An easy way to circumvent the AI problem is to ask the kids to read the material ahead of time and use class time for socratic method questions each student has to answer to determine their grade over time. Social media is training the new generations to be fed information - mostly stuff that flushes down the brain with an emotion, but also content. AI can easily create custom courses fit to a child’s needs and add density or adjust pace without being tired. Have them answer questions along the way to adjust pace and you have an educational opportunity beyond measure. The real problem is not that - it’s the US system’s multi use as a credentialing signal. Grading on curves and having kids play zero sum games where there don’t need to be any is what makes bad behavior unethical and unethical behavior a habit at an early age. With AI everyone can have mentors in every discipline (some better that others). So instead of encouraging laziness with laziness, invest in gamifying the degree experience so the more levels a student unlocks the more advanced they are certified to be. You will find abundant qualified people in no time. The real problem is that the current qualified people don’t want abundant competition for high paying jobs.
ggm · 7h ago
What we want education to teach, and what is formally structured into curriculum and what is measured and what is measurable and what is valuable to the individual and valuable to society; they aren't the same, they aren't in the same surface, they co-relate and co-exist.
I think it very likely AI is the chisel which opened up one or many of the cracks but the cracks have existed for a very long time.
I think "what is the education system" is a great open-ended pub discussion topic.
The article makes a very good claim that for people with freedom to chose expensive ivy league education, actual knowledge acquisition is the last thing on many of their minds.
Incipient · 4h ago
I don't think anyone would debate that the education system has cracks (in any country, I'm from aus) or is imperfect. The debate here is how BIG of a 'crack' AI is causing in the education system.
Brand new teachers design a lesson plan using two sentences and AI, students answer it using a screenshot and AI. I'm struggling to see who learned what there.
All we do is end up with teachers that don't know how to teach, and students that learn little.
Personally I feel there is a step change towards a poorer education, but others may not. I think it's worth debating this particular topic. Or tackle education as a whole...but that feels intractable.
OutOfHere · 4m ago
Has everyone lost their minds? Tests in class still work. No phones or other electronics allowed.
ndr42 · 7h ago
What I find strange: my students (german school system, 11th grade) let chatGPT do the creative work (like inventing a character for a play). That was what I liked in school the most.
akkartik · 6h ago
Everybody likes a different part of school the most. That's part of the joy of life.
mingus88 · 5h ago
It’s not always that simple.
Creativity is not a tap that you turn on and off. Sometimes it is hard to be creative, even if you enjoy it. Even if you are good at it.
When a student feels pressure to perform, and they have an LLM to fall back on, they can poison the well of their creativity. LLMs are that tap that they can always turn on.
Then soon enough they no longer want to put in the effort. Why, when an LLM can do it perfectly right now?
thefz · 5h ago
True, I am the least creative person I know and abhor any kind of art. Such an assignment would have me recoil in horror.
constantcrying · 6h ago
What I liked most about school was not having school. Thankfully after I left the German school system and finally was allowed to learn something in university I enjoyed that.
seanmcdirmid · 5h ago
I don’t see why we don’t move kids more quickly to a university style education if they show that they can handle it. The 7 hour of class time per day (but don’t worry, you can do your homework in class) doesn’t seem that great anymore, it’s just a grind and sets you up for real failure when real learning begins in college (3 hours of classes a day but 9-12 hours of homework/studying).
add-sub-mul-div · 6h ago
Most people will put in the least effort they can possibly get away with. Indulging this and training this habit in a generation of students is not going to go well.
grues-dinner · 2h ago
The system is already badly misaligned. Even ambitious students may consider it a better use of their time to use tools like LLMs to grind out more standardised points than use them to gain deeper understanding of a subject they may not consider important. Any STEM student targeting finance is basically uninterested in most of the subject matter, for example. This also far predates AI.
The suckers who actually want to learn will get even more badly screwed in such a system unless the assessment is balanced to favour actual knowledge. And not only at final assessment but from start to end because if you get screwed in the short term because your low marks while you get to grips with the subject gets you penalised, it takes a lot of foresight and fortitude not to buckle and just spam for points. Doing it "right" requires more teacher engagement, more parental engagement and generally more autonomy, effort and money all round. And even then you have the ever present problem of which group do you spend each marginal unit if effort on: the stronger or weaker students?
amadeuspagel · 2h ago
If a system can be screwed up merely by giving teachers and students access to useful tools, maybe it wasn't that great in the first place.
dogma1138 · 2h ago
That’s a gross oversimplification.
The fact that you can cheat in a game does not mean the game itself is flawed.
If you use tools to effectively ghost write your assignments you are not learning.
vrighter · 2h ago
You can't expect to learn to be a painter by simply buying pictures of artwork. You need to try (and fail, over and over) to actually paint.
rincebrain · 7h ago
IMO, it's because this has been the status quo for many years for people who could pay to cheat their way through the formal process of a degree, and now the opportunity cost is ~0.
I recall it being pretty obvious for a large number of years of my time in the education system which kids were cheating their way through, because they'd be able to parrot crap in writing or do perfectly on take-home things, but mysteriously be crap if you required them to reason about it in the moment.
I imagine we've all met people in our professional careers who could sell you a heater on the beach but can't reason their way out of a paper bag, as well - it's the same problem.
BobbyTables2 · 7h ago
People should talk more about entire states relying on AI to grade student performance instead of human graders…
AStonesThrow · 7h ago
Little Bobby Tables has a pretty good point here. Isn't it true that standardized testing has relied on computerized grading for at least 40 years? I recall taking the ITBS in Catholic School and, in those days, our digital overlords were so strict about the way we marked our sheets. We required special punch-card shaped forms. We absolutely required a #2 Pencil and this was drilled into our heads along with our parents who purchased #2 Pencils or we would be tarred and feathered. We were strictly forbidden from coloring outside the little ovals or boxes with our pencils. We were drilled on exactly how to erase and how to fix up mistakes in every case. We were instructed on whether guessing was encouraged or penalized.
It was not uncommon for a kindly, well-meaning Sister to slightly nudge a struggling student toward a correct answer, though it never happened to me personally. Yes that's right -- when you standardize testing, the teachers become the cheaters, because they have a vested interest in seeing students excel and driving up their institution's own rankings.
In fact my very recent student career was rather dismaying, because I encountered more than one teacher who was more than willing to cross a line and help a student into a better grade than what they could earn on their own. I didn't think it was fair, that I worked my ass off for grades and teachers would just basically join in the cheating. In fact, I tanked a grade in one class because I was incensed about the teacher's behavior. I blew up some important coursework and I directly, sternly told him not to fix up my grade. It was only a "B" but I was so pissed, at that point!
In the end, all our cards were sent off, literally to Iowa, I guess, and fed into giant A.I. machines and graded without human intervention. But our results were very human indeed. I have no reason to believe that our digital overlords failed to grade our S.A.T.s in the same manner, but the regime was slightly looser as we progressed through high school.
In a way, you can say that I lost my job to A.I. in 2024, because indeed I was tasked with grading student submissions, and by the time I was resigning about half of our workload was turned over to auto-testing multiple-choice quizzes and such that would be scored in the LMS itself.
While I personally rarely determined blatant A.I. usage to solve our homeworks, plagiarism was rampant and students were constantly copying from a very small pool of solved homeworks that were publicly posted. Some more savvy students paid a subscription for a cheating website that would provide even more content to them.
But indeed, if educators have relied so heavily on A.I. to produce and grade materials on our end, I suppose it was only a matter of time before turnabout is fair play.
divbzero · 6h ago
ITBS = Iowa Test of Basic Skills
It took me several seconds to recognize this acronym for a test I took decades ago but haven’t thought about since.
jay_kyburz · 6h ago
I know somebody who was asked to say home for Australia's national testing day. The NAPLAN tests.
Parents evaluate the quality of private schools based on NAPLAN results.
metalman · 2h ago
I watched a kids face boggle, totaly transparent discomfort and incomprehension as I handed him the correct amount for my purchase at the grocery store.I do this regularly, carrying a good mix of bills and change, some of the checkout kids respond differently, and I see the light go on, and I get a grin, but the most common reaction is confusion, looking at the money, at the display, back and forth, counting the money, entering it, and even
remarks like "it worked!"
But lets face it, if you cant count, and do basic math in your head, or with pencil and paper, there are millions of potential tasks that are going to be much harder to do, just sipmle time management.
The kicker is that if someone NEEDS to husle durring busy challenging events and time, nothing can or will be better than inate skills.So think about a societal/national crisis or challenge , the whole concept of automating basic thought processes is predicated on afluence and plenty, and a lasitude that never ends.
Instead of some alien zombie apocalypse, it's a never ending garden party with milling slightly confused somewhat shabiliy dressed people expressing a general mild angst and triumph is to latch on to some biting enui, again.
brockshipalpha · 7h ago
People who don't use AI will be better off. We all know people who cheated--heavily--really do get weeded out (unless they are super rich, in which case they get promoted). I worry about the young cheaters who are dooming themselves by squandering the one chance they get to really learn, and wish there was some way to make them see the long game they need to prepare for.
SirMaster · 7h ago
One chance they get to learn? You can learn any time at any age... You should never stop learning and try to learning a little something every day or at least every week.
Zircom · 6h ago
Yes but dedicating the same amount of time as kids or young adults do to school while also working full-time as an adult is exhausting. I washed out on my first go at college, and going back several years later took me 6 years to finish what was 4 semesters of credits back when I wasnt having to work 40 hours a week AND squeeze in classes when I can at night or early morning.
al_borland · 5h ago
Once you’re out on your own it’s very difficult to dedicate yourself to learning as a full time job for a decade plus. The world expects the foundation to already be in place.
abc_lisper · 7h ago
True - but you learn better when young and make use of it longer than if you learnt it later
brockshipalpha · 6h ago
First you need to learn how to learn. You are doing a survivorship bias: you already know how to learn.
zyx_db · 7h ago
i personally disagree with this because i, along with many others, simply see school as a means of qualification for certain jobs and internships. sure, there is useful knowledge obtained along the way of a degree, but i think for many people theyd be better off spending less time on subjects that arent relevant towards their goals, which using AI can enable them to do.
for example: if you had repetitive busywork for homework assignments, it doesnt make sense to spend a lot of time on it, once you have proven to yourself that you know how to do it anyway.
brockshipalpha · 6h ago
that's a shame. because school is a lot more than that. learning a breadth of subjects has been shown to improve overall knowledge and learning skills. but i get it, you and your many others are not cut out for a broader education. that's what vocations are for. we aren't all the same clones, humans are diverse.
charlie0 · 7h ago
The education system needed a rehaul a long time ago, only now with AI, the can can no longer be kicked down the road.
jay_kyburz · 6h ago
How about you get the kids to write the essay in class, on a computer without network access?
al_borland · 5h ago
They’ll transcribe it from their phone.
ur-whale · 4h ago
Your kids go to a school where phones are still allowed on campus?
Wow, time to move them.
constantcrying · 6h ago
And this will solve what problem?
ivape · 7h ago
I've been to public school in the US and I can testify that 90% of teachers can easily be replaced. There's literally no two ways about it, the AI can do it better. The basis for this claim is that all real teaching is done on a one-on-one tutoring basis. That's why parents that walk the child through homework have better performing students. Your average teacher in a classroom simply can't provide that to 20+ kids in a classroom.
ndr42 · 6h ago
3 observations:
1) Parents that walk their kids through the homework have more stress not better performing students
2) individualized learning programs exist since the 70s, they were not a substitute - you have to explain something to somebody to fully grasps something - I do not see how anybody wants to explan something to an ai
3) Nearly everybody has been to a school so everybody is an expert
ivape · 6h ago
The AI will generally know how to do diagnostics for any skill-level, so it should be able to identify what the child needs to work on. Diagnostic testing is not done in public schools. The teacher regurgitates a curriculum and if the kids don't get it (identified in testing), that's that. The teacher only helps students who already know how to self-diagnose (e.g, They know what they are not understanding and are willing to ask questions). Your average teacher in America has never been able to provide diagnostic testing to large classrooms. If you want to think about this differently, imagine a Doctor that can only help you if you already know what your issue is. That has been the state of the education system.
ndr42 · 5h ago
In your first comment I thought you were talking about teaching. Now It seems your main point is about diagnostics. I don’t dispute that both are intertwinned, but my reply to you was about „you can replace 90% of teachers“ with ai.
One of the strong areas of school is the in-person-interaction part of learning that can not be easily replaced by ai.
ivape · 2h ago
I'm not talking about the good schools in the suburbs. I'll just leave it at that. Your typical school America cannot provide the level of education an AI can, and that will be more and more true. So many kids are literally left behind, believe that.
ndr42 · 2h ago
If I understand correctly you are proposing to cut the teaching staff in the typical schools in the US to 10%, this 10% are there to place the students in front of the ai that makes the kids smarter?
hooverd · 7h ago
Damn, those kids are gonna be lobotomized.
constantcrying · 6h ago
>Everybody who uses AI is going to get exponentially stupider, and the stupider they get, the more they’ll need to use AI to be able to do stuff that they were previously able to do with their minds.
No. AI can be very helpful when trying to understand new topics. The author does not seem to understand that a technology is good or bad, nor in itself, but in how it is used.
The real question, which is totally unrelated to AI, is: "Why don't students care about their education?"
ur-whale · 4h ago
All this point to is the fact that there needs to be a better testing system for student's progress.
Lock them in a room for 4 hours to 6 hours with a list of carefully crafted questions to answer in writing (rather than ticking boxes) with no access to a computer.
See how AI will help them get out of that one.
And testing student progress on "home" work, give me a break. It has always been broken.
Way before AI existed, all you had to do is hire someone to do the work on your behalf, all the more easy if you're born in a family with money. Nothing new under the sun.
jcranmer · 6h ago
I don't think it's so much AI that is screwing up the education system as it is the "STEM über alles" crowd doing so. They've spent decades effectively telling people that it's the STEM fields that matter most, and any investment in education outside of that is frowned upon because it might detract from learning the important stuff. But the truth is that all of the non-STEM stuff is also important, and in many ways more so than the STEM stuff. I work in a STEM field, and I spend a significant fraction of my time trying to write essays and make coherent arguments; a good class on writing would probably be more useful than any other class actually required for my degree.
But now we have AI, which means that these people, who lack appreciation for the value of these classes and consequently don't even really understand what it is they lack, are better able to foist their beliefs in the unimportance of a well-rounded education on the rest of us.
al_borland · 5h ago
Soft skills in general are vastly under appreciated. It’s the biggest difference I see between those who excel and those who spend their whole career struggling for even a modest promotion.
I will say, it was CIS classes in college which got me to expand on my writing, not English classes. In high school, even with English class every year, I tried to do the bare minimum. It wasn’t until the papers were required to be 25-30 pages long that I was forced to really flesh things out into a narrative, rather that what amounted to a bulleted list shoved into a paragraph.
This was a doubled edged sword, as I now find it much more difficult to be concise in my writing, so that takes a focused effort.
There is also a lot to be said for finding the intersection between technology and X. Having a well rounded education can provide more opportunities for people to discover where these intersections can foster new growth or innovation. I often wish I went into a non-computer field, so I could have applied technology to the job, rather than technology feeling like the job itself.
I think it very likely AI is the chisel which opened up one or many of the cracks but the cracks have existed for a very long time.
I think "what is the education system" is a great open-ended pub discussion topic.
The article makes a very good claim that for people with freedom to chose expensive ivy league education, actual knowledge acquisition is the last thing on many of their minds.
Brand new teachers design a lesson plan using two sentences and AI, students answer it using a screenshot and AI. I'm struggling to see who learned what there.
All we do is end up with teachers that don't know how to teach, and students that learn little.
Personally I feel there is a step change towards a poorer education, but others may not. I think it's worth debating this particular topic. Or tackle education as a whole...but that feels intractable.
Creativity is not a tap that you turn on and off. Sometimes it is hard to be creative, even if you enjoy it. Even if you are good at it.
When a student feels pressure to perform, and they have an LLM to fall back on, they can poison the well of their creativity. LLMs are that tap that they can always turn on.
Then soon enough they no longer want to put in the effort. Why, when an LLM can do it perfectly right now?
The suckers who actually want to learn will get even more badly screwed in such a system unless the assessment is balanced to favour actual knowledge. And not only at final assessment but from start to end because if you get screwed in the short term because your low marks while you get to grips with the subject gets you penalised, it takes a lot of foresight and fortitude not to buckle and just spam for points. Doing it "right" requires more teacher engagement, more parental engagement and generally more autonomy, effort and money all round. And even then you have the ever present problem of which group do you spend each marginal unit if effort on: the stronger or weaker students?
The fact that you can cheat in a game does not mean the game itself is flawed.
If you use tools to effectively ghost write your assignments you are not learning.
I recall it being pretty obvious for a large number of years of my time in the education system which kids were cheating their way through, because they'd be able to parrot crap in writing or do perfectly on take-home things, but mysteriously be crap if you required them to reason about it in the moment.
I imagine we've all met people in our professional careers who could sell you a heater on the beach but can't reason their way out of a paper bag, as well - it's the same problem.
It was not uncommon for a kindly, well-meaning Sister to slightly nudge a struggling student toward a correct answer, though it never happened to me personally. Yes that's right -- when you standardize testing, the teachers become the cheaters, because they have a vested interest in seeing students excel and driving up their institution's own rankings.
In fact my very recent student career was rather dismaying, because I encountered more than one teacher who was more than willing to cross a line and help a student into a better grade than what they could earn on their own. I didn't think it was fair, that I worked my ass off for grades and teachers would just basically join in the cheating. In fact, I tanked a grade in one class because I was incensed about the teacher's behavior. I blew up some important coursework and I directly, sternly told him not to fix up my grade. It was only a "B" but I was so pissed, at that point!
In the end, all our cards were sent off, literally to Iowa, I guess, and fed into giant A.I. machines and graded without human intervention. But our results were very human indeed. I have no reason to believe that our digital overlords failed to grade our S.A.T.s in the same manner, but the regime was slightly looser as we progressed through high school.
In a way, you can say that I lost my job to A.I. in 2024, because indeed I was tasked with grading student submissions, and by the time I was resigning about half of our workload was turned over to auto-testing multiple-choice quizzes and such that would be scored in the LMS itself.
While I personally rarely determined blatant A.I. usage to solve our homeworks, plagiarism was rampant and students were constantly copying from a very small pool of solved homeworks that were publicly posted. Some more savvy students paid a subscription for a cheating website that would provide even more content to them.
But indeed, if educators have relied so heavily on A.I. to produce and grade materials on our end, I suppose it was only a matter of time before turnabout is fair play.
It took me several seconds to recognize this acronym for a test I took decades ago but haven’t thought about since.
Parents evaluate the quality of private schools based on NAPLAN results.
for example: if you had repetitive busywork for homework assignments, it doesnt make sense to spend a lot of time on it, once you have proven to yourself that you know how to do it anyway.
Wow, time to move them.
1) Parents that walk their kids through the homework have more stress not better performing students
2) individualized learning programs exist since the 70s, they were not a substitute - you have to explain something to somebody to fully grasps something - I do not see how anybody wants to explan something to an ai
3) Nearly everybody has been to a school so everybody is an expert
One of the strong areas of school is the in-person-interaction part of learning that can not be easily replaced by ai.
No. AI can be very helpful when trying to understand new topics. The author does not seem to understand that a technology is good or bad, nor in itself, but in how it is used.
The real question, which is totally unrelated to AI, is: "Why don't students care about their education?"
Lock them in a room for 4 hours to 6 hours with a list of carefully crafted questions to answer in writing (rather than ticking boxes) with no access to a computer.
See how AI will help them get out of that one.
And testing student progress on "home" work, give me a break. It has always been broken.
Way before AI existed, all you had to do is hire someone to do the work on your behalf, all the more easy if you're born in a family with money. Nothing new under the sun.
But now we have AI, which means that these people, who lack appreciation for the value of these classes and consequently don't even really understand what it is they lack, are better able to foist their beliefs in the unimportance of a well-rounded education on the rest of us.
I will say, it was CIS classes in college which got me to expand on my writing, not English classes. In high school, even with English class every year, I tried to do the bare minimum. It wasn’t until the papers were required to be 25-30 pages long that I was forced to really flesh things out into a narrative, rather that what amounted to a bulleted list shoved into a paragraph.
This was a doubled edged sword, as I now find it much more difficult to be concise in my writing, so that takes a focused effort.
There is also a lot to be said for finding the intersection between technology and X. Having a well rounded education can provide more opportunities for people to discover where these intersections can foster new growth or innovation. I often wish I went into a non-computer field, so I could have applied technology to the job, rather than technology feeling like the job itself.