing the road is not enough to remember it, it seems. You have to predict what is at the end of the road, as well.
This is why "flash cards" have the question on one side and the answer on the other. If you just looked at all on one side, then you lose retention.
I think the idea is that you want to get your mind trained to create the answer based on the prompt. You don't, necessarily, remember the answer and the prompt, together. Instead, you want you mind to be able to make the answer.
chizhik-pyzhik · 1d ago
Unfortunately and ironically this has all the marks of AI writing.
> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.
use of "not this — that", em dash, staccato sentences to make a point, unnecessary metaphor, etc
I stopped reading at this point.
DHPersonal · 1d ago
LLMs use em dashes because they were trained on content made by actual writers. Actual writers still exist and they still use em dashes.
kccqzy · 1d ago
Either actual writers who care about typography, or actual writers who have had their writings edited by a real editor. Or even anyone just curious enough about writing that they picked up a manual of style.
parpfish · 1d ago
i'm a frequent em-dash user. it's great for little appositive clauses because it can make the sentence feel less cluttered than commas.
but i have no idea how to type an em-dash. you just put in a double-dash/hyphen (i.e. "--") and any modern word processors will know to convert it to an em-dash for you.
I suspect that lots of writers who use this trick are getting unfairly slammed with "omg, youre an AI! no human knows how to type that character!"
kirubakaran · 1d ago
You're conveniently replying to the weakest point of the parent comment. They listed a several more reasons, and when taken together, the article reeks of LLM generated content.
snapcaster · 1d ago
You don't have a lot of experience with LLMs if this isn't immediately identifiable as ChatGPT generated
sctb · 1d ago
Of course, they certainly do. But this article is really something else! I don't care if it's written by AI or not, but it has a rhetorical style that relies much more on rhythm than on connecting the conceptual dots. Like a TED talk or a revivalist preacher.
jihadjihad · 1d ago
Cmd-F for em dash `—`:
> 72 results
It doesn't prove anything but it's a highly suggestive signature. I would hazard a guess that it would be rare for most writers to use an em dash every other sentence.
PeeMcGee · 1d ago
It happens as soon as the fourth sentence (maybe even the third):
> There was a silence at the table—not confusion, but recognition.
Then keeps happening again and again and again to the point where it would be obnoxious even if a human wrote it.
It's unbelievable to me that there's a kind of person who would publish an article about learning that is so obviously AI generated, and from a professor nonetheless. Maybe this is some sort of experiment or an ironic joke that went over my head.
djeastm · 1d ago
I also felt my AI spidey-sense tingle and just threw the article into an LLM to summarize for me.
Oh, what a world we live in.
somebodythere · 1d ago
LLM argumentative essays tend to have this "gish-gallop" energy; say a bunch of tenuously related and vaguely supported things, leave the reader wondering if it was the author who failed to connect the dots, or them
zahlman · 1d ago
Yes, so do human ones (just not the ones that filter through to you). The output is like this because the training data is like this.
esseph · 1d ago
You just described my personal writing style :(
intended · 1d ago
Yeah, this reads as AI Generated. The opening para, and several subsequent paras, have this specific flow that I associate with an LLM asked to write an essay.
There’s a great phrase from bodybuilding that applies to much in life:
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
teilarer · 1d ago
>There was a silence at the table—not confusion, but recognition.
Didn't read further — that's an AI-generated article. Shame!
talkingtab · 1d ago
The propaganda name for it is AI. I am not opposed to AI, I think it will have far reaching benefits for all of us. However, people are trying to make as much money from it as possible and so would like to influence how we think of it. If we consider it Intelligence then more people will throw more money at it. But it is not.
When you think about it, what is now gently called AI is more like think by number - TBNI. You take all the current thinking, you search it and compile it. How you get AI should tell you something. Searching. So it tells you what color to paint the square with a 7 on it. That is the good part.
The bad part is that if the drawing is wrong, so is the color. If your paint-by-number kit is titled "A Duck" and the numbers are on a drawing of a dog, then TBNI will not really help you.
As I look around I notice the degree to which we humans use following. You learn to do things by watching others. A map tells you how to go some place. Why go to college? The curious thing to me is that so much of what we follow is wrong already. People follow a well worn path even when they see it leads know where. Why? Because many people are unaware there is an alternative.
I blame our education system for this. The essence is to trust what other people know, not what yourself. Silly educators.
If you are a follower, TBNI will make you redundant, because TBNI will be faster and cheaper.
But you can think if you try. Perhaps the most important thought any person can have is when they experience something and say to themselves "This is stupid". Follow that thought. :-)
wohoef · 1d ago
I'm quite worried by this post. After reading the first paragraph it is obvious that this is AI generated, or at least heavily edited by AI. Read some of the other comments on this post for examples of how this is obvious.
The author is a professor in Computer Science at Yale. As well as an ex-research at Microsoft and IBM. You would think this person has the necessary writing skills to write this article themselves. There is no excuse to use AI for writing this. It makes it much harder to read. And always leaves me wondering if I don't understand the point the author is trying to make or if there wasn't one to begin with.
Overall I'm just annoyed by how often I see people use genAI to write stuff for them. Do they think people won't realize it is generated by AI? Do they just not care? Or has it become socially acceptable to write emails, articles, and memos with AI? Just give me the f***g prompt. Then at least I don't have to deal with reading the AI slop.
Let alone how ironic it is to write an article that talks about AI in education, with AI.
PS: I'm not trying to attack the author. This is becoming a widespread issue and I don't want to single him out.
MagicMoonlight · 1d ago
You're seeing behind the curtain. It turns out that professors at Yale are morons, just like everyone else. As are the people that work at Microsoft and IBM. Almost everyone in the world is.
We have a lot of good marketing to try and persuade people that everyone isn't a moron, but ultimately you can't change the fact that they are. That's why you'll notice that 99% of work in every organisation is done by a handful of people.
bombdailer · 1d ago
People don't care, in fact the average person finds LLM writing to be some of the best since it's so good at effortlessly conveying information (of what value..?). That ease of course comes with the loss of the real intent of the author. No longer their words, bearing no mark of effort and discernment, it becomes assimilated into the corpus of all that unthinking, unfeeling machination that lingers breathlessly with no pulse. No life exists in those empty words, no one who will take the stand to defend them, to hold them as true by the fire they alight in oneself. No, the LLM provides a cold flame, only pretty to look at - providing only the image of warmth. But perhaps the LLM reflects the soul of the modern person, who in becoming more machine like, comes to find their home amongst the shadows of that dim blue light.
marssaxman · 1d ago
I do not understand why so many people are so supremely confident that they can accurately identify AI-assisted writing. The "tells" they cite generally strike me as unremarkable features of normal human writing.
qwertytyyuu · 1d ago
Reminds me of mathsacadamy which also claims to accelerate learning
rahimnathwani · 1d ago
I have no idea why Alpha doesn't use Math Academy, instead using IXL and ALEKS.
websight · 1d ago
Please stop posting obvious AI-written slop.
jongjong · 7h ago
My experience is that some people who learn too fast don't seem to always fully synthesize their knowledge to resolve internal contradictions. Sometimes when you talk to such people, it feels almost like they can guess what you're trying to say; they can predict the next best word like an LLM; this makes them highly intelligent by some standard. However, unlike LLMs which are generalists, such people tend to steer away from conversations which are slightly outside of their main area of competence; in such situations, they will often defer their thinking to 'experts', even when it goes against what seems like basic common sense.
Sometimes if you force them into such conversations, you can uncover some surprising blind spots where they don't understand very basic things. I once had this experience when I was talking to a guy I worked with in crypto space who had a PhD in mathematics; smarter than me in many ways. But one time we were having a discussion and he just couldn't understand my argument about basic price and demand dynamics, he couldn't accept my argument that the Bitcoin blockchain isn't actually scalable, that the main reason the network doesn't get congested and grind to a halt is because when the Bitcoin transaction volume is high, block miners increase the transaction fee as a way to drive down demand for transactions. He couldn't gasp the role of market incentives and could not accept the fact that the Bitcoin blockchain itself can't physically process more than about 4 transactions per second.
Invictus0 · 1d ago
This author seems to have completely misunderstood what Alpha School is doing. The student learns at their own pace. They don't move on until they learn it, whether that's quickly or slowly. That is worlds better than the assembly line system we have now, where if a student doesn't learn a concept, they are expected to build on top of that misunderstood concept in the next lesson, and then the entire remainder of their education becomes a wash.
We are living in a world where high schools are graduating students that can't read and don't know their times tables. The critiques of alpha school are reactive inertia for a system that is already badly broken.
rob_c · 1d ago
Fluff mainly built around trying to push something which has rich elites (regardless of political bent) believing that school shouldn't spend time teaching the skills they don't use because they don't use them. (And by don't use i mean society applauds them for not using rather than they're incapable)
This schooling by design locks out the possibility of world leading medicians, scientists, mathematicians and economists if it ignores learn by rote. Just because repetition is boring doesn't mean it's not essential, and frankly before the age of 18 is when you're most susceptible to getting benefit from that learning.
Same goes for a lot of the new age and home schooling. It's not that that these models can't work. But they're normally fighting against an education system which has been refined for almost 100+ years in the developed world. Instead, the good ones embrace and extend without extinguishing. Just because it has it's faults (it does) doesn't mean you throw out the baby with the bath water.
Then again kids going to such a school are going to be wealthy and connected which in certain strata in society matters more than efficacy or meritocracy (regardless of what is preached).
This nonsense that ML(AI) will be the ultimate recall always is the worst of fluff. It's right behind "terminator". ML systems are at best a great tool on hand for experts because query and verify to them is faster than lookup, then reference and then query is to do manually. That's the point.
And no, not a single ML system has proven reliable outside of a lab context in raw isolated offline fact verification...
MagicMoonlight · 1d ago
>And when you name your school Alpha, you signal something deeper:
Not growth. Not care. But dominance
This article is so blatantly written by chatgpt
bluGill · 1d ago
School isn't just about 'book knowledge'. Homeschooled kids often do well on tests - but they all lack an awareness of the real world because they don't meet republicans or non-christians or whatever is outside of their parents groups. those who promote home schooling are aware of this and make some attempt to provide it but that doesn't compare to the many hours you spend in a classroom with such people and so I can still tell the lack.
i'm curious how these ai schools will be different
WaitWaitWha · 1d ago
I suggest that you maybe missing some details around home-schooled children.
> Homeschooled kids often do well on tests - but they all lack an awareness of the real world because they don't meet republicans or non-christians or whatever is outside of their parents groups.
I will assume that in "lack an awareness of the real world", you mean first hand experience with non-scholastic environment of all varieties - If so, this is incorrect. Most home-schooled children have significantly more opportunity to experience "real world" than public school ones. This is because the very nature of home-schooling often involves traveling and often interacting with different people. (e.g., counting money - public school, in class with same teacher same people, home school might take to grocery store and talk to manager who shows how she does it; history - read book, explained by teacher, maybe show pictures, video clips; Home school meet with individuals who lived through or have relatives that told stories, show historical objects.)
If you mean that they lack socialization, that is also incorrect. Homeschool parents often prioritize character development, moral understanding, and meaningful relationships over the large-group peer interactions typical in public schools, which may align better with long-term social fluency but differ from conventional metrics.
Of course, there are terrible outliers where home schooling ends up nothing more just laziness by the parents, and ends disastrously.
[0] Medlin, R. G. (2000). Homeschooling and the question of socialization. Peabody Journal of Education, 75(1–2), 107–123.
Smedley, T. C. (1992). Socialization of home schooled children.
[1] Smedley, T. C. (2004). Social Skills: A Comparison Study. National Home Education Research Institute.
[2] McKinley, M. J., Asaro, J., Bergin, J., D’Auria, N., & Gagnon, K. E. (2007). Social skills and satisfaction with social relationships in home-schooled, private-schooled, and public-schooled children. Home School Researcher, 17(3), 1-6.
const_cast · 18h ago
The great thing about schools is they throw hundreds or thousands of kids together. The fat ones, the skinny ones, the annoying ones, the gross ones, the white ones, the black ones, the mean ones, the cool ones, the weird ones, everyone. And you're FORCED to be around them and make it work. And then you do that every day for 12 years.
This is all anecdotal of course, but of all the homeschooled kids I knew, even going into highschool, they were freaks of nature. I mean, just deeply unlikable people. They were always "off", often rude, often meek, and had this sort of air of desperation for socialization, with none of the tools to make it work.
Now, some of them grew out of it - I met some in highschool working at the Dairy Queen. Turns out, a couple of years of dealing with food service will help you out socially too. But a lot of them never did. Not when I knew them, anyway.
I don't know why, I don't know how, and I can't tell what, exactly, about the public school experience causes this. But it's what I've observed.
kemotep · 1d ago
I’m sorry, I am not familiar with homeschooling as I wasn’t but is it actually common to go to the grocery store and have the manager of the store teach how to make change to the child?
Many your points do not sound like something uniquely possible because of homeschooling.
WaitWaitWha · 21h ago
That was an anecdotal example. I watched a pod (i believe that is what is called when several parents get together for a specific topical teaching) instructed by the grocery store manager when I was there.
> Many your points do not sound like something uniquely possible because of homeschooling.
I am open to elucidate if you give me details you think that is not possible.
kemotep · 20h ago
Half of your points sound like museum trips, that plenty of non-homeschooled children go to on a regular basis. Additionally why can’t a non-homeschooled child be taken to a grocery store and demonstrated how to make change on a Saturday or after school?
That’s my problem with your specific examples. None of them seem unique to homeschooling.
WaitWaitWha · 20h ago
Thanks for the clarification, albeit I still do not see which half you think is equivalent in public schools.
I will say that the likelihood of school trips in public schools is possible, but significantly fewer and less likely than for home schooling. A home schooled child can take a field trip every week. This will not happen for public school student, just for logistical reasons.
My point was to counter the argument that "they [home schooled children] all lack an awareness of the real world". If you look at my response from that context, it is clear, at least to me, that a public school student has significantly less opportunity to experience "real world".
kemotep · 19h ago
I would disagree and say the opportunities are probably equal. There are plenty of stories of homeschooling that leave a lot to be desired may be borderline abusive and there are regular schools that offer better education and enrichment opportunities than some colleges and vice versa.
tobinfekkes · 1d ago
> Homeschooled kids often do well on tests - but they all lack an awareness of the real world
My experience has been the exact opposite, almost exclusively. I witness them not performing as well on tests in the high school/college years, but excel at the "real world" afterwards. To the point that they look "behind" in school, but then leapfrog their peers in the post-college years. They're particularly better equipped in the subjective "adulting" areas, and not just the "maximize income" area.
lurk2 · 1d ago
What are the benefits of “awareness of the real world,” and how are they measured?
crims0n · 1d ago
> Homeschooled kids often do well on tests - but they all lack an awareness of the real world because they don't meet republicans or non-christians or whatever is outside of their parents groups.
Uh, not all of us that homeschool are right-wing fundies. A sizable population of homeschoolers in the US do so because the public school system is atrocious, but we can't afford private school. You better believe we prioritize a diverse set of experiences and ideas, and I think we are more favorably positioned to deliver on that.
bluGill · 1d ago
A lot are left wing fundies as well.
Us public education is really good, but people will always complain about something.
drivebyhooting · 20h ago
Why do you say US public education is really good? Any facts or data to back that assertion?
dragonwriter · 1d ago
> Uh, not all of us that homeschool are right-wing fundies.
Yes, that's probably why the first example of an out-group in GP is "republicans", while the second is "non-Christians", and the broad category label for the examples is "whatever is outside of their parents group".
Actually reading the excerpt you quote to react to would help.
> You better believe we prioritize a diverse set of experiences and ideas, and I think we are more favorably positioned to deliver on that.
And on what evidence should I believe either of those things?
crims0n · 1d ago
> Yes, that's probably why the first example of an out-group in GP is "republicans", while the second is "non-Christians"
My mistake, misread the sentence. Not that it is an excuse, but it is a common stereotype.
> And on what evidence should I believe either of those things?
I don't see how one could even go about collecting empirical evidence to substantiate either of those claims, and I expect you know that. Regardless, I am sharing an anecdote - not writing a thesis. Believe what you will.
adamtaylor_13 · 1d ago
They “all” lack that awareness, eh? I’m glad to have finally met someone who met EVERY SINGLE homeschooled kid and interviewed them.
I was worried for a second we might’ve been over-generalizing for the sake of online karma.
Seriously though, your superiority complex is showing, you may wanna cover that up.
"We don’t need another miracle of steel and jet fuel to fling us across the sky at five hundred miles an hour. We need wheels that creak, hooves that strike the ground with an honesty no turbine can mimic. We need the long road—the smell of manure and lilacs, the way your thighs ache after a day of swaying on a wooden bench.
Because in the air, you don’t hear the frogs tuning their throats in a roadside ditch. You don’t feel the wind peel an apple’s scent from an orchard as you pass. And maybe—just maybe—you don’t really arrive anywhere at all. Not the way you do when a horse brings you there, slow enough to see every dragonfly and every dying sunflower bowing in the field."
I know this is aside to the point you're making but the every dying sunflower line really got me as a reader of poems.
As an argument of course there's barely one at all which was closer to your point.
And this is how AI slop often arrives: so recognizable it hurts.
The real proposal should be that slate dot com type "Is Food Really Good For You?" or "Hands Are A Completely Unnecessary Part Of The Arm" article authors should be replaced by LLM.
I like the proliferation of LLM slop, because it involuntarily reveals the emptiness of an enormous proportion of actual human writing. You can't help but see it, even if you don't want to. You end up forced to talk about the author's resume in defense.
Someone in this thread accused LLM of writing the OP.
If so, you're almost certainly wrong.
No comments yet
How can AI itself be so great if it's output is literally AI slop, which is basically garbage?
When it comes to writing ordinary natural language, the constraints are less rigorous, and LLM output tends to focus on rhetoric, where the goal is to fool people into accepting a conclusion rather than actually supporting the conclusion from a logical perspective.
"Childhood itself, reframed: not as a journey to be nurtured, but a system to be streamlined."
"But what starts as adaptation ends in control."
"And when you name your school Alpha, you signal something deeper: Not growth. Not care. But dominance."
"What’s lost in Alpha’s world isn’t content—it’s interiority: the struggle, the slowness, the human friction."
"And in that shift, the soul becomes overhead."
"Human scaffolding gives way to sleek sterility."
"...we risk raising children who are fluent—but forever waiting for the next prompt."
"It’s not that it fails—it’s that it succeeds. Brilliantly. But at the wrong task..."
Don't know about the "without ever arguing why one is better than the other" part.
The LLM made a very strong case for horse and buggy. It just takes the right sensibility to appreciate it...
> And some readers may ask: if schools like Alpha accelerate the basics and then give students space to explore—what’s wrong with that?
> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.
The argument, if I'm following it, is that the Alpha model is going to do well, and therefore the model will change to remove the current 3/4 of the curriculum used for exploration, which will make the model worse. But Alpha won't care, because teaching students worse in the name of efficiency is the natural end point. I am not convinced.
I think the article would have done a much better job starting with Asian cram school culture and how AI tutoring is being "fueled by state incentives and parental anxiety", instead of having that as a throwaway thought in the middle of an article otherwise focused on Alpha school.
> It’s a signpost for a broader trend—one that treats friction as failure, learning as delivery, and formation as a plug-in.
I think building something provides a lot more friction (and learning opportunities) than reading books. We had computer classes for at least 7 years in school and beyond some loops and recursion, I didn't really think I understood computers. One month of trying to build an app and that worked. Similarly, hundreds of hours of YC (and other) video content paled in comparison to trying to salvage a startup that was going bankrupt.
> And what’s the real tragedy of this model? It’s not that it fails—it’s that it succeeds. Brilliantly. But at the wrong task: a perfect system solving for performance, not presence.
I don't know why this line feels like it's written by ChatGPT. Maybe because it has that tone of trying to say something deep in a verbatim manner that is the signature style of ChatGPT.
> Training children to outperform machines may win the game, but it misses the point: Machines don’t need meaning. We do.
And I haven't found more aimless people than those coming out of current highschools. They then go to the universities their peers go to, get the job their peers do and try to fill their weekends with entertainment. No judgement, but I don't think AI will reduce any of that.
This article sounds like the usual ideological objections, lots of vague claims that amount to “I don’t like it”.
There is nothing more threatening to a failing institution than a solution that delivers results.
The US education sector is quick to embrace any new fad that sounds good but doesn’t work, building thinking classrooms is the latest. Productive struggle is another.
Yes learning takes time, but it doesn't have to be painfully slow and unproductive.
The education system in US is a disaster and getting worse. The response from schools like the San Francisco school district has been to lower standards and remove higher level material.
I see tremendous potential in Ai tutoring. I use chatgpt to help me learn new material daily. Why should school be any different?
However, what remains to be seen is if 1-1 with an LLM reaches that productivity.
Humans, and especially kids, are weird. They're picky, they're self-sabotaging, and they're short-sighted.
From what I've seen from kids, they will absolutely destroy their own education in the name of fucking around. Presumably, you didn't let that happen. Will an LLM? We're already reaching the breaking point with teachers - a lot of parents just say "I don't care" when confronted with the fact their kid is illiterate.
The article is saying something is lost when the algorithm becomes the teacher, as when the AI is the instructor.
1-on-1 teaching (with the parent as teacher) is not that; whatever problems it has, it's never a problem of a too-powerful algorithm.
Every human civilization and tribal community does this.
It's why we in the USA spend so much time in the early grades not just on arithmetic and ABCs, but on stuff like the Pilgrims, the first Thanksgiving, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, etc. It's not really anything anyone needs to know for day to day life in 2025, but it's a set of common stories that we all can relate to, draw analogies to, and yes rally around if called to do so. I'm not sure really how much this is true today, I'm reflecting on my experience in the 1970s.
Well said. Did you just make that up?
Anyway -
Education is a very slow and difficult thing, because it is paired with the maturing of the individual along with sharing enough concepts to spark connection _but_ not so much as to overwhelm. Adult humans can make the individual judgment that algorithms can't - WIS not INT.
Regarding dysfunctions.
Children can absorb knowledge _very_ fast in the right environment. I'm uncertain how much that replicates across the whole population, but you can see this in the top-flight homeschoolers.
When we were looking for better environments for our kid than the neighborhood school, we realized that private schools have an advantage in that they can select the parents and effectively curate the environment. Most of the issues in the public elementary school were generated by dysfunctional parents combined with certain political choices on classroom management. The second is materially fixable given work - the first is not something a school board can fix. Much of the discourse on education needs to relate to the total educational delivery across family/student quartiles of capacity, rather than trying to cherry pick a student, or a class, or - . You see, it's very hard to teach when certain students have no self control and disrupt the class continually, and there is no facility to remove them from the class for the good of others. And as we all know- 90% of students are above average, and our kids are _definitely_ gifted. So there's no easy political way to solve the environment problem - which happens to be the key drag on education today.
I'd have thought repetition was more about retention than the described "learn one new thing every day".
I'm also curious what new means here. Is attempting to research and retain (eg SR) some small fact the goal? Or would it be learning novel modals, such as new skills or new ways of thinking - which i imagine would be quite difficult in a day of course, just thinking out loud.
For SR to apply i imagine it depends on the underlying set of SR cards/etc. If you're just topping off on well known material then SR can't do much - but if it's well known material, there's often not even a review stage to have - all the material won't be flagged for review.
However if you have several items that you're reviewing then the SR algo has determined you don't know it (or perhaps they're new, but that's a bit besides the point).
At the very least it’s an interesting experiment—still unclear if or how well this sort of thing will succeed.
https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1933354196792979590?t=bMl...
My main problem is that they claim:
- it can work with any cohort
- that the gains come primarily from the 2 hour learning platform
But actually:
- the gains come from the high quality and large quantity of adults
- only 10% of the benefit comes from the platform (according to Matt Bateman, an education thinker who now works there)
- there are definitely large selection effects, too
I like the idea of it. But AFAICT there's nothing special about the execution. It's just that public schools (both government-run, and charters):
(i) can't choose their students, and
(ii) aren't trying to maximize learning, and
(iii) have parents who want something 'normal'.
So it's easy to do something better, if you can get a few folks to pay you a lot of money, and you have investors willing to burn additional money.
(BTW at their new school in San Francisco, opening this fall, they're planning to charge $75k/year, so probably no need for VC subsidy)
They might iterate to something that can scale. But right now they're making claims that I don't think would stand up to scrutiny.
Regarding their charter school application in Pennsylvania: the fact that they're trying to get taxpayers to pay so much for their software (which Matt acknowledges only accounts for 10% of the gains) seems like a trick to extract money from a taxpayer-funded 'not for profit'.
Separately: if I were paying $75k/year for a school for my child, I'd be disappointed if they were using IXL and ALEKS for math, instead of Math Academy.
0: $59,320 for the 25-26 year according to their website.
But actually I don't think you could hire a full time tutor for that amount in San Francisco. Many public school teachers in SF cost double that https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=school-...
You could hire one full time tutor per two children, though...
Right, but the student:teacher ratio in a typical harvard 'classroom' is much higher.I definitely recommend it for those who enjoy thinking about what life is like for people of different perceived "intelligence" levels.
It is really hard to guess what is the right way, everyone has a different idea.
Effort and resources seems like the biggest missing piece in practice.
In almost everything more effort and resources seem to be able to overcome a lot of bad decisions and mistakes but there is not much hope if there isn’t enough effort.
- Spaced repetitions
- Active recall
Next up is LEARNING first, then remembering. Grinding trivia is not learning.
Combine elaborative encoding + self-explanation + dual coding as your core encoding triad. Use mnemonics selectively for hard-to-remember facts. Embed spaced and interleaved practice into your review schedule via tools like Anki or RemNote.
This is true for many things, but there are exceptions.
For example, my son studied the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) using Anki, without any prior exposure. Now, when he uses a dictionary (paper or online), he can verify the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word.
Another example: foreign language vocabulary. These are rote facts. There's no meaningful distinction between 'learning' a foreign word and 'remembering' that word. You cannot say you've 'learned' a word if you cannot already 'remember' it.
You haven't learned anything you can't remember, you've just heard it once.
Also, this is horseshit on its face. Sometimes I just need to to remember what dots and dashes in what order mean "J," or how -ar verbs are conjugated in the progressive past. Learning things and remembering them is the same thing. Once you have the facts remembered you can abstract groups of them into parameterized functions, and abstract those parameterized functions, and test how they work in strange contexts, etc.
But these are all rewards you get for remembering things. On the other hand, I see no benefit in thing that I "learned" yesterday that I don't remember today.
edit: I agree 100% with the prescription, though. But creating lots of spurious associations around pieces of data you want to remember is a temporary measure until you can make more real and useful associations. The process of creating real and useful associations between new information and old knowledge is what I'm referring to when I say "learning." It happens whether you want it to or not. It's a product of the sheer amount of repetition times the salience of the new fact to old knowledge. [edit: although number of sleeps seems to have an effect.]
That is, some people will approach spaced repetition as a means to re-consume the information. But, sadly, that doesn't really work. Instead, those that use it as a means to attempt active recall, effectively "guessing" the answer and then immediately checking that result do see massive gains.
To that end, I'm curious if this describes your approach when it works?
That is the mental model I have of it, I don't know how accurate it is though.
This is why "flash cards" have the question on one side and the answer on the other. If you just looked at all on one side, then you lose retention.
I think the idea is that you want to get your mind trained to create the answer based on the prompt. You don't, necessarily, remember the answer and the prompt, together. Instead, you want you mind to be able to make the answer.
> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.
use of "not this — that", em dash, staccato sentences to make a point, unnecessary metaphor, etc
I stopped reading at this point.
but i have no idea how to type an em-dash. you just put in a double-dash/hyphen (i.e. "--") and any modern word processors will know to convert it to an em-dash for you.
I suspect that lots of writers who use this trick are getting unfairly slammed with "omg, youre an AI! no human knows how to type that character!"
> 72 results
It doesn't prove anything but it's a highly suggestive signature. I would hazard a guess that it would be rare for most writers to use an em dash every other sentence.
> There was a silence at the table—not confusion, but recognition.
Then keeps happening again and again and again to the point where it would be obnoxious even if a human wrote it.
It's unbelievable to me that there's a kind of person who would publish an article about learning that is so obviously AI generated, and from a professor nonetheless. Maybe this is some sort of experiment or an ironic joke that went over my head.
Oh, what a world we live in.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
Didn't read further — that's an AI-generated article. Shame!
When you think about it, what is now gently called AI is more like think by number - TBNI. You take all the current thinking, you search it and compile it. How you get AI should tell you something. Searching. So it tells you what color to paint the square with a 7 on it. That is the good part.
The bad part is that if the drawing is wrong, so is the color. If your paint-by-number kit is titled "A Duck" and the numbers are on a drawing of a dog, then TBNI will not really help you.
As I look around I notice the degree to which we humans use following. You learn to do things by watching others. A map tells you how to go some place. Why go to college? The curious thing to me is that so much of what we follow is wrong already. People follow a well worn path even when they see it leads know where. Why? Because many people are unaware there is an alternative.
I blame our education system for this. The essence is to trust what other people know, not what yourself. Silly educators.
If you are a follower, TBNI will make you redundant, because TBNI will be faster and cheaper.
But you can think if you try. Perhaps the most important thought any person can have is when they experience something and say to themselves "This is stupid". Follow that thought. :-)
The author is a professor in Computer Science at Yale. As well as an ex-research at Microsoft and IBM. You would think this person has the necessary writing skills to write this article themselves. There is no excuse to use AI for writing this. It makes it much harder to read. And always leaves me wondering if I don't understand the point the author is trying to make or if there wasn't one to begin with.
Overall I'm just annoyed by how often I see people use genAI to write stuff for them. Do they think people won't realize it is generated by AI? Do they just not care? Or has it become socially acceptable to write emails, articles, and memos with AI? Just give me the f***g prompt. Then at least I don't have to deal with reading the AI slop.
Let alone how ironic it is to write an article that talks about AI in education, with AI.
PS: I'm not trying to attack the author. This is becoming a widespread issue and I don't want to single him out.
We have a lot of good marketing to try and persuade people that everyone isn't a moron, but ultimately you can't change the fact that they are. That's why you'll notice that 99% of work in every organisation is done by a handful of people.
Sometimes if you force them into such conversations, you can uncover some surprising blind spots where they don't understand very basic things. I once had this experience when I was talking to a guy I worked with in crypto space who had a PhD in mathematics; smarter than me in many ways. But one time we were having a discussion and he just couldn't understand my argument about basic price and demand dynamics, he couldn't accept my argument that the Bitcoin blockchain isn't actually scalable, that the main reason the network doesn't get congested and grind to a halt is because when the Bitcoin transaction volume is high, block miners increase the transaction fee as a way to drive down demand for transactions. He couldn't gasp the role of market incentives and could not accept the fact that the Bitcoin blockchain itself can't physically process more than about 4 transactions per second.
We are living in a world where high schools are graduating students that can't read and don't know their times tables. The critiques of alpha school are reactive inertia for a system that is already badly broken.
This schooling by design locks out the possibility of world leading medicians, scientists, mathematicians and economists if it ignores learn by rote. Just because repetition is boring doesn't mean it's not essential, and frankly before the age of 18 is when you're most susceptible to getting benefit from that learning.
Same goes for a lot of the new age and home schooling. It's not that that these models can't work. But they're normally fighting against an education system which has been refined for almost 100+ years in the developed world. Instead, the good ones embrace and extend without extinguishing. Just because it has it's faults (it does) doesn't mean you throw out the baby with the bath water.
Then again kids going to such a school are going to be wealthy and connected which in certain strata in society matters more than efficacy or meritocracy (regardless of what is preached).
This nonsense that ML(AI) will be the ultimate recall always is the worst of fluff. It's right behind "terminator". ML systems are at best a great tool on hand for experts because query and verify to them is faster than lookup, then reference and then query is to do manually. That's the point. And no, not a single ML system has proven reliable outside of a lab context in raw isolated offline fact verification...
This article is so blatantly written by chatgpt
i'm curious how these ai schools will be different
> Homeschooled kids often do well on tests - but they all lack an awareness of the real world because they don't meet republicans or non-christians or whatever is outside of their parents groups.
I will assume that in "lack an awareness of the real world", you mean first hand experience with non-scholastic environment of all varieties - If so, this is incorrect. Most home-schooled children have significantly more opportunity to experience "real world" than public school ones. This is because the very nature of home-schooling often involves traveling and often interacting with different people. (e.g., counting money - public school, in class with same teacher same people, home school might take to grocery store and talk to manager who shows how she does it; history - read book, explained by teacher, maybe show pictures, video clips; Home school meet with individuals who lived through or have relatives that told stories, show historical objects.)
If you mean that they lack socialization, that is also incorrect. Homeschool parents often prioritize character development, moral understanding, and meaningful relationships over the large-group peer interactions typical in public schools, which may align better with long-term social fluency but differ from conventional metrics.
Of course, there are terrible outliers where home schooling ends up nothing more just laziness by the parents, and ends disastrously.
[0] Medlin, R. G. (2000). Homeschooling and the question of socialization. Peabody Journal of Education, 75(1–2), 107–123.
Smedley, T. C. (1992). Socialization of home schooled children. [1] Smedley, T. C. (2004). Social Skills: A Comparison Study. National Home Education Research Institute.
[2] McKinley, M. J., Asaro, J., Bergin, J., D’Auria, N., & Gagnon, K. E. (2007). Social skills and satisfaction with social relationships in home-schooled, private-schooled, and public-schooled children. Home School Researcher, 17(3), 1-6.
This is all anecdotal of course, but of all the homeschooled kids I knew, even going into highschool, they were freaks of nature. I mean, just deeply unlikable people. They were always "off", often rude, often meek, and had this sort of air of desperation for socialization, with none of the tools to make it work.
Now, some of them grew out of it - I met some in highschool working at the Dairy Queen. Turns out, a couple of years of dealing with food service will help you out socially too. But a lot of them never did. Not when I knew them, anyway.
I don't know why, I don't know how, and I can't tell what, exactly, about the public school experience causes this. But it's what I've observed.
Many your points do not sound like something uniquely possible because of homeschooling.
> Many your points do not sound like something uniquely possible because of homeschooling.
I am open to elucidate if you give me details you think that is not possible.
That’s my problem with your specific examples. None of them seem unique to homeschooling.
I will say that the likelihood of school trips in public schools is possible, but significantly fewer and less likely than for home schooling. A home schooled child can take a field trip every week. This will not happen for public school student, just for logistical reasons.
My point was to counter the argument that "they [home schooled children] all lack an awareness of the real world". If you look at my response from that context, it is clear, at least to me, that a public school student has significantly less opportunity to experience "real world".
My experience has been the exact opposite, almost exclusively. I witness them not performing as well on tests in the high school/college years, but excel at the "real world" afterwards. To the point that they look "behind" in school, but then leapfrog their peers in the post-college years. They're particularly better equipped in the subjective "adulting" areas, and not just the "maximize income" area.
Uh, not all of us that homeschool are right-wing fundies. A sizable population of homeschoolers in the US do so because the public school system is atrocious, but we can't afford private school. You better believe we prioritize a diverse set of experiences and ideas, and I think we are more favorably positioned to deliver on that.
Us public education is really good, but people will always complain about something.
Yes, that's probably why the first example of an out-group in GP is "republicans", while the second is "non-Christians", and the broad category label for the examples is "whatever is outside of their parents group".
Actually reading the excerpt you quote to react to would help.
> You better believe we prioritize a diverse set of experiences and ideas, and I think we are more favorably positioned to deliver on that.
And on what evidence should I believe either of those things?
My mistake, misread the sentence. Not that it is an excuse, but it is a common stereotype.
> And on what evidence should I believe either of those things?
I don't see how one could even go about collecting empirical evidence to substantiate either of those claims, and I expect you know that. Regardless, I am sharing an anecdote - not writing a thesis. Believe what you will.
I was worried for a second we might’ve been over-generalizing for the sake of online karma.
Seriously though, your superiority complex is showing, you may wanna cover that up.