> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said.
Sounds right to me. Kids under 13 need to learn to read, write and comprehend text. Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.
They can play with AI at home, and after 13 they can learn how to use AI productively and, ideally, in a way that enhances rather than detracts from their education.
Also from the story:
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
A big hooray for that. Will be interesting to see what impact that has on Norway education - a quick search just now didn't turn up any detailed studies, presumably those will show up eventually.
> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.
I think it's more complex than this.
AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.
The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.)
On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.
The obvious way to square this circle is to go back to how things used to be: less emphasis on coursework and more on old-fashioned tests in an examination environment with just pen and paper.
You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams. On the other hand, students who use LLMs to augment their learning will do fine
This is definitely what's going to happen. But there is still a problem - people (not just children) are fundamentally lazy and put things off. People always leave assignments until the last minute. I used to smoothly transition from "I've got plenty of time, no need to start" to "there's not enough time to do it, there's no point starting".
They will 100% just use AI for the whole year and then panic and fail the exam when the time comes.
So I think not only will we see more invigilated exams, but they'll become more frequent and shorter. Which I would say is a good thing anyway. I always hated learning a whole year of stuff for a 3 hour exam.
In what countries were the exams only once a year? When I grew up in the 90s in Sweden we would have tests and exams frequently, usually at the end of each module. This continued all the way through university. I think we had 3 separate exams for the first math course (which lasted a quarter of a year, so roughly one exam per month).
(Though they didn't give formal grades for the first several years of elementary school, which I'm not sure was a good idea.)
In the UK. In high school (age ~11 to 16) the only exams that mattered were SATs at ages 7, 11 and 14 (though I just checked and apparently they've scrapped the 14 year old ones for some reason), and GCSEs at 16. After that you have A-levels for two years (age 17 and 18) where IIRC it was just one big group of exams at the end of each year, and then university where I guess maybe it varies but at least at Cambridge it was one big group of 3-hour long exams at the end of each year.
Though Cambridge does have "tutorials" which are 1:2 tutoring sessions where you probably couldn't completely rely on AI.
It’s one dimension, I agree. Though, for essay-based courses I’m a little skeptical about writing under time pressure.
My thinking here is that you might want to also introduce more “viva voce” (verbal defense) style tests. These have been expensive to administer but my hunch is that you can scale these with AI administering the first round, random human review or participation. This feels like a better endpoint than essays under time pressure (but also maybe you can elect one or the other?)
My other angle is to break completely from the past. I want to see more project work. If AI makes it easier to fake or attain any given level of knowledge, we need to ask more of students, ie ask them to demonstrate mastery by building real things. More open-ended projects are harder to grade (use AI to scale grading), but more fun and engaging for students.
This doesn’t just refer to STEM of course; why not ask students to write a play, compose a symphony, etc?
My core thesis is that most students would work harder and engage with things that interest them, and the fundamental problem with Taylorized education is that one-size-fits-all is only interesting to some.
I studied in a French Lycée in Spain. We did dissertations, brutal 3h live writing tests. There was no problem with it other than the difficulty. Kids didn’t come out screwed up or impaired.
Exactly, “write an essay under time pressure” used to just be called… an exam.
It’s normal and was done for centuries (and still done in many countries) for a reason, it works and it’s equally hard for everyone so it’s not unfair.
I agree it’s an option. I did some essay exams at Uni too. I just don’t think we should assume that the old cost/benefit calculus still applies and this is the best way to test e.g. English Lit or Philosophy.
> You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams
This might sound principled, but we need to recognize that school administrators are incentivised to have as few kids as possible fail their exams; and consequently, so are the teachers. Either exams will change, or the teaching will change.
There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.
LLMs are able to talk for a very long while now. Have you ever used Gemini as an assistant? It can even put in related images about your query and while it can use an improvement it can spell more or less.
I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.
I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
> I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
I am not sure. It would be like sending a kid to a beautiful garden with full of life and stuff, and then micromanaging what they can do there!
The beauty of the books is that the books talk to you, and you cannot talk back. You have to talk to yourselves, go down some wrong path, and course correct on your own at some point, and that is where true learning happens..
The thing I think is underspoken in this space is that LLMs will always hallucinate a bit. How will you know as a 13 year old that an LLM is not conversing truth at you?
My teachers were frequently wrong too and spoke with authority on subjects in hindsight they were frankly ill equipped to teach. Part of learning is understanding how to reason through these types of issues. It's a common problem solving problem in the work place just the same.
I think this is a false equivalence, by some extreme margin. Teachers may occasionally have some fact or whatever incorrect, but especially at lower levels it's going to be exceptionally rare, and often based on a logical foundation that is otherwise invalid for some reason, like whether 1 is a prime number or not.
By contrast LLMs constantly get things wrong and once they get something wrong will begin weaving that into everything create entirely fake realities of the sort that is more akin to a schizophrenic than somebody being mistaken on this fact or that.
My own experience from elementary school was that teachers being wrong was shockingly common. There is no subject in which I would trust any of my elementary school teachers more than a state of the art LLM. This was in Norway. I’m guessing you were privileged to grow up in a place with better quality elementary education.
Yeah but the teacher says you're wrong even if you're right. The AI tells you you're right either way. The former can facilitate an important lesson, the latter doesn't ever give you the chance to.
I've been doing things like accounting where I upload receipts and have the LLM adjust a Google sheet with the money balances. The error rate over the past year has dropped from occasionally to never. That is because there's sub agents now running that check the work. If you have multiple LLMs running with a 94% success rate but you throw them into a group that requires a consensus suddenly the number basically hits 99%.
Hallucinations aren't going anywhere. So you're having a conversation with a stochastic parrot that occasionally says something completely wrong but completely viable and in a highly compelling fashion.
The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.
> The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.
Agreed. With the way LLMs often are quite artuculate and confident sounding, it's only a matter of time until kids will be suspicious of actual people that are articulate and confident from putting effort into improving their speech and speaking about things they are right to be confident about due to being proficient in the subject.
Either that or kids will see that LLMs aren't "getting punished" for being "convincing liars" and will grow up convincing the socially correct way to interact with others is by speaking to them respectfully while going all in on long-game gaslighting.
I understand the first part, but I don't understand the second one. It's probably my ignorance for not having children and being out of touch with schooling.
When I was in school very little grading was based on homework, mostly was grading by testing in class. For example math, I'm absolutely sure it was 100% a few grading tests every semester. You could cheat by copying the homework of your classmates, it was the same set of problems for, but with 0 understanding, you would not pass.
This is what schools enforce, second, even more important part is what parents do/allow/pay for at home.
Every single household I've seen benevolent use of phones/tablets/tv/computer/consoles (quite often all of it), kids were unruly, had shitty grades, living empty lives without good role models and very little passions or hobbies, and overall were more depressed than happy.
I do get why - its supremely easier to just throw tech at them and let them drown in endless cheap dopamine content, triple that for already-addicted parents. The whole principle of active screen itself is so overpowering and addictive compared to good old physical toys, drawing, paint, reading etc.
As a parent of young kids, its much harder to come up, continuously, with good motivating program out there, or even indoors, ie climbing. But - I didn't get kids to have easiest possible life, coursing through our short lives deep in comfort zone is a failure IMHO, thats not life well lived, that's life avoided. I am not kind to such parents - its the biggest achievement, or failure, in one's life, biggest challenges bring biggest rewards. Rather few people put in corresponding effort continuously, compared to careers, relaxing and other aspects of adult lives.
And then folks wonder why so many old people are sour, seeing in more life-successful others all the stuff one could/should have done if not so lazy is deeply depressing, usually amounts to biggest life regrets.
Hard agree. AI generated questions should be absolutely forbidden. In our university I helped a instructor set up a custom Gemini Gem to let students grade themselves in recording because we did not have time to read the final scores in time, It was a nightmare to restrict or get consistent results.
It’s not complex. One must first learn HOW TO LEARN before they can use any tool to help them learn.
There’s no substitution for human connection (social media) and there’s no substitution for traditional learning (robot teachers).
Everyone who wants to “disrupt” this fundamental human quality is chasing delusion. If you want to help, pay teachers a couple billion from the hundreds-of-billions going into AI maybe?
I disagree that humans are required to bootstrap meta-learning; I think it is quite deeply wired into the human brain and there is no reason that we can’t create digital gyms that give opportunities to learn the same insights.
I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.
Well, what we’re seeing in society is the opposite effect. Kids with phones and AI bots are doing, on average, terrible in school compared to folks who didn’t have those growing up.
University professors will likely agree that AI makes students worse at learning overall. No need to cite this there are articles all over the place.
So whatever solution you’re talking about, even when purpose-built, should be replaced by higher paid teachers. Ultimately the AI-First model is about moving money into mega-corps and paying teachers less.
I agree that we are seeing the negative effects of AI-done-wrong. (The best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, as I said.)
I don’t agree that this means all potential or current uses of AI are harmful.
I also don’t agree that simply paying teachers more is a solution. This lever has always existed and as a society we fail to pull it. So for the majority of people who use public schools, improving quality at current spend levels would be a major win, and we should explore the obvious possibilities here.
I’m also pretty skeptical about your culture-war assertion that this is about wealth transfer to mega-corps. This can easily be a sovereign AI product. (I also never proposed “AI first” FWIW, I am a proponent of humans augmented by AI for this and most use-cases. Banning AI entirely operates at the margin of forbidding mostly-human use-cases from using any AI.)
> I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.
You seem to think you're making some kind of valid argument here by backing up your opinion about one thing by providing evidence of something unrelated aside from both things happening to involve AI. I'm guessing only reason it seems obvious to you is because it's not obvious to you that what you're disagreeing is something different than what's going on to begin with.
I haven't seen anyone say the best education would be pure-human provided. The entire point of the article is that the effect AI has had on the education of children so far has not been beneficial.
The fact that AI useful for GPs for getting relatively simple yet time consuming administrative work taken care of has nothing to do with children's education. GPs aren't doing paperwork to develop their fundamental reading and math skills. Less time dealing with the non-medical portions of running a practice means they can spend more time with their patients. Spending more time with their patients allows them to better understand their symptoms and make a better informed, more accurate diagnosis even if AI is never used in a patient-facing capacity. In no way does that indicate that AI is currently a suitable to deploy in education.
I don't know if you used AI to learn about what you were arguing with and gather information to back up your argument, but if you did then that's another example of why there's so much concern about little kids using it. Eventually it will be worked into something without such a double edged nature when applied to early learning. Everyone already knows it can be an educational boon for people who have the skills to use it properly. So far, statistics indicate students do not have those skills. The rate of failure among undergraduate students is only continuing to accelerate.
>very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.
Typically there's not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7 anyways.
Homework levels between elementary school and start of junior might look something like this:
Division I / early elementary - no formal assignments should be made, though 5–10 minutes of systematic study or reading was recommended.
Division II / upper elementary - formal homework could be assigned at the teacher’s discretion, but generally should be reading or study-type work and not exceed about 20 minutes.
Starting from junior high - students are expected to study one-half to one hour per school night.
I remember that whole "expect 30 to 60 min a night" nonsense. I always assumed that was a scare tactic or something. I mean, in high school i was awake until around 4 am playing games every night so I'd wind up using half of each school day compensating with well-timed napping. Even then, the only homework i had to actually take home was the stuff meant to be turned in a few weeks later like tests and projects. Sure, we had daily "homework" assigned; there was also more than enough time during lectures to finish it. The only students that i really ever saw complain about having tons of homework were the ones that didn't put any effort into learning stuff at school to begin with.
Bloom's 2 sigma problem solved at last! But that's overestimating LLMs, our zeitgeist.
AI can't detect AI, not because AI undetectable, but because it lacks judgment. Its shtick is random generation; the proverbial monkey on a typewriter.
> and the best technology ever invented for learning.
This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement.
Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.
I thought the dichotomy would make this clear, but the claim was not that however you use AI, it’s the best thing ever. To be more explicit:
_used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities, AI is the best technology ever invented for learning. If you don’t believe this as a technical HN person at the epicenter of this technology’s capability set, I probably can’t persuade you. But you can do a lot better than your transcript.
Used in the default mode, or with a desire to take shortcuts, or a desire to minimize what is perceived (often correctly in the case of many school curriculae) as BS fake work, it is the best technology ever invented to avoid learning.
I would argue it has gotten way better. Depending on the subject it can be really helpful and some tools even have a learning mode built in now that can generate questions and tests. They are often way too easy to solve but it does not demotivate i guess.
It has always gotten better, just like how self-driving cars have gotten better, and how the case for bitcoin is always getting stronger.
Many people have stopped believing this lie. Yes AI has gotten better by some metric which AI companies are pushing. It has not gotten good enough to be a qualified teacher, and it never will.
I have never claimed it to be good enough to replace a qualified educator, however for self learning it is a good tool with no hustle. You also consider how qualified some educators are...
Better then what for self-learning though? Better then textbooks? Better then an online course? Better then watching youtube videos from Khan academy, or just better then nothing at all as described some metrics which the AI companies came up with them selves?
I suspect it is the last one. This is a trillion dollar industry and if the AI companies claim this, then they should be able to to show it with quality research, they however have not, and the reason is that this is a lie. AI is not better then anything for self-learning. Go to the library and check out a chess book, go to r/trumpet, join a weekly meetup to practice you Spanish, etc. etc. all of these are vastly superior then AI.
You claim self-learning via is hustle free, perhaps you are right, however I suspect that there is no such thing as hustle free learning. If you want to learn something you have to use your brain, and you have to struggle. AI will just act like you got this, flatter you for a minute, and in the worst cases, you may start to believe the AI when it lies to you about how much you’ve learned.
I agree with the last part, however I disagree with the others. To learn something you can't just watch or just read, I personally try to do both, first watch to get a basic grasp, then read to get some of the finer details. It stimulates a bigger area of my brain and lets me remember it faster. AI comes in as a helper to this cycle, creating me a study plan letting me know what to focus on, finding me videos on the topic and sorting them on their success rates based on their comments and finding sources. It lets me ask it questions about parts i find difficult or don't comprehend fully. To go beyond it can create an hour long audio discussion about the topic, create flash cards for me to import to Anki, it can create video summaries for me, it can transcribe the videos and let me know which time mark is a topic i want to focus on is at. These are not lies these are self experience. I am a student too, you know.
How exactly is AI better at coming up with a study plan then you? How exactly does AI provide a better structure then your textbook? Better at finding resources then your friends, studdy-buddies, random strangers on reddit, etc.
That last part I actually know from experience. A couple of months ago I tried to use Qwen AI to help me study Japanese for exactly one week, my prompt specifically asked to link to sources with every grammar explanation. I know very well how to find grammar explanations using traditional search engines, it is rather easy actually. However Qwen AI would hallucinate non-existing links 3 times out of every 4. After 2 days I removed it from the prompt it was so useless, and it still kept hallucinating links to non-existing resources.
If you want to go beyond and read outside the material using a library or a search engine is much much much better for your learning. If you want to have a discussion, try web forums, discord servers, join a group class, hire an tutor on e.g. italki etc. etc. Pick anything at random which we have been doing for decades and is a proven solution, it will be better for your learning than using AI.
It lets me focus on learning rather than preparing to learn which takes motivation away from actual learning for me personally. For the second part I really personally think that is a big case of AI misuse, ever since I have hooked up MCP servers and let AI do web searches and even just letting Claude use Chrome it has never hallucinated a single link ever. The specific AI model you use and your enviroinment changes a lot. You cannot expect much from a 4b model compared to a 31b model (though we are getting better at that with time). I personally used Googlr Gemini for some of my exam subjects and easily passed with high marks, did not have any of the said issues. You may want to check out NotebookLM too.
For myself though, I have found a friend who will be helping me learn a new language this summer. I will of course use his help and sources and AI to supplement my learning. I don't just tell AI to teach stuff I use it as intended, as a tool.
>Better then textbooks? Better then an online course? Better then watching youtube videos from Khan academy, or just better then nothing at all as described some metrics which the AI companies came up with them selves?
The value of all of these self-learning routes has increased enormously due to existence of AI assistants. At least the way I do it now, I get the initial structure for a subject from YouTube/Udemy/textbooks and then fill out my personal comprehension gaps with the help of AI. You can even point AI to a specific material you're trying to grasp and usually it will rephrase a point you failed to get in a simpler language.
Previously, you'd need some trained person to explain to you something that led you to hit a roadblock. Now, the level of understanding you get easily beats most of the tutors in public schools or community colleges.
> The value of all of these self-learning routes has increased enormously due to existence of AI assistants.
This is a lie and most of us know it. AI companies have been lying and lying and lying and lying. If you believe this then the AI companies have successfully lied to you and are making you pay money for an inferior product. If this weren’t a lie then the AI companies should have the research to prove it, they have not, because it is not true. AI does not help anybody learn anything better then using traditional methods.
Yes, it is well known that people trying to sell you stuff lie about your experience with the product. A good salesmen will make you extremely happy to pay 10x more for a worse product. In fact a good salesman will convince you those bugs are actually feature, and you should be happy to pay 10x for so many “features”.
There are a few reasons AI is not the best teacher, but this is not one of them because teachers are also frequently wrong. I say that as someone who comes from a family of teachers, ranging from kindergarten to PhD.
And here is the problem: unlike AI, a lot of teachers don’t like being questioned or challenged. If your teacher doesn’t know a subject well, and you realize this, your options as a student are pretty limited. This is especially true at lower grades.
I don’t believe that AI can replace teachers. But, if used well, it can supplement them. I think Norway is making the right call here with elementary schools, but I wouldn’t support this kind of policy at higher grades where levels.
This is a popular game, still doing sales almost 18 years after release, with dozens of wiki fansites containing all the information, and with hundreds, if not thousands, of reddit postings... and it falls apart on the first answer!
No. Kids in school should not be using AI, because:
AI has existed for decades. The average person has just discovered it / had it forced upon them. And just a small-subset of AI. The average person does not use real AI. And AI is not even well-defined.
Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning. AI will be used as a tool as a way of 'shaping' the mind of young people. Similar to using standardized textbooks. AI is too much of a political tool to be useful.
> Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning
I am curious where you were educated to come to this conclusion.
I don't think your statement holds generally true for all education as it is by definition teaching knowledge.
Sure, there might be institutions that do teaching and propaganda, but I think it shows a lack of awareness to generalize this to all education.
In my experience so far it's less of a propaganda than basically any other medium massively consumed today. It might become it one day though, like all othe media became it.
For anyone who still thinks kids should use AI, another argument to make is we are still figuring out AI (hence the constant debate on it, hype, uncertainty, boundaries of its capabilities etc etc). I don't think anyone with right mind can disagree with that. Keeping that mind, wouldn't it make sense to at-the-very-least tread with caution when it comes to kids.
The counterargument is that kids will live in a world different from our own.
For example, in many countries children lost the ability to write cursive; that used to be a critical skill comparable to literacy itself. But in our current society, that's no longer the case and you can be very successful without it, but there are other skills, such as using technology, that became critical.
Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
But how do you know that letting kids use AI at a way earlier age is the right way to equip them for the world that they would live in? You don't even know what that world will be like, so you can't even draw the conclusion that teaching them AI today will create career success in the future.
And then there's the other solid supporting arguments:
- Humans today were able to comprehend and use AI as soon as ChatGPT became popular so kids today will be able to pick it up quickly as grown-ups.
- "Using AI" isn't really a skill because there isn't much to learn beyond typing to a chatbot and reading the output (creating agentic workflows are very much for power users).
- The form of AI tech today might not even be the same as its form in the future, so you're already teaching them something obsolete.
The point is that knowing what you don't know allows you to hedge your bets on events far into the future; my child will need to become productive 20 years from now and maintain it for 40-50 years. So, it's a bit like trying to educate a kid born in the 60s for the web era, you can't and you shouldn't even try.
What you can do though, is to offer them broad exposure to things that are interesting to them and their generation; my eastern block clone of the 8bit/48KB Spectrum computer didn't really help me excel at math, reading or history, nor was it to be the future of technology, but it did change my life significantly by letting me understand and relate to people that I couldn't otherwise have business dealings decades later.
It seems imprudent to cut children off from futuristic technology just because of a moral panic that it causes brain rot. Unless we know it's soma, a drug so powerful that it subdues volition and curtails intellectual development; we don't.
Everybody and their grandma can "use AI". Reading (and understanding what you read), writing (coherently) and calculating (in your head) are those basic skills that need to be trained and will give you an advantage no matter in what kind of world you live.
> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
I don't think this is as clear as you make it out to be.
There are areas (e.g. personal care as per the impact map released by Anthropic a few months ago) where the impact of AI will be less than in the ones HN often discusses. Communicating with people is important in many of these areas so making sure that kids "should learn" how to communicate is a good investment regardless of how rapidly technology is shifting. There are different time tested ways of doing this and while you can "disrupt" these a little, throwing them out completely is, at least to me, a bad idea.
OTOH, doubling down on learning "skills for the future" which are all bold bets while sacrificing things that have served humanity through multiple moments of change is probably a bad idea.
As for cursive writing (or atleast handwriting) itself, there are several studies of learning it being associated with developing fine motor control, improving memory, improving focus. I can't find them right now but I remember reading them because of my own interest in calligraphy. Many older (especially religious) traditions place emphasis on using written (rather than digitally typeset) books for memorisation because the slight changes in the shapes of the letters act as reinforcements for the process. I know this from experience as well so I think there's definitely value there.
I went through a Steiner school from pre-school to end of high school.
It’s highly opinionated and very controlling initially.
When you paint, you start with one colour. Then another day you get the next (there were only primary colours, because of course).
You eat at your desk, then you’re allowed to play. This was dropped after a year or so.
You don’t learn to read until you’re 7, etc etc.
However, by the end of high school it was up to the individual how much they achieved, and there was minimal pressure. As long as you weren’t messing with other kids, you could do a little or much as you please, and consequences were minimal.
Tools and skills were introduced at a developmentally appropriate age - not sure who chose that age though.
There was a lot wrong with the school and the system, but there was a lot more that was right in my opinion.
Yeah, I we considered a Steiner school because I think that extensive play is a super critical part of a good education. The problem is you also need to be able to be part of the mainstream system at some point, and it felt like it didn't necessarily quite meet that goal.
> The problem is you also need to be able to be part of the mainstream system at some point
There is a requirement to meet certain state mandated standards and the one I went to also took state funding, leading to dilution of Steiner influence/an improved curriculum. It depended which side you were on.
Also worth considering is that it is part of a broader ideology of Anthroposophy which sometimes aproaches semi cult status in how people identify with it. A lot of the principles of Steiner schools are actually pretty cool, but sending your kid there, depending on the school they will also be dealing with the more esoteric bits of all of this that have very little to do with didactic or pedagogic sound principles.
Some if it includes some schools teaching some of the more racists views of Mr Steiner.
>> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
I'm not really sure what point you are making here. We can talk about stuff based on what we know now. AI definitely isn't there yet. Even adults are figuring it out, the limits of its capabilities and shortcomings. Its not even been 5 years, and we want to change everything everywhere.
So if we don't know if we should or should not, and take into account all the hype, marketing, hype, advantages and some potential disadvantages (which are quite serious) why not just go ahead when there is more confidence.
My 6 year olds have been writing cursive at school all year, they have a zero policy about phones until the age ~15, and still use books for everything. Not many schools do this anymore, but there are schools that still do.
You're absolutely right! Joined-up penmanship is exactly the same as our current asymmetry in absorbing reams of soullessly verbose, arrogant pablum shat out by the latest crop of "frontier" LLMs.
Heirloom Groceries
Sponsored
La Mesa Roja Enchilada Kit
In stock • $14.99 • 25-35 minutes
Ads do not influence the answers you get from ChatGPT. Your chats stay private.
Learn about ads and personalization >
From a UK perspective it's very weird that kids in America don't learn to write joined-up.
How can you write sufficiently fast in an English or History exam (where you have to write a whole essay in limited time) if you're writing one letter at a time like a 6 year old?
I agree, but its also somewhat weird that the main reason kids learn to write cursive is for exams - its not a skill most of us use in adult life, and even for kids writing outside exams is often done on computers (e.g. my daughter's A level history coursework was done on, and submitted from, a computer).
Some of the exam boards are trialling computerised exams where exams are completed on computers instead of paper. Its cheaper for them to not have to handle paper (which gets scanned anyway). Its long been possible as an accessibility arrangement but it might become the norm.
> How can you write sufficiently fast in an English or History exam (where you have to write a whole essay in limited time) if you're writing one letter at a time like a 6 year old?
You use an ipad and keyboard or some other similar device. The only times in my life I have had to use cursive were in elementary school, pretty useless skill to have in this day and age.
This happens in the UK but only if you're literally disabled in some way so you can't write by hand, everyone else still uses pen and paper for all exams.
You're allowed to use a biro though, quills and inkwells are optional
I went to school in two different countries where I was taught/required to write joined-up, but I was never actually taught to write it quickly, only "correctly". I was (and of course still am) much faster at writing in block letters, so I'd draft my essays in block writing, then re-write it in joined-up to hand it in.
If your history exam grade hinges on your "typing speed", you had a bad teacher.
It's not like you can not write sufficiently quickly using block letters.
Isn't that a straightforward argument for preserving the status quo as much as possible in learning? We know how to get people to learn without AI, so we should keep doing it until someone figures out how to use AI effectively.
>>>> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
I'd say this is the case in times of technological stability as well.
Education has always been based on heuristics: Teach A, B, and C, with the hope that people will gain X, Y, and Z. Avoid P, Q, and R. The suspicion that some forms of education are fructifying, and others are stultifying, are largely a matter of guesswork and social bias. Attempts to clear things up with "studies" tends to produce results on a par with pseudoscience. Our biases are all we've got.
The reaction to AI isn't the first time that parents have had to decide on the merits of educational technologies: Radio, TV, the early Internet, social media, etc. Even books. There was certainly a suspicion that TV and social media caused brain rot, or a related issue, moral rot.
Regarding your comment below, I was born in the 60s, and was certainly educated for the web era. I'm more adept with technology today, including AI, than most people half my age.
My children were required to learn Microsoft Office in elementary school, "for their careers."
We're in like year 2 or 3 of LLMs being serious tools, still with many disadvantages over humans. There's plenty of time to figure things out, we don't need to experiment on children right now.
I am conflicted on this. One part of me think that they deserve a lot more compensation. But I am not really sure if that should be in the form of a salary rise.
I left teaching and have, literally, 10x'd my annual income after a few years. While teaching, I couldn't afford to support my family of four.
We don't need people stressing and struggling financially for the privilege of teaching our youth. That leaves those without a better option or have a working spouse.
While true, not all jobs are equally critical in that regard. A bad programmer probably can be detected easily. But the effects of a generation of bad teachers might only show up after many decades!
That pay range is roughly what teachers get in former-USSR/Warsaw Pact eastern Europe, and in those countries it's a comfortable income.
Also, going back to what they did a few years ago isn't "more work". May actually be less, given how often people look at AI output, roll their eyes, and say "ugh, slop".
Also also, questions of pay are obviously after society decides what it wants the role of a teacher to be and finds out how much it needs to spend to hire enough people who will do whatever that job turns out to be.
“Workload” has been a constant argument for just about any tech product we acquired at school. I’m very conflicted about this issue to be honest. I’m a member of one of those parent management boards type things, not sure what’s it called in English.
One the one hand I know how busy teachers are, on the other I also know how they never work to 5PM have twice my vacation days, while somehow never being able to meet to talk about issues. We get one ten minute session every few months at best.
If you put pressure on them they call in sick for weeks and good luck finding a replacement. I’m deeply worried that if teaching as a whole doesn’t get it together we will slowly be forced to use AI for everything because of lack of alternatives.
13? there is no reason a minor should use a brain rotting technology like AI, in fact, AI for pretty much most teens is way WAY more damaging than even tiktok ever was.
I'd add to it that most of the studies showing significant negative effects of LLM usage are on adults. This stuff is going to fry kids' still rapidly developing brains in a way that will make the COVID school lockdown kids look like they had it good.
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
I remember seeing an nyt article where there was mixed results on cell phone bans. While they increased socialization among students, the school didnt see better test scores.
We'll have to see if a ban on AI can improve test scores-I am bullish on the idea tho
British schools are often pretty clear that kids are not there to socialise - they will say it in so many words.
It also depends what you by socialisation. in terms of school people usually mean two distinct things: have opportunities to spend time in social interactions, and learning social skills.
My experience of taking kids out of school is that the first reduces (because they spend less time with other kids each day) but the second increases (because they meet a greater variety of people in a grater variety of places).
That takes me to my greatest concern with AI. That kids will socialise (in both senses) with AI rather than people. What will that do to their social skills? There are plenty of examples of adults doing that (visible in places like /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI ), but at least they grew up developing some social skills. If AI is a big part of your interactions, what will the effects of that be?
Socialization goes out of fashion at a rapid pace. If I were to guess, technology deprived kids will quickly catch up with the trend when they age out of the ban.
Also use of technology anti-correlated with alcohol and drug use so there might be unwelcome side effects.
Looking at that meta study, the conclusions seems to be that this kind of studies on children take a lot of time and generally lack any control group, thus conclusions are going to be weak.
Here in Ontario they "banned" phones in class/school and the teens just ignore it and the teachers are unable/scared to enforce it. As parents we've tried over and over with both our kids to lay down the law -- including taking phones away, consequences etc -- but the attitude is intense with both them and their peers and enforcement becomes very difficult once they're out of "child account" parental control range.
Canadian schools operate under the principle of in loco parentis. Your administrators are just unwilling to do their jobs. If they laid down strict policies of zero tolerance and consequences for offenders that inconvenience the parents there would be compliance. Any parent not on board with such policies can send their kids elsewhere.
That said, my youngest just reads gaming wikis and hangs out on Discords for roguelike video games and this somehow consumes 900% of their attention span.
I'd say that's one of the best ways to spend time. It's okay to have a hobby even if it's just rougelike games. Much better than doomscrolling on Tiktok in every way.
Not when it takes precedence over... doing your math homework, touching grass, communicating with a real flesh and blood friend (or parent/sibling), showering...
That's wildly putting things off track. I meant spend time as in free time. I assumed and took for granted things such as showering or doing homework was already done and dusted. Other than that I think students do see each other at school every day anyway so communication is not as desperate as one might think.
Actually, in Europe, Gemini is officially not available for kids even at home [1]. In some countries like Germany, the restriction applies until 16 [2]. I find unsettling that even for supervised account, parents are forbidden to let their kids learn how to use Gemini, even between 14 and 16 yo.
Note that this restriction does not seem to appear from other AI company. So from outside, it looks like unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.
> unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.
They are a company offering a product and they decided not to offer it to kids.
It's not like they are telling you as a parent what you need to do.
Why don't you get a similar product from a different company for your kids?
I don't understand what the controversy is in the US about banning phones in schools. I graduated highschool in the mid 2000s and cell phones were just starting to gain adoption in my town in the last couple years I was in school. I don't recall anyone using a phone in class, but Game Boys were definitely not allowed. I was surprised when I found out that kids were regularly on their phones in class. Why was that ever allowed? Did it get too hard to enforce and they gave up on it until recently?
I've heard a big problem is the parents - they want to be able to communicate with their kids while they are in school, so many parents oppose phone bans.
a large florida school district banned cell phones in schools, and after two years, the total benefit that was measured to be likely caused by this was +0.9 percentiles on their standardized achievement test.
in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.
how do dozens if not low hundreds of hours of time you are not spending on your phone at school translate to only the same benefit as doing ONE hour of studying? well, if there is no mechanism, then yeah, that's what happens.
so why was it ever allowed? either tests are severely limited in what they measure, or the impact of cell phones on education is actually quite small. it cannot be both.
Just ignoring the flimsy SAT metric, there's something most aren't considering in these sort of data. Cell phones enable and are fairly widely used for all sorts of cheating. Banning them gets rid of that, and so if there was no positive effect from a phone ban you'd actually probably expect a slight decrease on scores because of this effect.
So the fact that basically every school region that bans phones is seeing marginal to moderate gains is just huge. And as others have mentioned, test scores are but one aspect of this. Breaks where kids are playing and interacting more regularly are a million times better than ones where everybody whips out their screen and turns into a zombie.
A "million times better," or 0.9 percentiles better? You have no idea.
Of course I don't want kids to be distracted in school. I just think that if things were as easy as a ban, or some other kind of coercion, education would be easy.
You don't need to quantify things like socialization and real life interaction to know it's vastly better than not, and that's not even touching on the academic side of things where you are seeing clear quantifiable differences. Ultimately, education is easy. A century+ ago this [1] was a college admittance exam, which students were expected to be able to pass, and the overwhelming majority did.
It's not like we're making incremental progress over time. Education has become a dumpster fire, and it's getting worse. The solution is simple - stop changing stuff, and just go back to classical education methods that did work, phenomenally. Tech is clearly having detrimental effects on education, so get rid of it in the classroom. Starting with phones there is a mind bogglingly obvious low bar.
You mean chatgpt style AI won't help them with those skills?
If a human parent or teacher can help with skills like reading, an AI system can too, once it's trained and designed to do so. (How good are humans at teaching reading anyway?)
Writing developed thousands of years BCE. So, considering we as a species have been successfully teaching our offspring how to read for hundreds of generations, I'd say we're probably pretty decent at it.
It's funny how people let cultural narratives get in the way of actual analysis. I think some of it is modern convenience has made us intolerant of any imperfection then they label even minor imperfections as a catastrophe.
Yeah, it baffles me that the sentiment here is that AI can only hurt kids' reading ability, when AI (in the form of a chatbot) is practically a tool that forces its users to read a lot.
I still support for some sort of AI restriction for kids, though, since school is a place for kids to socializing. It's a more aspect important than reading and writing.
We need to remember there are going to be human admin tasks that still need human interaction and critical thought into what you read and write. Adult users of these tools already accept AI outputs without too much thought in varying scenarios.
As a child, your willingness to question a tool that’s already better then you at most tasks probably isn’t going too high, and if you go through early education without exercising critical thinking… well we can point to cursive reading/writing as an example of a skill that completely disappears from a generation when not practiced enough.
I had to learn regular writing after cursive at the age of 20 eventually when I was forced because my instructors at the university would not let me use cursive. Those times were BAD.
and with a structured tool, what better place to practice writing, process, iteration, revision, editing.
this happens constantly, every day. a current implementation of a technology isnt optimal so the entire class of anything related to that technology is treated as equally flawed.
the solution here is better tools, not preventing better tools from being created.
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
Isn't that expected in most countries in Europe? There's an aging overall population that is shrinking and immigration is rising. So you get a progressively rising percentage of immigrants among school students, many of those coming from 3rd world countries with non-functioning education systems.
Why is this the most upvoted comment, yet when the UK repents teens form social media it’s met with “aDulTs arE bEiNg monItoRed”.
I agree with Norway here, and it’s slightly exhausting to see people attack any country that’s trying to protect kids as somehow coming for everyone’s supposed sovereignty.
I care about the youth and know they are in the midst of a culture war with adults, leave them out of it until we figure out a path forward.
edit: (crazy to see +11 on my comment, and also -1 when refreshing. Clearly my comment is divisive. This is honestly validating that adults simply cannot find common ground in this topic - especially HN)
The rhetoric I often see online is forcing children to identify themselves which, obviously leads to adults being required to identify themselves.
How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?
It’s all complicated, but I am exhausted from reading doom articles of how the UK wants adults to not exist online while trying to force children offline for their own existence and long term health..
It’s worth me noting that I’m extremely liberal, but I’ve admittedly been failing to see how we keep children safe online without forcing identity of adulthood. We do not allow teens to buy cigarettes or vapes based on vibes either, right?
(please correct or roast me, I really am struggling with this and am tired of reading refutes that are not productive)
> How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?
It's pretty much impossible, so we should stop trying. It's exhausting seeing politicians et al continue to push for age verification despite it being impossible to be even remotely effective. (I hedge because technically we could demand photo ID for every HTTP request, I guess, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.)
The best we can do is ask parents to raise their children themselves and teach children to be mindful online (as we expect them to be IRL).
In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful. And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy, and the sites themselves not entirely infrequently demand ID from accounts at their own arbitrary and whimsical discretion.
The digital world is not like the real one. When you show your ID once all it's details are saved and can be searched across. When showing your ID to the cigarette vendor they will not notice most data and will have forgotten it a while later. So we need to be more careful with the data we give out digitally.
No ID is needed, just proof that you are above a certain age. There are technological solutions to just give out that data, but politicians seem to not want to go that way. This is the real issue, not age checking. The fear that age-checking means tracking...
Two things on this. The first is that at least in the EU they are actively pursuing reasonable technological solutions. [1] The second is that most of the 'usual suspects', the sites people are seeking to regulate, already require a phone number for an account. That enables tracking to a far greater due to a much larger traceable footprint than ID does, even if prevented directly. Even ID numbers are not particularly useful because most change whereas people usually try to keep the same phone number.
And on top of this those sites also have a tendency of demanding ID at their own whimsical and arbitrary discretion and often in even more invasive ways, like requiring a selfie of a person holding their ID along with a scanned, not even photographed, image of said id with all details clearly visible.
>In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful.
By what possible measure have they been overwhelmingly successful? Pornography and alcohol are still used regularly by a double-digit percentage of youth.
In the US more than 20% of kids are obese. Keeping in mind their absurdo high metabolisms, that requires just copious amounts of endless crap, and an excessive intake of sugar in particular. The reason this is the case is largely because this sort of consumption is perfectly normalized. We don't even have terms for addictions to sugar or eating.
By contrast, the rate of alcoholism among youth is extremely low. What do you think it would be if alcohol were completely legal? Prohibition on something doesn't mean it disappears. I fully expect my children to have some drinks when they go to parties, as I did. And I also fully expect they'll try, and fail, to hide their breath/drunkenness from me. And that's fine, I'll also play the role of being tricked. The whole point of the prohibition is that it denormalizes the behavior and keeps it hidden away, which does an overall phenomenal job of minimizing excessive consumption.
In person ID requirements all rely on punishing merchants if a minor fools them with a fake ID which aligns the incentives pretty well. It's hard to imagine how that would work online. Do you go to jail/pay thousands of dollars if someone hands their phone to their kid while logged in to Facebook or Google? You would if you sold beer to a kid who was given their parent's wallet.
Without an enforcement mechanism that punishes site owners the whole system fails. And you can't reasonably expect site owners to be responsible for checking ID on every request. So, it's (practically) impossible.
> And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy
Yep, and we* lost that argument and "think of the children" hysteria won.
* I would bet the same folks opposed to ID requirements now were opposed to phone number then
Sites don't require phone numbers because of any sort of law or regulation. They started requiring them on their own, likely in an effort to amplify their tracking efforts by being able to a high confidence unique identifier to an account which can be paired and cross-referenced with data from other sources to create ever more detailed and invasive profiles of people. Privacy with anything involving companies like Facebook or Google is just nonexistent. And people are fine with this, until there's actually a motivation that isn't outright dystopic.
The companies that would be punished in this case would be Google/Facebook/etc if found to be willingly complicit in enabling fraudulent underage access. And the poetic thing about this is that this is where their endless datamining comes back to bite them square in the ass. That'll be day 1 discovery in the lawsuits, because Google/Facebook/etc already know full well who's e.g. under 14, with an extremely high degree of accuracy.
In my view, it’s very simple. There are places like schools, or parents buying phone plans, to identify children. Will some children get access outside of that? Sure. But 100% enforcement isn’t possible even if you thought it was worth destroying privacy on the internet.
Some other way without making all internet usage identifiable, like maybe parents start parenting? The UK laws aren't even to protect children anyway. It is just a shell to identify everyone online.
Everyone says this..it’s not working! The more kids are online, the less traditional parenting is working. It worked when I was younger, I didn’t know any better. Nowadays, a kid can go on Reddit or Roblox and be told otherwise. We had Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica..
..now kids have /r/ihatemyfamily or #fuckeverything
So your solution is to deanonymize the whole internet? Also can't teenagers ever vent? I would much rather them use websites such as Reddit or Facebook to socialize instead of Instagram or Tiktok to just scroll endlessly. We should target the social media apps for their predatory algorithms I believe.
Come up with a solution that works instead of a slogan.
The last person who divulged any details about what he meant when he said 'parents should parent' went on to reveal that parents should learn to manually configure home routers, a solution that is technologically unattainable for most parents. Again I ask, do you have a solution or a slogan?
You can say as much as you want about burden of proof and the way things should work. But society doesn't care. Trying to play Diplomacy like a chess game is a losing strategy.
The goal is to encroach on privacy, and those interests are using the children able to do it. There is no “solution” to the children using the internet anonymously problem that will satisfy them. We have to keep fighting for privacy.
Look, I don’t disagree. Kids need a safe space to moan. It would be hypocritical of me otherwise, as I spent much of my time in my formative years on ventrilo and various other niche pockets of the internet.
That said, the only cess pool that existed at the time was 4chan - which I avoided, despite actually knowing the founder.
The internet has obviously evolved a lot since, and I feel adults unfairly believe that all persons deserve the fully open internet. We’ve clearly reached beyond the point where most companies care about children, as it’s all profit at the end of the day for engagement. If you keep up with Apple, it’s no surprise they concisely spent a large portion of their precious WWDC showcase on child safety. There’s obvious pressure on them, but I also believe firmly Apple is fully aware the online world cannot behave the same way it has with children having access more easily than ever. It’s not like families share a single desktop computer anymore in the living room where all can see…
My (probably) bad comparison is still vapes and porn. Why should kids be allowed to purchase and view this online, but if they went into a retail store they would be denied? Why the double standard? Why immediately presume it’s about tracking adults? What proof do we have that identity verification is leading to adults being scrutinised and tracked? It all just feels like a tin foil hat fan fiction that has no proven purpose other than conspiracy and proof that every person should never be restricted, regardless of age.
Blocking acess to porn sites is as easy as setting up a firewall, my phone carrier has a feature called family shield, Google Parental Tools lets you see which websites your kid accessed, and restrict them. You do not need to ID everyone in order to let them access the internet. Did the past generations never got their hands on porn back then? Of course they did one way or another. Same with vapes or cigarettes or alcohol. There will always be a website out there that will provide free porn with no ID restriction residing in god knows where. This ID verification is useless and while it appears to be in good faith unfortunately it is not. I'd recommend watching a few videos about this such as this one from Louis Rossmann
In the end, yes there is a possibility that this won't happen, but there is a much bigger possibility that it will happen based on the track record of past bills.
Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.
Plus "Generative AI" isn't one single thing. Using it to write your essay is cognitive offloading but using it as a Socratic tutor that gives immediate feedback and adapts to the student is closer to the thing education research says works.
There's an equity angle as well. A school ban doesn't ban AI at home. It bans the equalizing version. Kids in educated, rich households will get AI exposure from parents. Kids without that won't get it anywhere, because the one place where the field is leveled has opted out. If AI fluency becomes a differentiator in the labor market infrastructure which is very likely a 7 year exposure gap sorted by household class is the opposite of what public education is supposed to be for.
(edit: By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.)
It's not just Norway. Here in Australia many modern style schools were leaning hard into the digitized classroom era in the 2010s. Now slowly they're realizing their mistake
The problem is, a lot of the parents have bought into the digital parenting age too. They were told ipads etc were part of getting the best education for their kid. Now they're fighting hard on rolling it back (not least because they can't comprehend that it's a problem, that their child can't focus 5 minutes without a device)
I certainly believe that, but why did school systems jump on board, especially to be such early adopters as the 2010s, when the iphone was just a few years old? We used to use TV to keep kids quiet, but schools always talked about how bad it was.
It stinks that investments are going to be unwound, but it would be worse to engage in a sunk-cost mindset and keep it digital. Since the move was made we've had research suggesting that writing by hand is superior at generating lasting recall and learning than typing.[1] There's very early evidence that skills we use AI for begin to atrophy. [2] Erring on the side of nurturing young people's minds while their ability to learn is maximized seems completely rational to me.
Please define "AI fluency"? From what I see, it's mainly being able to write and read at a high level, and having a strong media litteracy and critical reasoning sense something you don't need AI for.
And having no TV and no smartphone at home and at school is likely the best way to acquire it.
By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.
I feel like "detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify" is the key skill, but it's also extremely demanding.
You need to have a very solid understanding of things like sources, and bias, and how to evaluate if something is likely to be true, and how to get to a credible answer.
Given the number of people online who try to read arguments with screenshots of a ChatGPT conversation, this is not an obvious process at all.
> By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.
It's AI; by definition alone, those who don't know how to use it will reach competence within minutes, mastery within days.
> Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.
Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8. I don’t even like LLMs and I’m against this mess. Imagine having regulations rolled out when we were 8 saying “you can’t use the internet!” And I was running my own websites by 10 years old.
Let’s stop pretending this tech is as interesting as we wish it was. If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet. I don’t see the difference at this point.
> Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent.
> Adults at level 1 are able to locate information on a text page, find a relevant link from a website, and identify relevant text among multiple options when the relevant information is explicitly cued. They can understand the meaning of short texts, as well as the organization of lists or multiple sections within a single page.
in the intermediate oecd [piaacs report] pages 64ff (PDF page 66ff) there are bar charts indicating the percentiles of each level for each participating nation.
the report also visualizes not only inter country but also intra country outcomes correlating socio economic influences (age, parents, family migration history, ...) and level of education (school, high school, college and higher) with test outcome (literacy, numerics problem solving)
it also has 10y ago/now comparison.
a trove for the Q "how are we doing, capability wise?"
A notable effect that skews those numbers a bit is that the test for literacy is often given in English only, meaning any people in the US who can read and write Spanish but not English are counted as illiterate. (It's slightly more complex than this, some states let you take it in Spanish, some have the option but still usually give it in English most of the time, but the effect is the same)
That's a really good catch. It looks like that 28% figure is specifically Level 1 or below in English literacy, which makes that number a whole lot less interesting for evaluating education levels.
I care about ability to comprehend text in someone's fluent language. The PIAAC figures don't appear to measure that.
Sure, but if that trend turns out to be an increase in non-English speakers it tells us less about the state of literacy, which is the thing I'm interested in here.
The national results page literally has a section where it shows separate results for native-born and non-native born participants. You claim that you're interested, so it's strange to see you speculate about what "turns out" when the answer is so conveniently available.
The United States has always been at the forefront of pushing higher literacy both internally and world wide. We have just had multiple crazy tech breakthroughs, a world wide pandemic, and various other uncontrolled variables like SAT tests no longer being required at some institutions. It's impossible to draw any conclusions with so many moving pieces but ultimately I'm sure we'll figure it out. A slight regression isn't the end of the world.
Your 'slight regression' has lasted a lot longer than the last ten years, and is a real problem that has a significant effect on many people's lives. Again, this is not uniquely a US problem, but it is a problem.
I appreciate the replies that just drive home how correct the observation is. Some of you hate the US, I get it. Some of you are probably bots or shills doing it for compensation. Some are just parrots. Some are actually in the US, of course, there's no loathing like self-loathing.
In this case it's the US that's shitting on the US. These numbers don't compare the US with other countries, they compare the US in 2023 with the US in 2017. And the numbers are from the US government National Center for Education Statistics.
Relevance of 'magot - a seated oriental figurine, usually of porcelain or ivory, with a grotesque form' to someone who criticizes the US? The allusion is too esoteric for me I'm afraid.
Check in in 20 years. The gap between the US and whoever is in second place is enormous. I don't spend enough time on Reddit to think it's close or declining.
>A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.
Yes and AI isn't to blame for that as adults predate AI. It's the governments, schools, teachers, parents, teacher's unios, who taught them(or more accurately didn't teach them) and graduated them out of school anyway regardless just so they don't look bad in statistics. Sorry but if you graduate people out of high school who can't read you should be trialed for fraud. Simple as.
People blaming AI for adults unable to read puts us back to the 90s when Doom was to blame for school shootings or back to 60s when rock music was to blame for juvenile delinquency, all of them being wrong, and they're wrong here too. People always want to blame a third party external scapegoat that isn't' the parents and isn't the government, for the problems of their kids.
Nobody is blaming AI. The point is we don’t have the luxury of throwing nonsense at our kids when they’re illiterate. Particularly not nonsense where all the evidence shows it harms on average more than it helps.
Just wanna start off by saying that with young unformed minds, it does probably harm more on average than it helps. But particularly for spelling and reading, it might maybe actually help?
To be efficient with AI and LLMs you need to be good at least two things, reading and writing. One easy way of getting better is by reading a lot, and writing a lot. Maybe if we coax the kids into understanding (believing?) that better reading and writing helps them use AI better, they'd pay more attention to it?
You mean you can place transcript/dictation in front of them, so you don't have to type your words but you can speak them, and the LLM will receive text? If so I'd still argue it's important to be able to read and write to be able to use them effectively, but I have to also be honest, I never met/seen anyone who couldn't read/write and was using an LLM, I might be very wrong here.
AI hasn't had a chance to demonstrate if it helps or hurts education yet.
That's the big problem with education in general. If you introduce a new factor to children's education you can't realistically measure the effect it has had for about five years, because you need to wait for a cohort of kids to go through that system and then see how they did.
This means that if you introduce something with clear negative effects it will be five years before you spot them!
That's pretty catastrophic given that ChatGPT only emerged in late 2022 and only got good around early 2024.
>Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.
In countries like Finland kids don't get any homework. Though their society and school system optimizes more for child happiness, not winning international math Olympiads where you need to cram to get ahead.
> Even if the Finns don't need it, research suggests it makes a positive difference.
Prof Susan Hallam from the Institute of Education says there is "hard evidence" that homework really does improve how well pupils achieve.
"There is no question about that," she says.
A study for the Department for Education found students who did two to three hours of homework per night were almost 10 times more likely to achieve five good GCSEs than those who did no homework
>A study for the Department for Education found students who did two to three hours of homework per night were almost 10 times more likely to achieve five good GCSEs than those who did no homework
It didn't control for why they were doing the homework. I'd bet if you did a study comparing two cohorts of students with identical social-economic status and IQ, you wouldn't see a significant difference.
From what I can tell the average school at best can aspire to teach kids how to work and how to socialize. That's it. I'd personally be very happy with computers mostly going away from school too. Most actual learning and exploring will hopefully happen at home.
This is really not true. Kids do actually learn a lot in school - includong weak students. And you actually see huge difference between places with and without schools.
Those are important skills schools teach, but I'm skeptical that most learning happens at home. I strongly suspect most adults learned to read and write because of the education they received in school, not home. Especially when it comes to the high school level and learning things like how to structure an essay or more advanced math. I doubt many parents are having their 16 year olds write essays and do trigonometry problems on the weekend.
This is true for many children of non-English speaking immigrant parents anywhere in the developed world. Schools will use language immersion and extra help to get these kids up to speed very quickly. Computers are sometimes used for educational games and activities, but these can be done just as well without.
Can I guess that you are (native/ethnic) Norwegian and upset by the recent waves of immigration to Norway? Your comment is very specific, plus you used a new throwaway account.
My living example - my kiddo didn’t speak a word in English until 4.5 years, when she went into preschool. Russian speaking home and daycare do that for you.
After 9 months in American preschool, she completely switched to English language as her primary. 2 years later, and she speaks Russian with strong accent.
I didn't have the internet when I was in school. Neither did my kids till they got to college. We've all gone pretty far. For myself, that's in the technology world as a software engineer.
Yes, there's also a push to ban all computers in classrooms because data is showing that it's of no benefit and if anything is a negative effect on education.
Yeah but one is supported by science and the other isn't. It's nothing to do with internet access. The fact is that computers/ipads in classrooms are negative regardless of whether they're connected to the internet.
>At eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills.
I have two kids and can confidently say eight year olds generally have good language skills, are capable of expressing themselves just fine, and have good comprehension of the parts of the world that they've been exposed to.
The original claim was that "at eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills" and that they can't conduct debate is a relevant example of that.
By sheer irony, it would also suggest that the original poster had limited language comprehension skills and wasn't capable of evaluating an eight year old.
If you think an 8 year old can comprehend text at the same level of a 13 year old (or an 18 year old for that matter), I don't know what to tell you. Reading comprehension doesn't peak at 8.
Spend a few minutes on the teacher subreddits: /r/teachers and /r/professors, specifically. AI has been a disaster for student outcomes and educator performance, more or less across the board. It should be banned in education, but there's no way to enforce that without increasing educator workload substantially (eliminating homework and re-working lesson plans around that; moving tests and projects back into the classroom; etc.)
Computers generally are stupid for schools. There should be a computer room and computer classes, but all other learning should happen offline. Computers are far too distracting.
Half of my classmates in university failed Compsci, they could not use a computer but they somehow could install Instagram, do basic video edits there and doomscroll. It is NOT conputers! Phones should be the main target.
But computer usage proficiency is not computer science either. These skills should be teached in a separate class. Agree with the gen z lack of computer skills though.
Any modern country invest heavily in its future. There is no easier marker for that than education - literally laying groundwork for future of everybody.
Teachers should be paid and respected as much as doctors are, all levels, all age. But they should be skilled up too, every single one of them needs to be very good ad child psychology, no exception there even effin' gym teacher. If would arrange itself easily if they would be having doctor's salaries. They should be themselves role models, its #2 after parents usually.
US is not a modern country also in this aspect, its everybody for themselves, fuck the poor they didn't try hard enough and thats it. Wealth-based class society at best. Somebody has to clean pools and houses of rich folks anyway, it ain't gonna be their work colleagues.
That used to be the case, but it no longer is. Not only are budgets limited, only a few choose for a career in education, leaving schools already understaffed. Expansion is not feasible in the short run.
I would happily make a career switch if I had the feeling my work in a school would be useful and doable. Where I live, I tried it and it was neither of the two. After having experienced efficient companies, schools feel mind-boggingly stupid. And the policy of never failing students and reluctantly enforcing rules generates an serious waste of human energy.
I mean we have trillionaires now, budget limitations are a political choice. Perhaps instead of giving all our resources to Elon we can, you know, pay teachers instead.
I think like every field this revolution reveals the cracks, good teachers use AI to enhance teaching material and experience for students while weak teachers complaint they can't keep up with student's access to Ai that out-paces them.
AI forces us all in every field to be better at what we do, and coupled with the previous innovation of the internet only reveals the drastic variance in quality of skills. Teaching is no different.
Good teachers use AI. Bad teachers complain AI is ruining their job, but I posit it's only revealing they were never able to excel beyond their students in the first place.
A savant exceeds their teacher fast. Even faster with AI.
Banning it in classrooms isn't going to fix things, not when adults are broadcasting to students that (in the actual words of Sam Altman) "intelligence will be too cheap to meter", that (in the words of Darius Amodei) half of white collar jobs will be gone by the time these students graduate school, and so on. If intelligence is too cheap to meter, mental labor is a losing proposition. We've also spent decades emphasizing STEM and de-emphasizing arts and culture. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?
So, it's no surprise they're going to opt out of a system that's investing trillions to make education useless.
Even if the people building this world are wrong -- not all students are equipped to call some of the wealthiest people in the world complete bullshitters. Not all adults are ready to call them out as bullshitters, for that matter.
> If intelligence is too cheap to meter, selling your mental labor is a losing proposition. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?
The ban is for elementary school. I don't know about you, but when I was 11, what motivated me to go to school definitely wasn't the idea that I could monetize my intelligence later on.
What is your point? Are you going to subject your parenting to their whims or are you going to be an adult and discipline them into doing what is right for them?
Granted, an 11-year old who doesn't want to go to school is already symptomatic of many years of failure of parenting, but 11 is such a young age and there's certainly plenty of room to stimulate their curiosity. What kind of an adult would deliberately raise their children to know so little of this world?
I’d argue education (especially those early years) is less about making them good white collar workers and moreso making them well rounded people. Education has value beyond monetary gains
> "intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.
They’ve always been metering AI access (whether this is meaningfully intelligence is a separate question), but that doesn’t prove that there isn’t some time in the future where it won’t be worth metering, only that if there will be, it isn’t here yet.
OTOH, it is still worth noting that from a a consumer-of-the-service perspective, the trend is for more metering, not less (even if that is due at least in part to the rollback off unsustainable subsidies and not to the fundamnetal shifting what is sustainable farther from unmetered access.)
Hm maybe I was sheltered or something but I was definitely not reading what industry leaders were saying when I was under 13. I don't think I really even knew who industry leaders were at that time...
it'll start to raise the question of not only is college not worth it, but why should we even have compulsory education through high school? (just think of all the money we could save aka spend on the military instead)
school wasn't compulsory for most of human history. private schooling was the norm, and private school, like now, was very expensive. as a result, most people worked physical jobs and gained limited skills beyond this.
the idea of public school where everyone had a fair shot of developing skills for knowledge work was an extremely progressive concept in the beginning. what you're asking is the impact of undoing this. many states are essentially trying this through private school vouchers funded by public school dollars.
i think is a very unfortunate regression; unfortunately, it takes a generation of change for impacts to realize.
> what you're asking is the impact of undoing this
I was being sarcastic. But this could become a serious question: in the (near) future, if academic skills no longer matter for the vast majority of jobs, then the State's responsibility to fund public education will be called into question -- maybe it would stop at 14 when kids can read/write and do basic math. If you want more, do it on your own dime.
I hope not, but we already have the Trump WH trying to chip away at public education - and that's without AI in the picture.
I would not build my philosophy on the marketing talk of a well-known impulsive liar. Sam, by his own admission, does not even know that much about LLMs, but he is so good at sales that somehow people take what he says for gospel anyway.
Yes, I hoped it would've come across as so without the /s. Just goes to show where our fellow engineers are at. "Memory safety is humanity's last problem. Once we solve that then all of life's problems will naturally follow."
I think this is basically right. You don’t hand out calculators before kids understand arithmetic. LLM version is sneakier because skipping the work still produces something that looks finished.
Actually, calculators were banned in my school until 10th grade or so. I understood the reasoning at the time and still think it was a good thing.
But I think the AI topic is a double-edged sword. Those tools can help tremendously when used in the right setting (e.g., similar to how brilliant.org works) and can easily spoil the whole learning effort when used wrongly.
I am not convinced that a ban is the solution, but probably better than doing nothing.
Not quite. The LLM gives you a statistically probable sounding token stream. The calculator gives you a qualified answer within documented and deterministic limits of the device.
Teacher uses AI, creates lesson plan -> AI creates assignments -> Teacher gives assignments to students -> Students use AI to do assignment -> Teacher grades with AI -> Principal uses AI to monitor teachers progress.
This is happening at schools nationwide. It is unstoppable at this point. It's a bizarre charade.
You forgot the parasite companies that sit between the teachers/student/principal which pretend they detect the big bad AI assisted/generated work to punish individuals using AI (with a majority of false positives and always late by 1 generation of models). The charade wouldn't be complete without rent seeking intermediaries.
> eacher uses AI, creates lesson plan -> AI creates assignments -> Teacher gives assignments to students |
Up to this point, it's actually completely fine. LLMs do an excellent job up to here.
> | Teacher grades with AI -> Principal uses AI to monitor teachers progress.
Again, this is probably mostly fine. Assuming they are taking it seriously, this is also fine.
> Students use AI to do assignment
This is singularly the section of the loop that AI has no place in. The ENTIRE point of the education system is for the students to learn how to use their brains to accomplish tasks.
AI shouldn't really be needed for every lesson plan as:
* Lessons can have a generic core to base off, like learning objectives, content, methods, vocab, tools, experiments, etc.
* Routines are important for kids, so the same set of learning methods, activities are familiar and don't need to be taught themselves - there is no need (indeed it is detrimental) to have new activities each class.
* The teacher should know their class better than AI for customisation (for now, until every student gets monitored for everything); a lot of customisation from systematic marking, etc, can exist without AI and simply by being planned and using deterministic tools.
AI can spice things up, for sure. But using AI systematically for lesson planning suggests -
A. The teacher doesn't have access to what should be a solved problem: tens of thousands of teachers repeating the same lesson plan from scratch - even with AI - across the country is not efficient.
B. The teacher doens't have planning time or skills in order to implement a systematic course plan, formative assessment and on-going improvement system.
Using AI to rush or bootstrap A or B suggests their problem is systematic and that AI will not solve this. In programming lingo, AI use hides further accumulation of technical debt.
This isn't about teachers using Ai to make their life easier, otherwise it wouldn't only apply to elementary school, and from what I read it applies to students.
Students likely aren't allowed to use AI anyway for assignments. Or are they? That's the question, what is actually being banned if anything
Nah, they're always going to have a free tier, that's how they get you hooked to their service. It might be even ad-supported in the future (watch an ad to earn credits, or by inserting sponsored content in the responses).
Plus the free tier gives them loads of new training data. I do agree we will see two types of adverts soon: Traditional and submarine (paid-placement).
The same thing is happening in business settings. There's more words being sent around than ever before, with an ever lowering percentage that is read by humans. There has to be a way to stop the madness.
I have three children in that age span in a Norwegian school. For the ages 10-13, ChatGPT and the like has frequently been used in the classroom to help with the cold start problem when doing writing assignments, and for getting feedback on written work before handing in to the teachers. Also frequently used as a brainstorming tool or for writing whole speaches or presentations that should be held in front of the class or school. As for doing homework, the school-provided and school-managed iPad has (had I should say) www.chatgpt.com whitelisted, so using these tools also for homework is at least not blocked, and sometimes encouraged.
My children has at least not yet received any tasks or homework using AI for coding. They teach less coding in school now compared to when I was at the same age, at least at my elementary school.
> ChatGPT and the like has frequently been used in the classroom to help with the cold start problem when doing writing assignments, and for getting feedback on written work before handing in to the teachers. Also frequently used as a brainstorming tool or for writing whole speaches or presentations that should be held in front of the class or school.
Aren't those things critical thinking? We do we want to prevent the acquisition of critical thinking skills.
The cold start problem in creating a piece of content requires executive decision-making (planning, design, selection). That's a critical-thinking type of skill (examine existing options, determine relevancy, determine good arguments from bad, etc).
Reviewing your own work requires critical thinking, almost by definition!
Brain-storming likewise requires some elements of critical thinking.
Writing entire speeches and presentations is almost all critical thinking, as it covers the gamut from planning all the way to implementation and execution.
Completely agree, and I think outsourcing critical thinking to AI is a bad idea for learning. Here is one study that researched AI assistance in a writing/learning context: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872.
The teachers that have instructed using AI for assistance in our school seems focused on teaching how to technically use specifically ChatGPT (that particular product, not AI in general), and on the courage to speak in front of people. Learning how to speak in front of people is a noble goal, but I believe any person would be better prepared for speaking if they had done the hard work of writing in the first place.
Thank you for the first hand feedback. I am assuming that you did similar assignments at the same age. Yet, you did not have the same tools. When I think back on my own LLM-free educational experiences, brainstorming was a hard mental skill to master. Some might argue it is one of the hardest as it requires some imagination, then critical thinking skills to filter the ideas. Can you comment about this? To be clear, I am trolling/baiting with my question.
Well not all types of assignments are alike, I was not required to write nor hold a speech at school, as my eldest was at 13. I would be absolutely terrified to present in front of more than half my class, and they now speak to their whole school. But on the other hand, learning how to brainstorm effectively both alone and in groups is such a rewarding skill to have. And since brainstorming is something taught from elementary school all the way up to university level (I had it as part of a master’s degree), I would assume this means some pedagogs think it is both important and difficult. If you have learned about ‘anchoring’ in negotiations or brainstorming contexts, you would know how important the initial ideas or suggestions or proposals are for the rest of the process and the outcome. So I believe that it is very negative to be outsourcing the initial stage of using your own creativity. There have been studies showing negative effects on performance, learning and memory when outsourcing the initial stage or getting help from AI in this stage, while the opposite is true when using AI for review later. Do not remember the exact source, was something that popped into my feed. So I think you are correct.
Secondly, I started learning programming in elementary school at the age of 10 in the late 90s, we had a couple of hours in the computer lab a week doing creative open-ended projects. Today the local school teaches how to use an iPad with OneNote and Kahoot in 1st-4th, and performing predefined recipies for MicroBit or BlueBot in 5th-6th grade. Not sure how that is an improvement.
So in conclusion, I support the policy to restrict the use of tech in school. The tools should support the higher goals, and sometimes doing hard work is actually required.
A kid gets homework to do a writing assignment online. Kid goes on chatgpt.
"Chatgpt do this work, heres the assignment' ctrl c + ctrl v
Chatgpt spits out a good answer.
Kid spent no time doing homework and learned nothing
Or imagine a reading log(typing out what you read) to encourage a kid to read, you have AI that can copy and paste your homework for you
Social media execs are already known for keeping their children off their platforms* and even phones so my question is: Do the leading ML/AI people let their children interact with LLMs yes or no?
Broadly speaking, the wealthier the parents the more restrictive device is in general in the household.
This used to be a tech/non-tech line. It shifted to class sometime over the last ten years. The iPad kids are probably getting served slop. The AI-employed parents don’t have to directly police AI exposure because their kids’ device use is already controlled; at school, at extra-curriculars and at home.
The question is do the allow them to use their laptops to access llms. Like I assume before ai they where not allowing the kids to fry their brains doom scrolling but would allow programming. They weren't blocking all tech as they aren't raising subsistence farmers.
The difference is between asking to explain x^y and reading and understanding the why and maybe go through a test, vs asking to do my homework for me and then go back to video games quickly. If the whole idea of using LLMs is to reduce effort on the part of the pupil, you are probably holding it wrong.
My 6yo kiddo recently realized that smart speaker (Google home) can not only play her favorite songs, but answer her homework questions. And it was something not that trivial, like “which animal from the list changes color of its fur when seasons change: tiger, arctic fox, something else”.
And now I need to either disable everything or figure out how to turn that off for her.
> And now I need to either disable everything or figure out how to turn that off for her.
Why?
I tell me 6yo "That's for adults only, children are not allowed to use it" and not have to worry.
Sure, he'll push boundaries here and there, but with some things he knows "No means no" and doesn't push those boundaries.
I have literally tested this: left a cookie on the table (that he wants) and told him "You can eat that cookie after you finish the thing you are reading"
and left the room.
Teaching kids to not succumb to their instant-gratification instincts is part of being a parent.
You tested it, i doubt you authored it. A paternal twin can have one with good impulse control and another who's more instinctual. Even in the same family and upbringing.
At the end both will have to live in same society, and this society will not care whats their background and issues. Perform as expected and get reward, or otherwise not so much.
Everybody can be taught some degree of behavior even if it may require different amount / type of effort, I refuse to believe it ain't true apart from most extreme cases.
> A paternal twin can have one with good impulse control and another who's more instinctual. Even in the same family and upbringing.
Sure it happens, but it's unlikely.
It's why kids from certain cultures achieve better academic success on average than kids from other cultures, on average: the environment matters a lot.
> So I suggest to keep unasked parental advices or expectations how other kids should behave to yourself.
Forget it. Not gonna happen, on a story about kid's development, in a thread about lack of impulse control.
Sure, there could be physiological reasons for a given child to have a lack of impulse control, but in practice most of a child's characteristics are going to be from the environment.
If we agree that a child is a product of their environment, we have to extend that same grace to the parents (and parents’ parents ad infinitum). They are also products of their environments, genetics, and upbringings. Turtles all the way down. It’s unrealistic to expect parents who were given different tools, different neurobiology, and different levels of support to all produce children with identical levels of impulse control. The playing field isn't level.
It’s hard to parse the tone in comments like this, and I’m sorry if am off the mark here, but a little more compassion and consideration makes life and everyone better.
I'm glad this is the case. It is the correct outcome.
I've heard students actually discussing that they will just use an LLM to shortcut work. I even have friends in their 50s who can barely think for themselves now without having to refer to "AI". And at least two of them are teachers.
Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.
No one taught anything of value. No one learned anything of value. I am very worried we'll see a lost generation at some point rippling through the ages.
> Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.
They have also been explicitly told by the department of education to NOT do this, but it hasn't stopped lazy teachers all over. Apparently not doing your job, in direct contradiction to your given rules, is ok because "it's the future".
AI in 1:1 tutor mode with proper hardware (live scanning pen and paper), harness and guardrails should be wildly successful (in terms of education outcomes) especially in elementary school.
Disagree. AI has no business being used in 1:1 tutor mode before the hallucination and sycophancy issues are completely resolved. As is, I can easily see it being a hindrance to building actual understanding.
Just one example - it's very common to see ChatGPT and the like respond with "you're absolutely correct! Great insight" to something that is a complete misunderstanding.
This is specifically a consumer model (or specifically ChatGPT) issue. e.g. IME codex does not do this, and will just tell you when you're missing something or somehow wrong, and Gemini does this weird thing where it tells you you're a genius and then immediately starts correcting everything you said.
Sycophancy is just one aspect of the problems I mentioned, though. Another huge one is hallucination, and one that is actually far worse than I thought:
> It’s been proven that when a model is trained on large volumes of highly factual and non-theoretical data, it learns to always have an answer. DeepSeek V4 Pro (1.6T params, 49B active, 44 AA Intelligence Index score) has a ludicrous 94% hallucination score on the AA-Omniscience benchmark, meaning on questions that it couldn’t figure out, it only stated that it didn’t know around 6% of the time, and the rest it confidently hallucinated an answer. GLM-5.2 scored a 28% hallucination rate, Opus 4.8 was 36%, Fable 5 was 48%, and GPT-5.5 was 86%.
I think even a 5% hallucination rate would be terrible for a teacher, who should generally be comfortable with saying "I don't know off the top of my head but here is how to find resources to answer your question".
---
So, just to drive the point home, Codex has an 86.9% hallucination rate on the AA-omniscience score in this index https://benchlm.ai/models/gpt-5-3-codex - if you ask it something that wasn't sufficiently covered in its training data, it will confidently make up an answer nearly 87% of the time.
While you might think it is happy to correct you when you are wrong, you don't know that for sure since you don't know when you're wrong. Codex may have been happily agreeing with you about things you had completely backwards.
Except I generally do know when I'm wrong because I'm working in a domain I am familiar with, and it will often create experiments on the fly unprompted (well, prompted, but generically in AGENTS.MD) to check itself. My experience actually using it for software is that it almost never makes up answers. The answer for hallucinations is fairly simple: give it facts and tools to ground itself.
> Except I generally do know when I'm wrong because I'm working in a domain I am familiar with, and … My experience actually using it for software is that it almost never makes up answers.
Yes I am certain that it feels that way. However empirical testing holds a lot more weight than anecdotes.
> The answer for hallucinations is fairly simple: give it facts and tools to ground itself.
The entire danger here is that it hallucinates when you don’t know the ground facts. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Teachers hallucinate too. I’ve had creationists and communists and tin-foil-hat (chem trails, 5g, etc) teachers. Surely you can imagine an AI tutor that is higher than zero ROI.
> I’ve had creationists and communists and tin-foil-hat (chem trails, 5g, etc) teachers.
I certainly have, too, but there is still a difference between a person who has a factually incorrect but consistent worldview and an LLM which simply reflects the worldview of the user or even changes between queries.
I don't think creationists have any business being in schools either, for what it's worth, but I think it's easier for a teenager to sort out "Mr. Smith has no clue what he's talking about" vs "I have no clue what's true because the LLM everyone expects me to learn from just confirms everything I ask regardless of what I'm asking".
Tutors should be able to approximate the ZPD better than any student can. Most students lack intrinsic motivation and it's a tutor's job to help them get started.
Okay, I was generalising from experience; most students I've met lack intrinsic motivation. School systems typically encourage students to depend on extrinsic motivation.
We thought the same of electronic devices in general and digital learning content specifically. In actual practice both result in lowered test scores and declining critical thinking skills.
Tutor mode sucks because even if it was actually accurate and didn't hallucinate, it isn't scoped to what the class is actually covering within a given topic.
Best AI is still your own brain, trained on paying attention in class and reading the assigned content.
One to one human tutors are the best way of educating kids and they are not scoped to what a class is covering. They teach the kid as an individual: they are effective because they can adjust to the kids abilities and interests.
It would be a shitty tutor if they never asked to see your textbook and what sort of material you'd work on. You'd legitimately waste time covering stuff that won't ever be tested.
“AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years.”
Yup. Short-term metrics juice. Actual comprehension and cognition falls. This seems to be the case across the board, including with adults.
I’m genuinely optimistic that there is a way to make AI helpful in education. I just don’t think we’ve found it yet. (We certainly haven’t demonstrated it.)
This is probably the big problem, or at least one of them.. If you use less time on learning, it will probably be harder to remember what you learned also. We need to spend some time to make it stick
The behavioral issue I see is that LLM users tend to immediately reach for an LLM and do their thinking in concert with it.
This tempts users to approach problems by first feeding them into the LLM and then simply following the route the LLM lays out, which does improve task completion time for tasks that the LLM can simply regurgitate, but it stops the user from developing the actual critical thinking skills that school is supposed to teach.
It’s not just critical thinking skills, it’s also that there’s a big difference between recognition/following instructions, and recall/generating your own memories of an approach. But most students don’t recognize the difference. In other words, “following the route” is a big part of the problem - it doesn’t engage the brain the same and isn’t representative of real world use, and having something explained well doesn’t mean you can in turn explain it well yourself (the more revealing test of internalized true understanding)
AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.
This was a surprise too me. I would have thought otherwise.
Would love to see some evidence about if more or less people fall behind and have worse results. In my head the AI should be able to get the weakest students a bit highere.
The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys.
No mention of the weakest student. Which probably means they did not have a significant worse or better score
I think AI could (and by some students probably already is) be used to help a student better understand the material, and faster than you could before. I still recall some parts of Physics taking a while to click, and often having to reread different sections of a textbook to try and understand the what and why behind something.
The biggest issue is a child has to want to do that, since they also could just ask the AI for the answer and then go back to playing video games. End of the day past age 13 or so I just don't see legislation making any difference, they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting.
> I think AI could (and by some students probably already is) be used to help a student better understand the material, and faster than you could before
I think so too. But we haven’t demonstrated we’ve found how, in kids or in adults.
> biggest issue is
We genuinely don’t know what the biggest issue is. We just know it doesn’t work. There is zero quality evidence for AI helping with learning or cognition in kids or adults. (Happy to be proven wrong. This is a fast-moving and big field.)
> they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting
And community. Rich towns restrict devices in school, monitor use at home and thus will have less of an issue with AI exposure.
>I think so too. But we haven’t demonstrated we’ve found how, in kids or in adults.
Ask chatgpt or claude, on their highest model (probably unnecessary but I'm sensing a vibe) to explain a simple linear algebra problem, and if you don't understand it, ask about what part you don't understand.
And if you truly believe it made something up, prove it.
This is seriously the easiest thing to prove out there, you can see for yourself in the next 5 minutes.
> And if you truly believe it made something up, prove it.
You seem to be assuming that the issue is around factual correctness, and that may be the case but the evidence we have so far doesn't support jumping to such a narrow cause.
Is the poor performance because the LLMs are frequently wrong? Unknown.
Is it because the LLMs are sycophantic? Unknown.
Is it because the chat interface is a poor one for learning? Unknown.
What we do know is that students who rely on LLMs learn less and perform worse in the long term. And that alone is enough evidence to support a ban. If better tools come along in the future and are shown to aid learning, then the ban can be re-evaluated.
Sure. I already know linear algebra. If it’s a new branch of mathematics, this is a terrible way to learn.
Again, the research points almost exclusively in one direction when it comes to learning and cognition around AI. You’ll solve more problems more quickly but wind up learning and thinking less.
Honestly, what do you think a teacher does that an llm can't? If you want to learn you absolutely can ask an llm how to _solve_ x and explain the steps and why.
My leaving out the word solve seems to have led some of you astray, I apologize.
Again the problem is you have the option to solve your problem and move on without understanding it. That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it.
I live in fear that instead of learning how to use the tool, some might just vote to ban the tool.
> what do you think a teacher does that an llm can't?
I don’t know! It’s an interesting question. All we know is it does.
> That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it
It doesn’t. But we have no evidence it can.
We have lots of evidence of people thinking they’ve learned something, taking a benchmarking test, and being found wholly deficient compared to folks who worked through a textbook, went to a class or even solved problems off YouTube videos or instructional websites.
> to explain a simple linear algebra problem, and if you don't understand it, ask about what part you don't understand.
The goal is not to understand a linear algebra problem. The goal is to learn how to solve it using lessons and techniques taught beforehand. Aka not to get a fish, but learning how to fish.
> Type in "Explain how to solve a simple linear algebra problem" into the AI of your choice instead.
I’ve seen this particular philosophy in college where the student focus exclusively on passing exams. They would memorize notes and past exercises. The focus is on solving a particular set of exercises instead of understanding the concepts. Change things slightly and they’re lost.
That may not matter in college where you can focus on a few disciplines and half-ass the rest. But everything in lower stages is truly foundational.
Considering that the paper concludes that even students who take the long approach and use LLMs in the most appropriate way for learning still retain less over the long term than students who simply don't use LLMs, I think it's likely they didn't read the paper in the first place.
I think AI should be used in higher level schools but with the added requirement that the output will be held to a much higher standard and that it's fact checked. Teach the students to use AI to reach a higher level while mitigating the inherent issues like hallucination and sycophancy.
"You just have to repeat the prompt 3 times and then spin around counter-clockwise twice! That always works for me. You obviously just don't know how to prompt the model correctly."
Every time I see LLM enjoyers yapping on like this, it just reminds me of people trying to read tea leaves. There's all these goofy little rules about how to structure the prompt and how mean or nice to be to get it to work optimally, but I think it's obvious that most of these users are just seeing incidental successful outcomes in a largely random system and extrapolating from there because it makes them feel in control.
Education right now has basically become a giant AI echo chamber, and it's happening nationwide. It’s this bizarre setup where teachers use AI to make assignments, students use AI to do them, teachers use AI to grade them, and principals use AI to watch over the teachers.
US legislators have almost no say in how schools are run. The DoE is a husk, and states call the shots. In my state of Oregon, you will have wildly different curricula and standards depending on your district, because there's almost no state oversight either.
They made a choice - US legislators effectively gave up their control of how schools are run when the conservative coalition allowed the trump administration to dismantle the DoE without congressional approval. Congress itself could legally retain control of education, but if congress refuses to assert that power then it is meaningless.
The end goal is to dismantle public education and route public money to religious and private schools.
No - US always delegated education policy decision locally. Not just the state level, but the local district has the most amount of control. Nothing material here has changed in the last few years.
> Nothing material here has changed in the last few years.
Bald faced lies from you, nothing surprising here. I could take the time in explaining how state and federal responsibilities are divided, I could go through the history of the Department of Education and how funding for schools works in the US. I could point to dozens of examples of you being wrong from any decade in the last century, from de-segregation to "no child left behind".
But there's no point, since you're just a troll and not here for a real discussion. No one interested in a sincere exchange of ideas would start from such a stupid premise. So you can go ahead and look through my comment history all you want, and respond all you want, but it'll just make you mad and get you flagged.
You would be better served by finding a large rock to kick.
I already told you I'm not going to waste time debating you, there's no point since you aren't engaging in good faith.
I will say though, for someone so convinced that "political/ideological commentors" are harshing the vibe here on Hacker News, you sure seem eager to start and encourage political debates.
Why don't you try being the change you want to see
>"The most important thing in school is that our children learn to read, write and do mathematics," Stoere
Language is not a tool for thought. It's a tool for communication. This has been known for decades. People routinely lose all language related faculties and remain competent in other skills. Their only value is in creating an artifact that a teacher can then look over and update their mental model of the students knowledge. This is no longer the case since students can now easily create those artifact without having a mental model. You are entirely swapping the test for the goal when you say language is the most important thing we much teach them. You are optimizing for a large noise to signal ratio.
The EU's general obsession with deprecated tech is mindboggling. Teach you're kids these skills and you won't have to worry about getting sent to a nursing home, I guess.
The fundemental problem is motivation not AI and this is simply the result of a larger societal shift that happened to correlate with the advent of AI.
Personally I've never done any homework or assignments, when I was outside school it was over. However, this motivated me to do really well in tests which in-turn made me extremely active during the limited time I had in school and I became pretty damn efficient at absorbing information and picking things up. So on the surface at minimum it appears that we should stop grading on activities outside school.
To be honest, what worked the best for me was what my history teacher did, 5 minute tests at the start of the lesson, then 10-20 minutes of teaching + self study assignments, remaining time is grading + answering any questions and if grading goes fast they usually had time to continue teaching for a few more minutes before the lesson ended. Group study was also heavily utilized as a form to take the load off themselves when they were overwhelmed from work due to 12th grade students especially right before exams, most of our classes became group study. All the students from their class always performed exceptionally well in nationals even though it was a mid tier public school. I will recognize that I am a bit special and that students are extremely varied I picked up on this when I discovered that someone in 11th grade still couldn't grasp the pythagorean theorem.
I don't really have a solution to the motivation problem when phones are just so addicting and have an atmosphere of their own, the best way I can put it is that your child becomes an outcast if they can't play roblox because everyone in their school does which is a very real thing my friend experienced with their kids.
Should have started with that. No, your experience doesn't easily translate into some general good advice, you are probably way-above-average bright. I for example went through old school education with tons of home work and benefited greatly from having enough time to comprehend harder topics more deeply, without rush. Memorizing is another aspect, my mind is slow in that so I took my time, trying to remember everything at class' pace would not bring results.
Having some homework ain't something horrible, it became daily habit as part of education and I certainly don't see it negatively in hindsight. It also teaches things like a bit of self-discipline, a trait thats very rare in young these days, and probably the most important personality trait in overall long term life success. It doesn't come on its own, but can be taught/self-taught quite a bit over time. Again, in hindsight, those similarly mentally equipped but lacking it, after few decades, performed in life worse to much worse (I don't mean just money but overall life situation and happiness/fulfillment)
I highly doubt that I am special in a way where I have a "smarter" brain. I believe that I simply adapted to learning fast. I was a slow learner and by grades were awful until around 7th grade where I've started to catch up and perform really well in school.
But what you said about homework IS motivation, self-discipline IS motivation. I had zero issues digging into whatever I can find to improve at programming and grasp concepts far beyond what I would be learning at my age. I started programming at the age of 12 which I believe also manifested in the ability to do much better in school.
Nothing mentioned about the use of AI by elementary school teachers who may well be using it to generate sub-par worksheets or to rapidly, and potentially inaccurately, mark work.
Every special event flyer I get from my kids' school now seems to be AI generated. I'd be surprised if quizzes and worksheets don't head the same way.
What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.
You'll never get strong by watching a video of people lifting weights. Similarly, you'll never understand math by watching a video or having an AI do the work for you. And, somehow, writing out the words and equations by hand is very effective for learning.
Not always. I once got accused of cheating at University because my take-home assignment was so much better than my in class work. At home there was no pressure to perform. I could practice and try things.
I once was accused of cheating as well, as my term paper was "too good". (Long before computers.) I brought in my cites (books) the next day and dumped it on his desk. He grudgingly changed the grade from F to A.
It’s not math but I’m using AI to help study and learn DSA. I’m finding it helpful.
But yeah you need to make attempts to apply what you’re learning and answer questions on your own. You can’t simply watch problems being solved (whether by an AI or a person) and retain it.
Many times I was sure I understood something by watching it. Then, when it came time to do it, I realized I didn't understand at all.
And it's not just for math. Try it with learning to light a fire without matches. I watched the survival experts on "Alone" fail at that, and fail at building a fireplace, and fail at building bear proof food storage, fail at archery, fail at fishing, and so on. (I'm not claiming to be a survival expert, I wouldn't last a week on that show.)
There are ways to make it work, but it requires using it only supplementary and with strict discipline. And it will look different for a 6-year old than a 13-year old.
But think of this trick we use about turning a tricky research paper in maths/science into something more tangible by making an LLM whip up an interactive version. That works at every level of education, and it means that you can completely tailor a piece of educational material to the kid
Tiny example: one kid was introduced to fractions and found it abstract that it was both about partitioning stuff and about numbers on a number line. So while we were practicing, I had an LLM make https://fuglede.codeberg.page/broeklegeplads/ to make it more hands-on.
Obviously for the small kids, this has to be an experience guided by teachers and parents, but for bright older kids with sufficient discipline that ought to be a useful trick for enhancing education.
Of course when we were kids, we would just write such educational programs ourselves and get the same effect /and/ learn to program (before getting banned from the computer room for putting spooky /binaries/ on the computers anyway), so maybe that's better for older kids. And maybe these kids will never have to do any maths or programming because the AI overlords have taken over when they grow up.
So is watching a trainer showing you a move and telling you to do it but you not moving at all. You need to cooperate with AI it's not a silver bullet that will.move your body for you.
Not really, you might understand it in the moment, but to learn something you need to do actual work.
An example is, watch a thousand hours on photography, how to take great photos.
Go out and try to take great photos, you will fail. This is why all serious tutors keep saying ”stop watching and go out and take photos, every day, all the time”.
I don’t know Rust, but I can understand AI outputting some Rust code if I ask it to. Two days later I won’t be able to write it again.
I disagree. You learned something at that point it is up to you to repeat it and make it stick and make sure you learned it correctly. No teacher no AI nothing can fix that unless you take the time. Because of this I think it is irrelevant to the topic. I want to go back to the math problem, you can definitely understand the solution and learn it, then it is up to you to practice. Goof thing about AI is it can throw you many more questions to make sure it sticks and help you know what you did wrong. It is susceptible to mistakes, yes but first of all those models are not made to be math teachers and real teachers also make mistakes. One advantage of AI is it can tirelesely explain the solution to you again and again unlike a real person.
I apologize if I'm in the wrong but I do not ever remember claiming you could just lesrn through looking at AI alone. I only defended the fact you can learn by analyzing how an AI model solved an issue. To me whenever I talk about an AI talk it goes back and forth. So in my mind it was always AI talking about a topic, then giving you an example question which you yourself solve. However for topics such as history yes indeed this is absolutely possible as they depend on memorization.
> I'd ban all technology in the classroom. What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.
You've prohibited technology and then listed four technologies. "Technology" needs a more concrete definition. Calculators? Computers? TVs? Overhead projectors? Musical instruments?
I attempted to memorize the times tables. Eventually, I noticed the pattern. From then on, I used the pattern rather than memorization. For example, I compute 9*12 as 90+18.
I assume you're hinting at this, but yeah, that's the idea behind getting children to memorize and do rote math early on. There's really no better way to get people to really deep down learn strategies for dealing with numbers than repeatedly practicing and memorising stuff until they accumulate a huge bag of mental "shortcuts" and patterns and strategies they use
I don't think it's nitpicking. I think it goes to the heart of the issue: people saying "stuff I didn't use when I was a kid is BAD." The term "technology" is just being used as a veil to hide the lack of reasoning.
That would be correct! And all the technology added since has resulted in no discernible improvement in educational results.
In college, the classes were a lecture with a professor, 9 blackboards and colored chalk. Not even handouts (well, there was one on time dilation).
Calculators utterly wiped out slide rules when I was in college, though nobody learned any math from a calculator. Calculators just made for quicker work to more significant figures.
So you’re saying that educational technology has no noticeable negative impact on educational results. Since we know it has some practical benefits, such as accessibility, that would be a strong argument for using it.
You are correct that it does help with disabled students. The overwhelming majority of students, however, are not disabled and are not helped by technology.
> all the technology added since has resulted in no discernible improvement in educational results.
I would say it's because it's used stupidly (also I'd take a Millenial's education over a Boomer's any day). One of the best things about technology is that my kids can carry one lightweight tablet instead of 50lbs of back-breaking books. They can look up reference materials immediately instead of spending an hour looking at World Books that end up having little to know information (insert essay about being assigned a report about the golden lion tamarin in elementary school and all libraries in my town put together had one paragraph.)
Yesterday while driving my kids from camp to a celebration lunch, they asked a question about science and I was able to talk to my car's AI (apparently this is a thing in new cars!) and model how one goes about getting an overview of a topic through curious inquiry.
But plopping a kid in front of a computer isn't a panacea. I just think it's the pedagogist's fault, not the tech's.
Are you joking? I carried one or two books from the locker to class, if that.
> instead of spending an hour looking at World Books
I had a set of World Books. Looking things up in it usually meant encountering a number of other interesting entries in it. I never ever spent an hour looking up something. It is alphabetized, after all.
I actually think students should learn how to use a computer algebra system as early as possible so that it becomes second nature. Being and expert user of a CAS makes math vastly more interesting and less tedious.
I already saw it in my life: a ban on calculators, a ban on computers. But after a short period of rejection, everybody starts to embrace the new tech. Instead of bans we were getting computer classes in schools.
> after a short period of rejection, everybody starts to embrace the new tech
We’re banning cell phones in school after seeing the evidence, albeit along a class gradient. We’ll probably see something similar with AI. Poor kids get AI in school (and unmonitored at home). Rich kids do not.
I did mathematics, and a fair bit of computer science on the side. This was nearly all on paper, without computers. And I'd go a week or two without a calculator sometimes, mostly employing it when I had a bad hangover.
Do we really need to force technology into everything or are we just used to doing it so see it as necessary?
I did mathematics on paper, and informatics on computers. Some of my peers weren't so lucky, so they had to do informatics on paper only. Needless to say that the magnitude of progress we were getting in informatics had day and night difference, not in the favor of paper.
AI is indeed dangerous. It gives super abilities when in the right hands. Some people don't like it as it creates competition for their mere existence. They start gaslighting campaigns - "AI is bad, dangerous, does not work, consumes too much energy etc". This is luddism of our century, but also a form of psychopathy. When everybody is being gaslit, some of the very same players who spreads false narratives use AI to their own benefit.
It’s a fully centrally controlled technology that reduces your ability and makes you dependent on it to perform all daily and business functions with a huge environmental and economic impact. The economic impact is both the risks imposed by it failing and the risks imposed by it being successful.
Calculators might be allowed sometimes, but i dont think they are ever allowed when you are trying to teach school children how to add and multiply. Which feels like the appropriate comparison.
The number of people--adults included--who, when don't know something they could easily think about, resort to some AI bot rather than thinking, and developing their mind and intelligence, is staggering. Giving kids a reason not to think and develop their intelligence seems a pathway to even further declines in intelligence. Seems a quick route to dementia in old age too: if you fail to exercise and maintain something it eventually stops working.
If you have fast sugars and nice fat available at you any time of day and night, why to eat healthy? If you can spend your whole life getting easy dopamine hots from games and social media, why to exercise, study, work or do anything at all.
And we have a little bot that does your thinking for you, so that we will become a society of dumb fat morons who just fill online spaces with whayever hate speech our future fascist dictators tell the AI to be the correct opinion.
Surprised to read this as Norway also has Sikt AI for schools, where teachers can monitor how AI systems are used. Seems like it has both embraced AI and banned it.
> Seems like it has both embraced AI and banned it.
Indeed, seemingly they done so by age/educational progression:
> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said. In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added.
I wonder if the struggle is really comprehending thoughtful selective adoption.
Schools are the place where the product is a more fully developed person. There's no LLM shortcut for generating that. There are many ways you could use LLMs that would discourage it. There may be some that can encourage it.
Personally, I can see aggressively keeping kids away from LLMs until they've learned effort, living in tension/frustration, the pleasure of breaking through to discovery, trust evaluation, hypothesis/test cycles, and good socratic dialogue from the learner's side.
It may be possible at intermediate phases to prime some models to help with this process.
Very well said. As someone who taught for 6 years it's hard enough to just stay on top of lesson planning, let alone opens my curriculum to incorporate a tool (LLMs) which I'm personally figuring out for my own use.
LLMs add the most utility to people who understand process and what a good result looks and feels like. To a novice they can't stunt the learning of this.
I just had a discussion with 10 to 12 years old kids today. They are not using AI to learn, they are using it to cheat. It's not a moral judgement, it's what they, themselves, told me today in front of their peers. Initially they claimed it was an aid to get homework done, then their own peers asked few questions to clarify and they themselves came to the conclusion (after quite some pushback and mental gymnastic) that it was indeed to cheat.
So... ask kids themselves, see what they do and what they say, it's fascinating.
I would assume if children are allowed to use AI without rails as a shortcut it will undermine their learning, and it's used for feedback and as a patient tutor it would accelerate their learning?
It seems like the problem is that they don't have the science and tooling to use it constructively at scale, so the desperate solution is to ban it outright until a scalable constructive approach is understood?
The article doesn't explain any of this directly...
It's frustrating to me when bold statements are directed at "AI" holistically and vaguely, completely ignoring any nuance.
There is a massive gap between letting elementary students free reign use chatGPT 3.5 (hallucinations and all) to do whatever, vs using a very guard-railed pedagogically optimized app powered by a SOTA model to support students in a specific way that accelerates good outcomes.
Most respectful interpretation is that the leaders know this and have a plan to figure it out, but for some reason it's not making it's way into this article. Is the absence representative of the truth of the situation, or some editors choice to pile on to a holistic anti-ai narrative?
> it's used for feedback and as a patient tutor it would accelerate their learning?
We have mounting evidence AI hurts learning and cognition in many circumstances. I have not yet seen similar-quality evidence for it helping.
Given that balance, restricting AI in education in the general population (while studying how to best deploy it) seems prudent. Especially given the Norwegian approach, which gradually introduces AI as kids get older.
I'm actually not really criticizing the decision so much the article and communications around it. If student learning outcomes are crashing and they desperately want to turn them around I understand why they would take dramatic action.
Giving students uncontrolled access to generic LLMs probably would hurt outcomes. Research process is slow (IRB and all that) so they are dealing with data from years ago (models that confident hallucinated a lot more than current SOTA) so if thats what they are basing it on its reasonable.
My frustration isn't with the decision (hey all teachers - no more chatGPT in the classroom). My frustration is with the reporting / nuance of "until we can research this better and figure out how to harness AI to improve outcomes and not undermine them".
> the reporting / nuance of "until we can research this better and figure out how to harness AI to improve outcomes and not undermine them"
It’s balancing the irrationally exuberant narrative of the tech bros and AI pushers. You have to stop the bleeding before you can dress the wound to promote healing.
I don't think one balances a lack of nuance with more lack of nuance.
One avoids nuance for clicks or to propagate a narrative, sew division, distract, etc.
Again. As I said in both my comments, I'm not criticizing the ban, I'm criticizing the absence of any communication regarding a plan for researching potentially constructive uses. As a reader, I can't tell if the Norwegian leaders have no plan, or if they didn't communicate a plan, or if they did and Reuters chose not to include it in the article.
Not everything has to be a culture war. When we are talking about our children's future it would be cool to do so pragmatically.
Eh, if the politician thinks this is the clarity of language necessary to send the message, I think that’s fine. Studying this and that can come later. It’s not like anyone is banning that research.
And I guess that's a big part of my frustration. I don't know what the politician actually said. I don't see any link to the/an official statement in the article.
I'm just an old man shaking fist at clouds.
I'm sitting on a mountain of evidence (n=44,000) that used in a very specific way and context AI accelerates and improves lasting learning outcomes. Th3 data is new, but the science that explains it actually goes back decades, predating AI - it's based on pedagogy from texts such as How People Learn (NRC).
My data also shows that students using AI the wrong way perform way worse - the performance gap is widening between students who want to learn and struggle (and use AI to optimize struggle) and students who want instant gratification and use AI for shortcuts.
So I know that if they truly slammed the door on this potential then they threw the baby out with the bath water.
But I don't know the truth because Reuters doesn't report the truth, and that's what tips me from concerned to frustrated. But I guess by complaining about modern journalism standards in a thread about banning AI I'm breaking HN guidelines. Time for me to log off...
> but helps me learn things much more quickly than reading textbooks
Have you tested this against an external metric of competence? The research seems to show that AI is great at making you feel you know something. But I think the studies looking at language learning found those using AI extensively tested below peers using traditional methods.
You don't always need the same level of deep knowledge on everything you do. A lot of things in software development requires some basic level understanding of some obscure API you would never use again. LLM definitely speed up that part.
> A lot of things in software development requires some basic level understanding of some obscure API you would never use again
This is glorified look-up. AI is great at this! Learning through look-up doesn’t work.
Elsewhere in this thread is someone arguing they learned linear algebra through AI. I’d love to be surprised by their acing an exam. I’m thoroughly doubtful they could get through one. AI is trained to be a sycophant, not to teach. Maybe one day we will solve this. I have seen zero evidence we have that today.
I don't care what the studies say. It's an incredibly good tutor.
AI helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter which kind-of-but-not-quite explains the concept I am hunting for.
It feels like a good tutor. If you aren’t externally benchmarking your comprehension, you really can’t say.
> helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter
Have you considered that learning to phrase your questions is part of indexing and thus learning a subject?
I’m not saying AI can’t help with that search process. But we have no evidence it helps and lots of evidence it hurts, and everyone with anecdotes to the contrary seems to be going off vibes around how much they learned without any external reference.
Be careful. Speed of learning isn't necessarily the goal. Durability is another metric. I learn more quickly with LLMs, too, but it's certainly questionable if that learning is as durable or deep as learning through struggling with a book.
The students of lowly-rated profs had better 10-year outcomes than those with highly-rated profs according to a study that I think came out of the Naval Institute a decade or two ago. "No shine without friction."
We need more data. Certainly turning students loose with AI stunts them. There's probably some happy medium. But where kids need the most practice with fundamentals when they're young, a blanket ban for now seems sensible. And it also seems like a good plan to introduce it when they get older. I suspect we'll learn a lot from this Norwegian experiment.
Yes, but (I assume) that you are old enough to have already gone through elementary school and perhaps further and learned and internalized a model for learning and retaining information.
Oddly enough, I never was able to learn things from textbooks, except in the context of a traditional classroom lecture course. I've also met maybe one or two people in my life who were able to learn the subjects of my college majors -- math and physics -- at any level from a textbook alone.
> Do you delegate all opinions to only those which have studies?
For policy decisions around something like education standards, something for which we have an established status quo (which works in Norway)? Yes. I don’t think waiting for evidence to act is imprudent in that situation.
I think soemthing ignored in the discussion is that there are "good" students who can make use of AI to further their learning versus "bad" students who use AI as a crutch that prevents them from learning well
Acknowledging this divide exists would come down to individual parenting and assessment of a student's use of the tools, rather than a blanket ban of AI tools which punish the "good" students
You can straight-up bypass AI mania in schooling altogether by just keeping pen-and-paper as the primary medium, as most Asian countries do. Digitization is a meaningless overcomplication.
The problem is they were two decades late digitizing the classroom. Now we're dealing with the aftermath with the educational system still not being capable of keeping up with societal progress.
that's dismissing that brains need time to evolve. what if brains need to be mature enough in and by themselves before they benefit from digital support? as in "no telly before 3-4, no smartphone before 14, prioritize pen and paper proficiency until 12-14" makes sense biological brain maturity?
then "give'm a computer ASAP" is the wrong answer.
I don't think giving children tech adults don't fully understand is a goal by itself. But children shouldn't be limited by their parents' shortcomings either. Strict age limits may seem like a safe approach, but children and their capacity to bypass those rules should not be underestimated.
I think it’s quite tricky. On one side, writing is a form of thinking and cognitive training.
Just NOT doing that work by having AI simulate it is not good for anyone’s cognitive development.
At the same time, anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it.
I really feel for teachers/educators right now. It must be hard to remain demanding and insist on educating kids well while also preparing them for the future they’ll actually live in.
> anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it
Whatever AI looks like in 20 years is going to be so different from what it is today as to make distracting from basic skill-building an almost-certainly net negative educational effort.
I agree to some degree. But by that logic, should kids in the 2000s not have learned about the internet because the internet fundamentally changed between then and now?
I think that if anything, it’s really good I learned how to operate a computer and the Internet BEFORE what the Internet became.
I pity the generation who don’t understand a computer’s folder structure because they grew up with smartphones and TikTok.
> should kids in the 2000s not have learned about the internet
Yes. Emphatically yes. In elementary school? The kids who were online in elementary school—literally in school—who got like how-to-use-AOL lessons?
They almost certainly underperform those who learned about the Internet at home or later in life. This is like those stupid keyboarding classes in the 2000s. It was obviously a waste of time compared with developing basic cognition.
No AI CEO or chief engineer today grew up with AI. The idea that everyone in a ball sack or ovary is currently incurably fucked when it comes to the future is naive beyond silliness.
To be clear, I’m not presently arguing against early technology exposure. I’m arguing against the systematized exposure of nascent technologies to young children.
I agree and I think some of the comments here have shifted my perspective on this, especially given the age.
I think with teaching anything, there’s always going to be a difference between teaching the tactics (e.g. how to use AOL) vs the fundamentals (what’s the internet, how do computers work)
Your example would call more to create an "information technology" subject in schools, that updates its curriculum to include changes like the development of AI. Thus, you go to that class, some of your coursework in the year is going to involve learning about AI and how it works, what it can and cannot do, using it for some project, so on. Not using AI for doing your homework in every other subject.
> At the same time, anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it.
There's not so much to learn they can't put it into a high school course. Adults currently in the workforce haven't been using AI since they were in elementary school, and they're adjusting fine.
I would disagree that they’re adjusting fine. So much of the stuff we see now is full AI slop clearly created with the first output of ChatGPT. It’s like saying we don’t need to teach kids about the internet because older generations grew up without it and they’re scrolling TikTok.
a) what’s the actual percentage of professionals who actively use AI? It’s much smaller than we think in tech.
b) what percentage of those people understand the very basics of how LLMs work (e.g. token prediction, context windows, etc)
c) what percentage of those people understand AI Agents (or any of their ingredients (APIs, credentials, etc.)
You quickly arrive at a tiny fraction that has a real clue about what they’re doing.
The traditional schooling system can't stand that they are being outcompeted by AI and are trying to use the government to maintain their monopoly and keep those tax dollars flowing.
Pretty much; as people experience AI work better than the previous arrangement it will simply be adopted and this antiquated approach will likely be phased out
> The traditional schooling system can't stand that they are being outcompeted by AI and are trying to use the government to maintain their monopoly and keep those tax dollars flowing.
Learning is a conspiracy by Big Knowing, it's all a myth. Let's just ask an LLM to all our thinking, no need to be a functional human.
> LLMs can teach better than the human teacher could.
Clearly not, given that you seem to believe this despite it being incorrect. Every single bit of evidence gathered so far indicates LLMs are worse teachers than humans or every self-directed learning.
I've had LLMs both help motivate myself into getting better at things and help me understand things I don't. Being open with an AI is much easier than a human since there is no risk of being judged.
Yep… I mean scientific studies seem to suggest that you are completely wrong. But big science is all a conspiracy against those AI companies that work so hard for the betterment of mankind after all.
A lot of finance related concepts I wasn't very familiar with and I used a LLM to understand them. I was able to ask questions to make sure that I understood things correctly.
It's absolutely the right move. We're already seeing declines in cognitive capabilities among adults using AI. We're going to wind up with future generations of ignorants if we let them start as kids.
We are seriously in danger of "we need AI" becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as humanity becomes too stupid to do anything without AI, and we end up with a few companies essentially holding the keys to our collective ability to produce anything of value. Am I the only one freaked out about that?
"..ban on smart phones.." "..ban on gen AI.." "..ban on social media.."
yes
YES
YASSSSSSSSSSSS
Ban all the things for kids. I don't want to be interviewing people in 10 years and decline every candidate because they can't correctly answer the question "You are 50ft away from the car wash. Do you walk or drive?"
I did walk to a car wash. Automated one. To look at how it worked. I don't drive to a car wash often. Maybe once in few years. I don't see the point. The car is out in the elements all the time. It gets clean and dirty randomly.
I was going to comment that you missed the joke. However, it was still curious to me that you took it so seriously, so I looked at your comment history.
It is almost all political (and outraged) commentary, and you tend to dominate posts like this with many comments, without adding nuance, substance, or listening to the other side.
It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.
> It is almost all political (and outraged) commentary, and you tend to dominate posts like this with many comments, without adding nuance, substance, or listening to the other side.
Facts don't care about your feelings, bud. And neither do I.
> It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.
Yes I'm certain you will be happier if you ignore everything that challenges you.
You've probably made 20 comments just in this post alone, all attacking people and treating things as black and white. Do you really don't realize that this makes Hacker News worse, and is probably not healthy for you either?
The question is slightly vague (since I could be going there not to wash my car), but I'm pretty sure in the intended interpretation, the actual distance is irrelevant. :)
What a dream. If we could also somehow get rid of social media at the same time (or at least algorithmic recommendations and other predatory practices), the world would be a significantly better place.
The anti-AI stance seems like a fashionable contrarianism, not sure what will end up changing it
What's really interesting to me is seeing people who are pro-technology but anti-AI, like... if you're anti-tech, you become something like the Amish. If you're pro-tech, AI is the logical next development along that path of technology - whatever tech you preciously enjoyed, was part of the package deal of building this AI that we now see.
So I guess I am curious to see if more anti-AI people become something like the Amish or if they come to terms with their championing of technology being equivalent to embracing AI.
It's just "rock and roll and video games are bad" popular nonsense. AI is the best learning tool you could possibly ask for, it's literally your own personal ultra knowledgeable teacher that has all day to answer questions from you. I remember being in school and the most I could hope for was to raise my hand and ask one (1) question sometimes. The teacher would then already be miffed if I asked another follow up and made sure to quickly keep talking so that I wouldn't ask anything else alongside all kinds of other social cues or just outright tell me to look at it at home. I remember falling behind in understanding some basic math concepts and literally never ending up understanding them fully. When you are a child nobody cares in the slightest, you are alone. How could AI possibly make this situation any worse? Life is already at the near maximum pain for children, you barely get to ask a question before you get shut down and you get to reread the same exact useless textbook explanation 30 times in a row. AI is a 100% net gain, it's like having 50 extra teachers on standby. Is having teachers suddenly a bad thing? Of course not. Especially not if the only reason you dislike the teachers is because you can't tell the child to use the teachers intelligently for maximum, fastest gain in understanding.
In the future we should be getting rid of nearly the entire teaching position and instead be going with a model where human teachers are more like guidance counselors that can offer some extra experience and anecdotes from how things will be in real life, something that AI will inherently have less ability to do. All these restrictions are just made by adults who literally don't care to think about how life is for children and have long forgotten. They just want to give orders from the top without having to think about it. Is there a danger that children will abuse it? Of course, it's a massive danger. Without AI there is also a massive danger that children will never learn something properly because nobody has time to teach them. Does anyone care about that danger? Does anyone care that a child will waste years of its life in schooling that is boring? No because that damage is invisible to people who do not care, the children will become intellectually stunted and stop caring about learning or doing productive things. Life is full of dangers, the goal should be to use all the tools we have in their optimal way and if that includes teaching children how to use AI, when to use it and the value of understanding things then the time for that is as soon as possible. I have a feeling that all these complaints about AI come from people who themselves never learned the value of independent thinking and stopped thinking at some point. They went through schooling but with rote memorization and repetition and little to no curiosity or drive to do anything other than the exact homework that the teacher gave them.
This is especially ridiculous: "In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added.". So when you are already an adult and went through over a decade of schooling you can finally use AI? When you are 14 there are children these days that are already making videogames, there is no reason whatsoever to hold children back. Stop treating children like their time is worthless. This is their life time, you don't get to take it away from them however you like as if they are dumb pets that just need to be taught how to behave.
1. Wisdom through dogma.
2. Wisdom through reasoning.
3. Wisdom through experience.
AI is just stage 1. Instant and easily digestible. Traditional learning forces you to go to Stage 2, because you are often given too much information and you need to compress it to memorise it. And the best way to compress it, is by finding some kind of logical structure in the information.
I feel like in the context of AI in education, "wisdom through dogma" still doesn't capture it. It's not even wisdom nor dogma, but something in the form of wisdom developed through something in the form of dogma. "Wisdom" implies you actually believe it and embody it, but students don't believe it or embody it as much as just pass it along to finish the assignment. "Dogma" implies there's a coherent logic of accepted doctrine, but the output is more a stretched and morphed version of the most generalized doctrine imaginable.
In my country, education is the basic minimum for any social status. Dropping before the high school diploma is basically saying that you're going to be mediocre for your whole life. Anyone will try to get the basic down otherwise that means being ridiculed for your whole life basically.
Great, yet another "no child and no teacher left behind!"
I was gifted kid, bored to death at basic school. I was reading books under the table, and was lucky to have tolerant teacher. Total ban would just push me to misbehaving and disrupting the class.
AI is amazing tool for learning, if Norway can not harness it, there is something deeply wrong with the educational system. Perhaps teachers unions?
Norway has a big problem with young immigrant kids at school not speaking Norwegian. Right now other kids are expected to teach them basic language, holding back their own development (like learning reading and writing)! Again, AI could provide amazing help here!
Calculators are amazing at multiplication tables. Let's just give those to the kids too. It's the same thing. This type of thinking is ruining kids' futures.
Some kids can understand and memorize multiplication tables in a day. Are they just suppose to sit idle, for rest of semester not to disrupt "normal kids"?
Should we ban programming as well? You know, kid could program multiplication and cheat this way! I can not believe I am reading opinions like this on "hacker" news!
I would allow schooling in other languages in primary schools in Norway. Basic education is a human right, and it is not right to force kids out of their mother tongue. Insisting on some obscure language is just misplaced nationalism!
The the only conclusion I can draw from that is that you know nothing about education and even less about Norway.
FYI: all Norwegians learn at least one foreign language in school. It is mandatory. That means you have to, in case that’s a big word for you.
If you so prefer you will have the option to learn one or two more in middle school and one or two more in high school.
By the time I was 15 I spoke three languages. Everyone at that age would know at least two. Some would know four.
Is it so much to ask that you at least consult the AI tools you speak so fondly of as tools of education before babbling about something you so obviously are deeply ignorant of? If nothing else then at least in lieu of growing a brain?
So now you are arguing what? That the AI tools, that so thoroughly failed to educate you on education, should be used to teach immigrants in their mother tongue?
And keep in mind, if you move to a country you kind of have to accept that they won’t be able to offer you education in every possible language. In fact, learning the language is often a prerequisite for permanent residency.
I am not going to ask you how you envision that AI somehow magically solves this, since we have already established that education isn’t something you appear to know much about. The last thing we need is more speculation, fantasy or anecdote.
Have the courtesy of at least researching things online for more than 2 minutes before you expect to be taken seriously.
People from EU already have residency in Norway, and some are not planning to stay there permanently.
One reason to avoid native language (outside of waste of time), is to avoid Barnevernet. It is much harder to take child away from parents, into permament Norwegian foster care, if it does not even speak local language.
So let me see if I get this: we need AI in Norwegian schools so immigrants don’t have to learn Norwegian or English, or else child protective services will take away their children?
It isn’t so much that you and I disagree. It is more that you disagree with reality. To the extent you are aware of reality.
I never said english, just Norwegian. Many people are fine with english only education, but goverment will still demand Norwegian lessons.
> we need AI in Norwegian schools so immigrants don’t have to learn
No, you need AI so kids who do not speak Norwegian, can learn to read and write. It is more important than forcing them into Norwegian first.
AI also comes to spotlight with homeschooling.
> else child protective services will take away their children
Yes!? I admit my informations are precovid, perhaps it is different now (at least the economy in Poland is much stronger, and there is less incentive to work in Norway). But Barnevernet has horrible reputation in Poland.
Common legal advice (when one of the parents works in Norway) is to avoid ties to Norway when it comes to kids, not to establish long term residency for kids (rotate kids every second semester and holidays back to Poland), avoid norwegian language...
It is much harder for Barnevernet to pull their stunt, if you do not give up Polish residency!
You offer no concrete explanation of how AI will magically remove the language barrier. Have you ever taught a class? How, in practice would you make language go away? In concrete terms. Exactly how do you envision interaction between teacher and student and between students happening? Again, in plain practical terms that can be implemented easily?
Teaching isn’t just about delivering a monologue. Even at university level. It is about connecting and interacting with people. Or else people would derive no more benefit from education than simply reading a list of curriculum books and hand in papers.
How do you envision that this plays out, right now, with AI, when teaching at a K-12 and high school level? Which is much more demanding because you are doing far more than just throwing knowledge and facts at people.
You don’t know what you are talking about which makes you invent fantasies that have no contact with concrete, observable reality. But rather than realize that you are talking nonsense and perhaps educate yourself and think things through, you just carry on.
Again, look at what the original post was about, and what corner you have painted yourself into. Did you, at any point, ask yourself if you had gone off the rails somewhere?
I wonder if at some point we will look back on stuff like this as back in the 1990s schools banning internet research and search engines. Obviously that seems ridiculous now, but the internet was big and scary back then too.
Those bans were implemented without evidence. We have evidence AI exposure reduces learning and cognition. There are probably situations where it enhances it. But we haven’t delineated those yet, and so shouldn’t be rolling out a half-baked system more likely to hurt than to help.
Were schools banning search engines? I remember teachers recommending Dogpile (because it would combine search engines), and we did some computer lab stuff in the 00s, but there was no one saying that we should ignore search or the internet altogether.
In middle school I remember being assigned a book report that would include the author's biography. I'd just finished a book (The Gammage Cup) and of course my local library did not have any information about the author. So in that situation it was assumed that you would learn traditional research methods, but also that you would just pick a classic book where the information was readily available.
Few schools allow unrestricted internet access these days.
The general question here is risks vs rewards and with any new technology both are unknown making caution perfectly reasonable be that internet searches or anything else.
So sure in 30 years the policy will look different, but that doesn’t mean they are making the wrong decision.
It is wrong to think kids should not use AI. They actually need to use AI the most.
Childhood is the age when you constantly ask “why” until you get to the bottom of the problem. It is the age of enormous curiosity. But schools, teachers, and parents do not have enough time or knowledge to answer every single “why.”
AI is here to stay, and I believe the future of AI is education.
But that also means we need to change how we test students. We should bring back more oral exams and in-person writing exams. But to learn things please use AI.
> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said.
Sounds right to me. Kids under 13 need to learn to read, write and comprehend text. Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.
They can play with AI at home, and after 13 they can learn how to use AI productively and, ideally, in a way that enhances rather than detracts from their education.
Also from the story:
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
A big hooray for that. Will be interesting to see what impact that has on Norway education - a quick search just now didn't turn up any detailed studies, presumably those will show up eventually.
> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.
I think it's more complex than this.
AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.
The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.)
On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.
The obvious way to square this circle is to go back to how things used to be: less emphasis on coursework and more on old-fashioned tests in an examination environment with just pen and paper.
You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams. On the other hand, students who use LLMs to augment their learning will do fine
This is definitely what's going to happen. But there is still a problem - people (not just children) are fundamentally lazy and put things off. People always leave assignments until the last minute. I used to smoothly transition from "I've got plenty of time, no need to start" to "there's not enough time to do it, there's no point starting".
They will 100% just use AI for the whole year and then panic and fail the exam when the time comes.
So I think not only will we see more invigilated exams, but they'll become more frequent and shorter. Which I would say is a good thing anyway. I always hated learning a whole year of stuff for a 3 hour exam.
In what countries were the exams only once a year? When I grew up in the 90s in Sweden we would have tests and exams frequently, usually at the end of each module. This continued all the way through university. I think we had 3 separate exams for the first math course (which lasted a quarter of a year, so roughly one exam per month).
(Though they didn't give formal grades for the first several years of elementary school, which I'm not sure was a good idea.)
In the UK. In high school (age ~11 to 16) the only exams that mattered were SATs at ages 7, 11 and 14 (though I just checked and apparently they've scrapped the 14 year old ones for some reason), and GCSEs at 16. After that you have A-levels for two years (age 17 and 18) where IIRC it was just one big group of exams at the end of each year, and then university where I guess maybe it varies but at least at Cambridge it was one big group of 3-hour long exams at the end of each year.
Though Cambridge does have "tutorials" which are 1:2 tutoring sessions where you probably couldn't completely rely on AI.
Your way definitely sounds better to me.
In Poland, that's how it worked at unis. We had a lot of subjects where we had only one big exam at the end and your grade depended on it.
Before uni though, we would get a grade or two every week, be it from short tests, classwork, homework or exams.
It’s a good point. I could see a world where exams get cheaper to administer.
I also think we can use project work as an ongoing assessment.
It’s one dimension, I agree. Though, for essay-based courses I’m a little skeptical about writing under time pressure.
My thinking here is that you might want to also introduce more “viva voce” (verbal defense) style tests. These have been expensive to administer but my hunch is that you can scale these with AI administering the first round, random human review or participation. This feels like a better endpoint than essays under time pressure (but also maybe you can elect one or the other?)
My other angle is to break completely from the past. I want to see more project work. If AI makes it easier to fake or attain any given level of knowledge, we need to ask more of students, ie ask them to demonstrate mastery by building real things. More open-ended projects are harder to grade (use AI to scale grading), but more fun and engaging for students.
This doesn’t just refer to STEM of course; why not ask students to write a play, compose a symphony, etc?
My core thesis is that most students would work harder and engage with things that interest them, and the fundamental problem with Taylorized education is that one-size-fits-all is only interesting to some.
I studied in a French Lycée in Spain. We did dissertations, brutal 3h live writing tests. There was no problem with it other than the difficulty. Kids didn’t come out screwed up or impaired.
Exactly, “write an essay under time pressure” used to just be called… an exam.
It’s normal and was done for centuries (and still done in many countries) for a reason, it works and it’s equally hard for everyone so it’s not unfair.
(3 hours straight is brutal though)
I agree it’s an option. I did some essay exams at Uni too. I just don’t think we should assume that the old cost/benefit calculus still applies and this is the best way to test e.g. English Lit or Philosophy.
> You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams
This might sound principled, but we need to recognize that school administrators are incentivised to have as few kids as possible fail their exams; and consequently, so are the teachers. Either exams will change, or the teaching will change.
People keep bringing this up as though it’s a counter argument.
Yes, things will have to change. That’s the idea.
... and teachers will just not do this. So maybe having AI grade a million tests instead can help.
I mean is this being done to help kids? Or to protect the jobs of teachers who have no real interest in teaching?
There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.
LLMs are able to talk for a very long while now. Have you ever used Gemini as an assistant? It can even put in related images about your query and while it can use an improvement it can spell more or less.
It's far from clear that this helps you to learn anything. More likely it's a way for most people to avoid having to think or learn.
I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.
I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
> I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
I am not sure. It would be like sending a kid to a beautiful garden with full of life and stuff, and then micromanaging what they can do there!
The beauty of the books is that the books talk to you, and you cannot talk back. You have to talk to yourselves, go down some wrong path, and course correct on your own at some point, and that is where true learning happens..
The thing I think is underspoken in this space is that LLMs will always hallucinate a bit. How will you know as a 13 year old that an LLM is not conversing truth at you?
My teachers were frequently wrong too and spoke with authority on subjects in hindsight they were frankly ill equipped to teach. Part of learning is understanding how to reason through these types of issues. It's a common problem solving problem in the work place just the same.
I think this is a false equivalence, by some extreme margin. Teachers may occasionally have some fact or whatever incorrect, but especially at lower levels it's going to be exceptionally rare, and often based on a logical foundation that is otherwise invalid for some reason, like whether 1 is a prime number or not.
By contrast LLMs constantly get things wrong and once they get something wrong will begin weaving that into everything create entirely fake realities of the sort that is more akin to a schizophrenic than somebody being mistaken on this fact or that.
My own experience from elementary school was that teachers being wrong was shockingly common. There is no subject in which I would trust any of my elementary school teachers more than a state of the art LLM. This was in Norway. I’m guessing you were privileged to grow up in a place with better quality elementary education.
Yeah but the teacher says you're wrong even if you're right. The AI tells you you're right either way. The former can facilitate an important lesson, the latter doesn't ever give you the chance to.
I've been doing things like accounting where I upload receipts and have the LLM adjust a Google sheet with the money balances. The error rate over the past year has dropped from occasionally to never. That is because there's sub agents now running that check the work. If you have multiple LLMs running with a 94% success rate but you throw them into a group that requires a consensus suddenly the number basically hits 99%.
We simply need to run sub agents on the children's learning, then we will maximize pedagogic efficiency to 99%.
Hallucinations aren't going anywhere. So you're having a conversation with a stochastic parrot that occasionally says something completely wrong but completely viable and in a highly compelling fashion.
The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.
> The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.
Agreed. With the way LLMs often are quite artuculate and confident sounding, it's only a matter of time until kids will be suspicious of actual people that are articulate and confident from putting effort into improving their speech and speaking about things they are right to be confident about due to being proficient in the subject.
Either that or kids will see that LLMs aren't "getting punished" for being "convincing liars" and will grow up convincing the socially correct way to interact with others is by speaking to them respectfully while going all in on long-game gaslighting.
[dead]
I understand the first part, but I don't understand the second one. It's probably my ignorance for not having children and being out of touch with schooling. When I was in school very little grading was based on homework, mostly was grading by testing in class. For example math, I'm absolutely sure it was 100% a few grading tests every semester. You could cheat by copying the homework of your classmates, it was the same set of problems for, but with 0 understanding, you would not pass.
This is what schools enforce, second, even more important part is what parents do/allow/pay for at home.
Every single household I've seen benevolent use of phones/tablets/tv/computer/consoles (quite often all of it), kids were unruly, had shitty grades, living empty lives without good role models and very little passions or hobbies, and overall were more depressed than happy.
I do get why - its supremely easier to just throw tech at them and let them drown in endless cheap dopamine content, triple that for already-addicted parents. The whole principle of active screen itself is so overpowering and addictive compared to good old physical toys, drawing, paint, reading etc.
As a parent of young kids, its much harder to come up, continuously, with good motivating program out there, or even indoors, ie climbing. But - I didn't get kids to have easiest possible life, coursing through our short lives deep in comfort zone is a failure IMHO, thats not life well lived, that's life avoided. I am not kind to such parents - its the biggest achievement, or failure, in one's life, biggest challenges bring biggest rewards. Rather few people put in corresponding effort continuously, compared to careers, relaxing and other aspects of adult lives.
And then folks wonder why so many old people are sour, seeing in more life-successful others all the stuff one could/should have done if not so lazy is deeply depressing, usually amounts to biggest life regrets.
Learning is also impacted when homework/test questions are created and graded by AI.
The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map…
Why have teachers?
The AI might as well grade itself.
Hard agree. AI generated questions should be absolutely forbidden. In our university I helped a instructor set up a custom Gemini Gem to let students grade themselves in recording because we did not have time to read the final scores in time, It was a nightmare to restrict or get consistent results.
It’s not complex. One must first learn HOW TO LEARN before they can use any tool to help them learn.
There’s no substitution for human connection (social media) and there’s no substitution for traditional learning (robot teachers).
Everyone who wants to “disrupt” this fundamental human quality is chasing delusion. If you want to help, pay teachers a couple billion from the hundreds-of-billions going into AI maybe?
I agree that the human touch is valuable.
I disagree that humans are required to bootstrap meta-learning; I think it is quite deeply wired into the human brain and there is no reason that we can’t create digital gyms that give opportunities to learn the same insights.
I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.
Well, what we’re seeing in society is the opposite effect. Kids with phones and AI bots are doing, on average, terrible in school compared to folks who didn’t have those growing up.
University professors will likely agree that AI makes students worse at learning overall. No need to cite this there are articles all over the place.
So whatever solution you’re talking about, even when purpose-built, should be replaced by higher paid teachers. Ultimately the AI-First model is about moving money into mega-corps and paying teachers less.
I agree that we are seeing the negative effects of AI-done-wrong. (The best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, as I said.)
I don’t agree that this means all potential or current uses of AI are harmful.
I also don’t agree that simply paying teachers more is a solution. This lever has always existed and as a society we fail to pull it. So for the majority of people who use public schools, improving quality at current spend levels would be a major win, and we should explore the obvious possibilities here.
I’m also pretty skeptical about your culture-war assertion that this is about wealth transfer to mega-corps. This can easily be a sovereign AI product. (I also never proposed “AI first” FWIW, I am a proponent of humans augmented by AI for this and most use-cases. Banning AI entirely operates at the margin of forbidding mostly-human use-cases from using any AI.)
> I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.
You seem to think you're making some kind of valid argument here by backing up your opinion about one thing by providing evidence of something unrelated aside from both things happening to involve AI. I'm guessing only reason it seems obvious to you is because it's not obvious to you that what you're disagreeing is something different than what's going on to begin with.
I haven't seen anyone say the best education would be pure-human provided. The entire point of the article is that the effect AI has had on the education of children so far has not been beneficial.
The fact that AI useful for GPs for getting relatively simple yet time consuming administrative work taken care of has nothing to do with children's education. GPs aren't doing paperwork to develop their fundamental reading and math skills. Less time dealing with the non-medical portions of running a practice means they can spend more time with their patients. Spending more time with their patients allows them to better understand their symptoms and make a better informed, more accurate diagnosis even if AI is never used in a patient-facing capacity. In no way does that indicate that AI is currently a suitable to deploy in education.
I don't know if you used AI to learn about what you were arguing with and gather information to back up your argument, but if you did then that's another example of why there's so much concern about little kids using it. Eventually it will be worked into something without such a double edged nature when applied to early learning. Everyone already knows it can be an educational boon for people who have the skills to use it properly. So far, statistics indicate students do not have those skills. The rate of failure among undergraduate students is only continuing to accelerate.
> I haven't seen anyone say the best education would be pure-human provided
I took GP to be saying exactly that, and the OP’s full ban on AI in schools is also enforcing pure-human.
> I don't know if you used AI to learn about what you were arguing with and gather information to back up your argument
Accusing someone of mindless AI slop is a bad faith read. It’s also against the HN community guidelines. Please don’t do this.
>very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.
Where is the data on this?
> take-home essay assignments
Typically there's not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7 anyways.
Homework levels between elementary school and start of junior might look something like this:
I remember that whole "expect 30 to 60 min a night" nonsense. I always assumed that was a scare tactic or something. I mean, in high school i was awake until around 4 am playing games every night so I'd wind up using half of each school day compensating with well-timed napping. Even then, the only homework i had to actually take home was the stuff meant to be turned in a few weeks later like tests and projects. Sure, we had daily "homework" assigned; there was also more than enough time during lectures to finish it. The only students that i really ever saw complain about having tons of homework were the ones that didn't put any effort into learning stuff at school to begin with.
What do you mean there is not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7?
We had a fuckton of homework at every grade, here in Hungary.
I presume kids still learn to add 1 and 1, do their multiplication tables and long division before being given a calculator ?
Bloom's 2 sigma problem solved at last! But that's overestimating LLMs, our zeitgeist.
AI can't detect AI, not because AI undetectable, but because it lacks judgment. Its shtick is random generation; the proverbial monkey on a typewriter.
> and the best technology ever invented for learning.
This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement.
Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.
Dude, just use it to learn something. It's obviously true.
Everyone uses AI all the time now. People's impressions are not mediated by marketing.
> Ask a question.
> Ask two follow-up questions.
> Ask about a seeming contradiction between the original answer and the answer to the second follow-up question.
> Get congratulated for raising such a great point and get parroted back your objection as a "correction."
Useful as a learning aid if applied cautiously but maybe not the "best thing ever."
I thought the dichotomy would make this clear, but the claim was not that however you use AI, it’s the best thing ever. To be more explicit:
_used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities, AI is the best technology ever invented for learning. If you don’t believe this as a technical HN person at the epicenter of this technology’s capability set, I probably can’t persuade you. But you can do a lot better than your transcript.
Used in the default mode, or with a desire to take shortcuts, or a desire to minimize what is perceived (often correctly in the case of many school curriculae) as BS fake work, it is the best technology ever invented to avoid learning.
FWIW, I liked the way you expressed it through a dichotomy.
>_used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities
How often do children do things the "correct way" or know how to get the most out of a thing?
That’s our job as educators, not the kid’s. “The correct way” obviously requires scaffolding.
Useful as in “better than nothing” but lacking as in “inferior to almost anything else”.
It's the same old argument about knives and technology. But we don't give children knives.
But we do give them bicycles, so the lesson would be “give them technology that is safe to use”.
And then we are back to the discussion at hand none the wiser; what forms of AI are safe to use for kids?
The kind that doesn't allow a child to anthropomorphize it, or rely on it for learning.
AI is a terrible teacher though. It makes stuff up all the time, and for some subjects it has a remarkably low accuracy rate
I would argue it has gotten way better. Depending on the subject it can be really helpful and some tools even have a learning mode built in now that can generate questions and tests. They are often way too easy to solve but it does not demotivate i guess.
It has always gotten better, just like how self-driving cars have gotten better, and how the case for bitcoin is always getting stronger.
Many people have stopped believing this lie. Yes AI has gotten better by some metric which AI companies are pushing. It has not gotten good enough to be a qualified teacher, and it never will.
I have never claimed it to be good enough to replace a qualified educator, however for self learning it is a good tool with no hustle. You also consider how qualified some educators are...
Better then what for self-learning though? Better then textbooks? Better then an online course? Better then watching youtube videos from Khan academy, or just better then nothing at all as described some metrics which the AI companies came up with them selves?
I suspect it is the last one. This is a trillion dollar industry and if the AI companies claim this, then they should be able to to show it with quality research, they however have not, and the reason is that this is a lie. AI is not better then anything for self-learning. Go to the library and check out a chess book, go to r/trumpet, join a weekly meetup to practice you Spanish, etc. etc. all of these are vastly superior then AI.
You claim self-learning via is hustle free, perhaps you are right, however I suspect that there is no such thing as hustle free learning. If you want to learn something you have to use your brain, and you have to struggle. AI will just act like you got this, flatter you for a minute, and in the worst cases, you may start to believe the AI when it lies to you about how much you’ve learned.
I agree with the last part, however I disagree with the others. To learn something you can't just watch or just read, I personally try to do both, first watch to get a basic grasp, then read to get some of the finer details. It stimulates a bigger area of my brain and lets me remember it faster. AI comes in as a helper to this cycle, creating me a study plan letting me know what to focus on, finding me videos on the topic and sorting them on their success rates based on their comments and finding sources. It lets me ask it questions about parts i find difficult or don't comprehend fully. To go beyond it can create an hour long audio discussion about the topic, create flash cards for me to import to Anki, it can create video summaries for me, it can transcribe the videos and let me know which time mark is a topic i want to focus on is at. These are not lies these are self experience. I am a student too, you know.
How exactly is AI better at coming up with a study plan then you? How exactly does AI provide a better structure then your textbook? Better at finding resources then your friends, studdy-buddies, random strangers on reddit, etc.
That last part I actually know from experience. A couple of months ago I tried to use Qwen AI to help me study Japanese for exactly one week, my prompt specifically asked to link to sources with every grammar explanation. I know very well how to find grammar explanations using traditional search engines, it is rather easy actually. However Qwen AI would hallucinate non-existing links 3 times out of every 4. After 2 days I removed it from the prompt it was so useless, and it still kept hallucinating links to non-existing resources.
If you want to go beyond and read outside the material using a library or a search engine is much much much better for your learning. If you want to have a discussion, try web forums, discord servers, join a group class, hire an tutor on e.g. italki etc. etc. Pick anything at random which we have been doing for decades and is a proven solution, it will be better for your learning than using AI.
It lets me focus on learning rather than preparing to learn which takes motivation away from actual learning for me personally. For the second part I really personally think that is a big case of AI misuse, ever since I have hooked up MCP servers and let AI do web searches and even just letting Claude use Chrome it has never hallucinated a single link ever. The specific AI model you use and your enviroinment changes a lot. You cannot expect much from a 4b model compared to a 31b model (though we are getting better at that with time). I personally used Googlr Gemini for some of my exam subjects and easily passed with high marks, did not have any of the said issues. You may want to check out NotebookLM too.
For myself though, I have found a friend who will be helping me learn a new language this summer. I will of course use his help and sources and AI to supplement my learning. I don't just tell AI to teach stuff I use it as intended, as a tool.
Ok so you are using an llm without web search, ask it to give you links, and are confused why the links are hallucinated... ?
At this point it's just PEBKAC. You're holding it wrong brother.
>Better then textbooks? Better then an online course? Better then watching youtube videos from Khan academy, or just better then nothing at all as described some metrics which the AI companies came up with them selves?
The value of all of these self-learning routes has increased enormously due to existence of AI assistants. At least the way I do it now, I get the initial structure for a subject from YouTube/Udemy/textbooks and then fill out my personal comprehension gaps with the help of AI. You can even point AI to a specific material you're trying to grasp and usually it will rephrase a point you failed to get in a simpler language.
Previously, you'd need some trained person to explain to you something that led you to hit a roadblock. Now, the level of understanding you get easily beats most of the tutors in public schools or community colleges.
> The value of all of these self-learning routes has increased enormously due to existence of AI assistants.
This is a lie and most of us know it. AI companies have been lying and lying and lying and lying. If you believe this then the AI companies have successfully lied to you and are making you pay money for an inferior product. If this weren’t a lie then the AI companies should have the research to prove it, they have not, because it is not true. AI does not help anybody learn anything better then using traditional methods.
So my personal experience apparently is a folly that requires some bureaucratically approved scientific study to validate?
Yes, it is well known that people trying to sell you stuff lie about your experience with the product. A good salesmen will make you extremely happy to pay 10x more for a worse product. In fact a good salesman will convince you those bugs are actually feature, and you should be happy to pay 10x for so many “features”.
What exactly am I selling here?
It's far superior in many cases. Teachers get tired, lose patience, etc.
I'd prefer a grumpy teacher over one that cheerfully gaslights me.
>> It makes stuff up all the time
There are a few reasons AI is not the best teacher, but this is not one of them because teachers are also frequently wrong. I say that as someone who comes from a family of teachers, ranging from kindergarten to PhD.
And here is the problem: unlike AI, a lot of teachers don’t like being questioned or challenged. If your teacher doesn’t know a subject well, and you realize this, your options as a student are pretty limited. This is especially true at lower grades.
I don’t believe that AI can replace teachers. But, if used well, it can supplement them. I think Norway is making the right call here with elementary schools, but I wouldn’t support this kind of policy at higher grades where levels.
> AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.
Yeah, right. Did you forget a /s
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a363b6d-92ac-83ea-a619-41b2ecd9f5...
This is a popular game, still doing sales almost 18 years after release, with dozens of wiki fansites containing all the information, and with hundreds, if not thousands, of reddit postings... and it falls apart on the first answer!
No. Kids in school should not be using AI, because:
1. They won't be using the latest models, and
2. They can't tell if the info is accurate
[flagged]
[flagged]
Stupid people never have the appetite or ability to 'tackle' anything. It's their defining characteristic.
It's not more complex than stupid people in charge, stupid results follow. Smart people with integrity in charge, good things follow.
AI changes nothing.
AI has existed for decades. The average person has just discovered it / had it forced upon them. And just a small-subset of AI. The average person does not use real AI. And AI is not even well-defined.
Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning. AI will be used as a tool as a way of 'shaping' the mind of young people. Similar to using standardized textbooks. AI is too much of a political tool to be useful.
AI is a tool for propaganda.
> Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning
I am curious where you were educated to come to this conclusion. I don't think your statement holds generally true for all education as it is by definition teaching knowledge.
Sure, there might be institutions that do teaching and propaganda, but I think it shows a lack of awareness to generalize this to all education.
> AI is a tool for propaganda.
In my experience so far it's less of a propaganda than basically any other medium massively consumed today. It might become it one day though, like all othe media became it.
Totally agree!
For anyone who still thinks kids should use AI, another argument to make is we are still figuring out AI (hence the constant debate on it, hype, uncertainty, boundaries of its capabilities etc etc). I don't think anyone with right mind can disagree with that. Keeping that mind, wouldn't it make sense to at-the-very-least tread with caution when it comes to kids.
The counterargument is that kids will live in a world different from our own.
For example, in many countries children lost the ability to write cursive; that used to be a critical skill comparable to literacy itself. But in our current society, that's no longer the case and you can be very successful without it, but there are other skills, such as using technology, that became critical.
Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
But how do you know that letting kids use AI at a way earlier age is the right way to equip them for the world that they would live in? You don't even know what that world will be like, so you can't even draw the conclusion that teaching them AI today will create career success in the future.
And then there's the other solid supporting arguments:
- Humans today were able to comprehend and use AI as soon as ChatGPT became popular so kids today will be able to pick it up quickly as grown-ups.
- "Using AI" isn't really a skill because there isn't much to learn beyond typing to a chatbot and reading the output (creating agentic workflows are very much for power users).
- The form of AI tech today might not even be the same as its form in the future, so you're already teaching them something obsolete.
The point is that knowing what you don't know allows you to hedge your bets on events far into the future; my child will need to become productive 20 years from now and maintain it for 40-50 years. So, it's a bit like trying to educate a kid born in the 60s for the web era, you can't and you shouldn't even try.
What you can do though, is to offer them broad exposure to things that are interesting to them and their generation; my eastern block clone of the 8bit/48KB Spectrum computer didn't really help me excel at math, reading or history, nor was it to be the future of technology, but it did change my life significantly by letting me understand and relate to people that I couldn't otherwise have business dealings decades later.
It seems imprudent to cut children off from futuristic technology just because of a moral panic that it causes brain rot. Unless we know it's soma, a drug so powerful that it subdues volition and curtails intellectual development; we don't.
How do you know it's a moral panic and it isn't actually causing brain rot?
Everybody and their grandma can "use AI". Reading (and understanding what you read), writing (coherently) and calculating (in your head) are those basic skills that need to be trained and will give you an advantage no matter in what kind of world you live.
> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
I don't think this is as clear as you make it out to be.
There are areas (e.g. personal care as per the impact map released by Anthropic a few months ago) where the impact of AI will be less than in the ones HN often discusses. Communicating with people is important in many of these areas so making sure that kids "should learn" how to communicate is a good investment regardless of how rapidly technology is shifting. There are different time tested ways of doing this and while you can "disrupt" these a little, throwing them out completely is, at least to me, a bad idea.
OTOH, doubling down on learning "skills for the future" which are all bold bets while sacrificing things that have served humanity through multiple moments of change is probably a bad idea.
As for cursive writing (or atleast handwriting) itself, there are several studies of learning it being associated with developing fine motor control, improving memory, improving focus. I can't find them right now but I remember reading them because of my own interest in calligraphy. Many older (especially religious) traditions place emphasis on using written (rather than digitally typeset) books for memorisation because the slight changes in the shapes of the letters act as reinforcements for the process. I know this from experience as well so I think there's definitely value there.
I went through a Steiner school from pre-school to end of high school. It’s highly opinionated and very controlling initially. When you paint, you start with one colour. Then another day you get the next (there were only primary colours, because of course).
You eat at your desk, then you’re allowed to play. This was dropped after a year or so.
You don’t learn to read until you’re 7, etc etc.
However, by the end of high school it was up to the individual how much they achieved, and there was minimal pressure. As long as you weren’t messing with other kids, you could do a little or much as you please, and consequences were minimal.
Tools and skills were introduced at a developmentally appropriate age - not sure who chose that age though.
There was a lot wrong with the school and the system, but there was a lot more that was right in my opinion.
Yeah, I we considered a Steiner school because I think that extensive play is a super critical part of a good education. The problem is you also need to be able to be part of the mainstream system at some point, and it felt like it didn't necessarily quite meet that goal.
> The problem is you also need to be able to be part of the mainstream system at some point
There is a requirement to meet certain state mandated standards and the one I went to also took state funding, leading to dilution of Steiner influence/an improved curriculum. It depended which side you were on.
Also worth considering is that it is part of a broader ideology of Anthroposophy which sometimes aproaches semi cult status in how people identify with it. A lot of the principles of Steiner schools are actually pretty cool, but sending your kid there, depending on the school they will also be dealing with the more esoteric bits of all of this that have very little to do with didactic or pedagogic sound principles.
Some if it includes some schools teaching some of the more racists views of Mr Steiner.
This is probably true of every school that follows a philosophy or belief system.
It needs addressing. The school was white wealthy hippies when I was there. It’s vastly more representative now.
>> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
I'm not really sure what point you are making here. We can talk about stuff based on what we know now. AI definitely isn't there yet. Even adults are figuring it out, the limits of its capabilities and shortcomings. Its not even been 5 years, and we want to change everything everywhere.
So if we don't know if we should or should not, and take into account all the hype, marketing, hype, advantages and some potential disadvantages (which are quite serious) why not just go ahead when there is more confidence.
My 6 year olds have been writing cursive at school all year, they have a zero policy about phones until the age ~15, and still use books for everything. Not many schools do this anymore, but there are schools that still do.
You're absolutely right! Joined-up penmanship is exactly the same as our current asymmetry in absorbing reams of soullessly verbose, arrogant pablum shat out by the latest crop of "frontier" LLMs.
From a UK perspective it's very weird that kids in America don't learn to write joined-up.
How can you write sufficiently fast in an English or History exam (where you have to write a whole essay in limited time) if you're writing one letter at a time like a 6 year old?
I agree, but its also somewhat weird that the main reason kids learn to write cursive is for exams - its not a skill most of us use in adult life, and even for kids writing outside exams is often done on computers (e.g. my daughter's A level history coursework was done on, and submitted from, a computer).
Some of the exam boards are trialling computerised exams where exams are completed on computers instead of paper. Its cheaper for them to not have to handle paper (which gets scanned anyway). Its long been possible as an accessibility arrangement but it might become the norm.
> How can you write sufficiently fast in an English or History exam (where you have to write a whole essay in limited time) if you're writing one letter at a time like a 6 year old?
You use an ipad and keyboard or some other similar device. The only times in my life I have had to use cursive were in elementary school, pretty useless skill to have in this day and age.
iPads in exams? This just gets stranger and stranger
Just a tool to type with, it can be locked to prevent internet access or any other app.
This happens in the UK but only if you're literally disabled in some way so you can't write by hand, everyone else still uses pen and paper for all exams.
You're allowed to use a biro though, quills and inkwells are optional
I went to school in two different countries where I was taught/required to write joined-up, but I was never actually taught to write it quickly, only "correctly". I was (and of course still am) much faster at writing in block letters, so I'd draft my essays in block writing, then re-write it in joined-up to hand it in.
If your history exam grade hinges on your "typing speed", you had a bad teacher. It's not like you can not write sufficiently quickly using block letters.
Isn't that a straightforward argument for preserving the status quo as much as possible in learning? We know how to get people to learn without AI, so we should keep doing it until someone figures out how to use AI effectively.
Kids won't grow up into a world where it's not beneficial to know how to read or write or think.
>>>> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
I'd say this is the case in times of technological stability as well.
Education has always been based on heuristics: Teach A, B, and C, with the hope that people will gain X, Y, and Z. Avoid P, Q, and R. The suspicion that some forms of education are fructifying, and others are stultifying, are largely a matter of guesswork and social bias. Attempts to clear things up with "studies" tends to produce results on a par with pseudoscience. Our biases are all we've got.
The reaction to AI isn't the first time that parents have had to decide on the merits of educational technologies: Radio, TV, the early Internet, social media, etc. Even books. There was certainly a suspicion that TV and social media caused brain rot, or a related issue, moral rot.
Regarding your comment below, I was born in the 60s, and was certainly educated for the web era. I'm more adept with technology today, including AI, than most people half my age.
My children were required to learn Microsoft Office in elementary school, "for their careers."
Whether they should or not is a moot point. They are using it and we need to figure out how to organise society to deal with it.
We're in like year 2 or 3 of LLMs being serious tools, still with many disadvantages over humans. There's plenty of time to figure things out, we don't need to experiment on children right now.
Return to pen and paper, particularly for testing. Extend school time for doing supervised "homework" that doesn't involve the Internet.
Like that?
Yes, make the teachers on $25-35K annual salaries do /more/ work for no extra money. I'm sure that will fix education.
Just to be accurate, median annual salary is over $62k accross the US for kindergarten and elementary school teachers, with California nearing 100k.
[1] https://www.onetonline.org/link/localwages/25-2021.00?st=CA
I am conflicted on this. One part of me think that they deserve a lot more compensation. But I am not really sure if that should be in the form of a salary rise.
Why not?
Because those who are attracted by the high pay might not be the best ones to do the job.
I left teaching and have, literally, 10x'd my annual income after a few years. While teaching, I couldn't afford to support my family of four.
We don't need people stressing and struggling financially for the privilege of teaching our youth. That leaves those without a better option or have a working spouse.
So that is why I said teachers should be compensated well but may be by other means than paying out a large sum as salary.
For example, if you were able to get free education for your children as part of your payment, wouldn't that have made your life a lot easier?
that's true about every job. Even computers were better when nerds ran them.
While true, not all jobs are equally critical in that regard. A bad programmer probably can be detected easily. But the effects of a generation of bad teachers might only show up after many decades!
That's a straw man.
That pay range is roughly what teachers get in former-USSR/Warsaw Pact eastern Europe, and in those countries it's a comfortable income.
Also, going back to what they did a few years ago isn't "more work". May actually be less, given how often people look at AI output, roll their eyes, and say "ugh, slop".
Also also, questions of pay are obviously after society decides what it wants the role of a teacher to be and finds out how much it needs to spend to hire enough people who will do whatever that job turns out to be.
While a bit hyperbolic this is a major issue.
“Workload” has been a constant argument for just about any tech product we acquired at school. I’m very conflicted about this issue to be honest. I’m a member of one of those parent management boards type things, not sure what’s it called in English.
One the one hand I know how busy teachers are, on the other I also know how they never work to 5PM have twice my vacation days, while somehow never being able to meet to talk about issues. We get one ten minute session every few months at best.
If you put pressure on them they call in sick for weeks and good luck finding a replacement. I’m deeply worried that if teaching as a whole doesn’t get it together we will slowly be forced to use AI for everything because of lack of alternatives.
> figure out how to organise society to deal with it.
Yea, need to figure out to form society with participants who are incapable of thinking...
And to make matters worse the LLMs that is causing this cannot even really think!
13? there is no reason a minor should use a brain rotting technology like AI, in fact, AI for pretty much most teens is way WAY more damaging than even tiktok ever was.
Care to elaborate with an example?
https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
There’s another study by MSFT on a similar topic, and yesterday there was an article from Nature shared here on HN.
I'd add to it that most of the studies showing significant negative effects of LLM usage are on adults. This stuff is going to fry kids' still rapidly developing brains in a way that will make the COVID school lockdown kids look like they had it good.
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
I remember seeing an nyt article where there was mixed results on cell phone bans. While they increased socialization among students, the school didnt see better test scores.
We'll have to see if a ban on AI can improve test scores-I am bullish on the idea tho
I would see that as an absolute win. Socialization is the main point I send my kids to school.
Socialization leads to discourse which leads to learning.
British schools are often pretty clear that kids are not there to socialise - they will say it in so many words.
It also depends what you by socialisation. in terms of school people usually mean two distinct things: have opportunities to spend time in social interactions, and learning social skills.
My experience of taking kids out of school is that the first reduces (because they spend less time with other kids each day) but the second increases (because they meet a greater variety of people in a grater variety of places).
That takes me to my greatest concern with AI. That kids will socialise (in both senses) with AI rather than people. What will that do to their social skills? There are plenty of examples of adults doing that (visible in places like /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI ), but at least they grew up developing some social skills. If AI is a big part of your interactions, what will the effects of that be?
I agree but unfortunately the US education budget is driven by test scores.
Unless theres strong evidence that test scores will increase, Karen from the PTA insists that her child be given access to their phone
Socialization goes out of fashion at a rapid pace. If I were to guess, technology deprived kids will quickly catch up with the trend when they age out of the ban.
Also use of technology anti-correlated with alcohol and drug use so there might be unwelcome side effects.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20556365241270394
Looking at that meta study, the conclusions seems to be that this kind of studies on children take a lot of time and generally lack any control group, thus conclusions are going to be weak.
Here in Ontario they "banned" phones in class/school and the teens just ignore it and the teachers are unable/scared to enforce it. As parents we've tried over and over with both our kids to lay down the law -- including taking phones away, consequences etc -- but the attitude is intense with both them and their peers and enforcement becomes very difficult once they're out of "child account" parental control range.
It's a shitty time to be a parent of a teen.
Canadian schools operate under the principle of in loco parentis. Your administrators are just unwilling to do their jobs. If they laid down strict policies of zero tolerance and consequences for offenders that inconvenience the parents there would be compliance. Any parent not on board with such policies can send their kids elsewhere.
How about if we target the social media apps for their predatory algorithms?
That's precisely what needs to happen.
That said, my youngest just reads gaming wikis and hangs out on Discords for roguelike video games and this somehow consumes 900% of their attention span.
I'd say that's one of the best ways to spend time. It's okay to have a hobby even if it's just rougelike games. Much better than doomscrolling on Tiktok in every way.
Not when it takes precedence over... doing your math homework, touching grass, communicating with a real flesh and blood friend (or parent/sibling), showering...
That's wildly putting things off track. I meant spend time as in free time. I assumed and took for granted things such as showering or doing homework was already done and dusted. Other than that I think students do see each other at school every day anyway so communication is not as desperate as one might think.
Discords for xyz are as much universal hangout spaces as they are about xyz
the next movement would be blocking LTE/5G during courses. No social media = dumb phone
they don't seem to have the courage to do it. they don't even bother closing down the school wifi for a lot of stuff.
there's also parent who would boohoo about not being able to contact their kids all hours of the day
“Boohoo” is fine, but I think the reality is one of a) come to the school and scream at someone b) or threaten violence or c) a lawsuit.
> They can play with AI at home
Actually, in Europe, Gemini is officially not available for kids even at home [1]. In some countries like Germany, the restriction applies until 16 [2]. I find unsettling that even for supervised account, parents are forbidden to let their kids learn how to use Gemini, even between 14 and 16 yo.
Note that this restriction does not seem to appear from other AI company. So from outside, it looks like unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.
[1]: https://support.google.com/families/answer/16109150?hl=en#av...
[2]: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1350409?sjid=7871...
lol
> unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.
They are a company offering a product and they decided not to offer it to kids. It's not like they are telling you as a parent what you need to do. Why don't you get a similar product from a different company for your kids?
> They are a company offering a product and they decided not to offer it to kids. It's not like they are telling you as a parent what you need to do.
Fair enough! Indeed that would be a true issue only if the company had a monopoly.
Connect the dots also banned, though there is some discussion of loosening the rules to allow interpolating up to four points.
I don't understand what the controversy is in the US about banning phones in schools. I graduated highschool in the mid 2000s and cell phones were just starting to gain adoption in my town in the last couple years I was in school. I don't recall anyone using a phone in class, but Game Boys were definitely not allowed. I was surprised when I found out that kids were regularly on their phones in class. Why was that ever allowed? Did it get too hard to enforce and they gave up on it until recently?
I've heard a big problem is the parents - they want to be able to communicate with their kids while they are in school, so many parents oppose phone bans.
a large florida school district banned cell phones in schools, and after two years, the total benefit that was measured to be likely caused by this was +0.9 percentiles on their standardized achievement test.
in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.
how do dozens if not low hundreds of hours of time you are not spending on your phone at school translate to only the same benefit as doing ONE hour of studying? well, if there is no mechanism, then yeah, that's what happens.
so why was it ever allowed? either tests are severely limited in what they measure, or the impact of cell phones on education is actually quite small. it cannot be both.
Why was it allowed in the first place because why was it treated any different than other distractions in the classroom?
i don't know if you've been in an american classroom lately but the typical experience is that they're not that strict.
Schooling is more than just exams, I'm sorry. There is no need for a cell phone in a classroom.
Just ignoring the flimsy SAT metric, there's something most aren't considering in these sort of data. Cell phones enable and are fairly widely used for all sorts of cheating. Banning them gets rid of that, and so if there was no positive effect from a phone ban you'd actually probably expect a slight decrease on scores because of this effect.
So the fact that basically every school region that bans phones is seeing marginal to moderate gains is just huge. And as others have mentioned, test scores are but one aspect of this. Breaks where kids are playing and interacting more regularly are a million times better than ones where everybody whips out their screen and turns into a zombie.
A "million times better," or 0.9 percentiles better? You have no idea.
Of course I don't want kids to be distracted in school. I just think that if things were as easy as a ban, or some other kind of coercion, education would be easy.
You don't need to quantify things like socialization and real life interaction to know it's vastly better than not, and that's not even touching on the academic side of things where you are seeing clear quantifiable differences. Ultimately, education is easy. A century+ ago this [1] was a college admittance exam, which students were expected to be able to pass, and the overwhelming majority did.
It's not like we're making incremental progress over time. Education has become a dumpster fire, and it's getting worse. The solution is simple - stop changing stuff, and just go back to classical education methods that did work, phenomenally. Tech is clearly having detrimental effects on education, so get rid of it in the classroom. Starting with phones there is a mind bogglingly obvious low bar.
[1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...
> in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.
[citation needed]
[dead]
"and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
A big hooray for that."
I don't suppose they are allowed to use physical violence again, still I would like to know what exactly you are cheering here for?
I was cheering for the phones bit. I honestly hadn't noticed the dark undertones of "enforce discipline".
That's not dark, that's love.
It can be. But some also love dark shit.
You mean chatgpt style AI won't help them with those skills?
If a human parent or teacher can help with skills like reading, an AI system can too, once it's trained and designed to do so. (How good are humans at teaching reading anyway?)
>How good are humans at teaching reading anyway?
Writing developed thousands of years BCE. So, considering we as a species have been successfully teaching our offspring how to read for hundreds of generations, I'd say we're probably pretty decent at it.
It's funny how people let cultural narratives get in the way of actual analysis. I think some of it is modern convenience has made us intolerant of any imperfection then they label even minor imperfections as a catastrophe.
Yeah, it baffles me that the sentiment here is that AI can only hurt kids' reading ability, when AI (in the form of a chatbot) is practically a tool that forces its users to read a lot.
I still support for some sort of AI restriction for kids, though, since school is a place for kids to socializing. It's a more aspect important than reading and writing.
Not if they turn on voice mode, which is pretty excellent these days (at least in ChatGPT and Gemini.)
I do 100% support banning voice mode for school. (Again mostly for the socializing... or anti-socializing aspect.)
We need to remember there are going to be human admin tasks that still need human interaction and critical thought into what you read and write. Adult users of these tools already accept AI outputs without too much thought in varying scenarios.
As a child, your willingness to question a tool that’s already better then you at most tasks probably isn’t going too high, and if you go through early education without exercising critical thinking… well we can point to cursive reading/writing as an example of a skill that completely disappears from a generation when not practiced enough.
Good. My 4th grade cursive writing was a waste of time. Studying anything else would have been more beneficial.
I think what they meant was "no matter how common something used to be, once we stopped teaching it in school it got lost quickly. Example: cursive."
Not "we should keep teaching cursive indefinitely."
I had to learn regular writing after cursive at the age of 20 eventually when I was forced because my instructors at the university would not let me use cursive. Those times were BAD.
They need those skills to be able to communicate with others, not to .. research?
and with a structured tool, what better place to practice writing, process, iteration, revision, editing.
this happens constantly, every day. a current implementation of a technology isnt optimal so the entire class of anything related to that technology is treated as equally flawed.
the solution here is better tools, not preventing better tools from being created.
Sounds dystopian.
What kids need to learn to read is an adult to engage with them, listen to how they read and engage them on the contents of the book.
LOL
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
Isn't that expected in most countries in Europe? There's an aging overall population that is shrinking and immigration is rising. So you get a progressively rising percentage of immigrants among school students, many of those coming from 3rd world countries with non-functioning education systems.
Why is this the most upvoted comment, yet when the UK repents teens form social media it’s met with “aDulTs arE bEiNg monItoRed”.
I agree with Norway here, and it’s slightly exhausting to see people attack any country that’s trying to protect kids as somehow coming for everyone’s supposed sovereignty.
I care about the youth and know they are in the midst of a culture war with adults, leave them out of it until we figure out a path forward.
edit: (crazy to see +11 on my comment, and also -1 when refreshing. Clearly my comment is divisive. This is honestly validating that adults simply cannot find common ground in this topic - especially HN)
Because banning smartphones in schools doesn’t affect adults not in those schools, whereas age verification does?
How you implement these protections matter.
The rhetoric I often see online is forcing children to identify themselves which, obviously leads to adults being required to identify themselves.
How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?
It’s all complicated, but I am exhausted from reading doom articles of how the UK wants adults to not exist online while trying to force children offline for their own existence and long term health..
It’s worth me noting that I’m extremely liberal, but I’ve admittedly been failing to see how we keep children safe online without forcing identity of adulthood. We do not allow teens to buy cigarettes or vapes based on vibes either, right?
(please correct or roast me, I really am struggling with this and am tired of reading refutes that are not productive)
> How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?
It's pretty much impossible, so we should stop trying. It's exhausting seeing politicians et al continue to push for age verification despite it being impossible to be even remotely effective. (I hedge because technically we could demand photo ID for every HTTP request, I guess, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.)
The best we can do is ask parents to raise their children themselves and teach children to be mindful online (as we expect them to be IRL).
In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful. And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy, and the sites themselves not entirely infrequently demand ID from accounts at their own arbitrary and whimsical discretion.
The digital world is not like the real one. When you show your ID once all it's details are saved and can be searched across. When showing your ID to the cigarette vendor they will not notice most data and will have forgotten it a while later. So we need to be more careful with the data we give out digitally.
No ID is needed, just proof that you are above a certain age. There are technological solutions to just give out that data, but politicians seem to not want to go that way. This is the real issue, not age checking. The fear that age-checking means tracking...
Two things on this. The first is that at least in the EU they are actively pursuing reasonable technological solutions. [1] The second is that most of the 'usual suspects', the sites people are seeking to regulate, already require a phone number for an account. That enables tracking to a far greater due to a much larger traceable footprint than ID does, even if prevented directly. Even ID numbers are not particularly useful because most change whereas people usually try to keep the same phone number.
And on top of this those sites also have a tendency of demanding ID at their own whimsical and arbitrary discretion and often in even more invasive ways, like requiring a selfie of a person holding their ID along with a scanned, not even photographed, image of said id with all details clearly visible.
[1] - https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...
>In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful.
By what possible measure have they been overwhelmingly successful? Pornography and alcohol are still used regularly by a double-digit percentage of youth.
In the US more than 20% of kids are obese. Keeping in mind their absurdo high metabolisms, that requires just copious amounts of endless crap, and an excessive intake of sugar in particular. The reason this is the case is largely because this sort of consumption is perfectly normalized. We don't even have terms for addictions to sugar or eating.
By contrast, the rate of alcoholism among youth is extremely low. What do you think it would be if alcohol were completely legal? Prohibition on something doesn't mean it disappears. I fully expect my children to have some drinks when they go to parties, as I did. And I also fully expect they'll try, and fail, to hide their breath/drunkenness from me. And that's fine, I'll also play the role of being tricked. The whole point of the prohibition is that it denormalizes the behavior and keeps it hidden away, which does an overall phenomenal job of minimizing excessive consumption.
In person ID requirements all rely on punishing merchants if a minor fools them with a fake ID which aligns the incentives pretty well. It's hard to imagine how that would work online. Do you go to jail/pay thousands of dollars if someone hands their phone to their kid while logged in to Facebook or Google? You would if you sold beer to a kid who was given their parent's wallet.
Without an enforcement mechanism that punishes site owners the whole system fails. And you can't reasonably expect site owners to be responsible for checking ID on every request. So, it's (practically) impossible.
> And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy
Yep, and we* lost that argument and "think of the children" hysteria won.
* I would bet the same folks opposed to ID requirements now were opposed to phone number then
Sites don't require phone numbers because of any sort of law or regulation. They started requiring them on their own, likely in an effort to amplify their tracking efforts by being able to a high confidence unique identifier to an account which can be paired and cross-referenced with data from other sources to create ever more detailed and invasive profiles of people. Privacy with anything involving companies like Facebook or Google is just nonexistent. And people are fine with this, until there's actually a motivation that isn't outright dystopic.
The companies that would be punished in this case would be Google/Facebook/etc if found to be willingly complicit in enabling fraudulent underage access. And the poetic thing about this is that this is where their endless datamining comes back to bite them square in the ass. That'll be day 1 discovery in the lawsuits, because Google/Facebook/etc already know full well who's e.g. under 14, with an extremely high degree of accuracy.
In my view, it’s very simple. There are places like schools, or parents buying phone plans, to identify children. Will some children get access outside of that? Sure. But 100% enforcement isn’t possible even if you thought it was worth destroying privacy on the internet.
Age verification does not affect adults. But often when they say age verification they want to make you give out more data than "i am over 18"
Is Norway forcing all internet users to provide their ID to access all internet services?
So how would you know who is who?
Some other way without making all internet usage identifiable, like maybe parents start parenting? The UK laws aren't even to protect children anyway. It is just a shell to identify everyone online.
Everyone says this..it’s not working! The more kids are online, the less traditional parenting is working. It worked when I was younger, I didn’t know any better. Nowadays, a kid can go on Reddit or Roblox and be told otherwise. We had Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica..
..now kids have /r/ihatemyfamily or #fuckeverything
So your solution is to deanonymize the whole internet? Also can't teenagers ever vent? I would much rather them use websites such as Reddit or Facebook to socialize instead of Instagram or Tiktok to just scroll endlessly. We should target the social media apps for their predatory algorithms I believe.
Come up with a solution that works instead of a slogan.
The last person who divulged any details about what he meant when he said 'parents should parent' went on to reveal that parents should learn to manually configure home routers, a solution that is technologically unattainable for most parents. Again I ask, do you have a solution or a slogan?
I do not need to have the real secret of immortality to say to the emperor that swallowing mercury is bad.
The burden of proof is on those who put forward a solution.
You can say as much as you want about burden of proof and the way things should work. But society doesn't care. Trying to play Diplomacy like a chess game is a losing strategy.
maybe do not give your kids self-controlled access to devices with internet access?
Of course that isolates them from their peers who have less caring parents that give them access.
Cool. A non-viable solution, We'll keep encroaching on privacy. Have it your way.
The goal is to encroach on privacy, and those interests are using the children able to do it. There is no “solution” to the children using the internet anonymously problem that will satisfy them. We have to keep fighting for privacy.
Look, I don’t disagree. Kids need a safe space to moan. It would be hypocritical of me otherwise, as I spent much of my time in my formative years on ventrilo and various other niche pockets of the internet.
That said, the only cess pool that existed at the time was 4chan - which I avoided, despite actually knowing the founder.
The internet has obviously evolved a lot since, and I feel adults unfairly believe that all persons deserve the fully open internet. We’ve clearly reached beyond the point where most companies care about children, as it’s all profit at the end of the day for engagement. If you keep up with Apple, it’s no surprise they concisely spent a large portion of their precious WWDC showcase on child safety. There’s obvious pressure on them, but I also believe firmly Apple is fully aware the online world cannot behave the same way it has with children having access more easily than ever. It’s not like families share a single desktop computer anymore in the living room where all can see…
My (probably) bad comparison is still vapes and porn. Why should kids be allowed to purchase and view this online, but if they went into a retail store they would be denied? Why the double standard? Why immediately presume it’s about tracking adults? What proof do we have that identity verification is leading to adults being scrutinised and tracked? It all just feels like a tin foil hat fan fiction that has no proven purpose other than conspiracy and proof that every person should never be restricted, regardless of age.
Blocking acess to porn sites is as easy as setting up a firewall, my phone carrier has a feature called family shield, Google Parental Tools lets you see which websites your kid accessed, and restrict them. You do not need to ID everyone in order to let them access the internet. Did the past generations never got their hands on porn back then? Of course they did one way or another. Same with vapes or cigarettes or alcohol. There will always be a website out there that will provide free porn with no ID restriction residing in god knows where. This ID verification is useless and while it appears to be in good faith unfortunately it is not. I'd recommend watching a few videos about this such as this one from Louis Rossmann
https://youtu.be/Xa3-TkHBh90
In the end, yes there is a possibility that this won't happen, but there is a much bigger possibility that it will happen based on the track record of past bills.
[dead]
Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.
Plus "Generative AI" isn't one single thing. Using it to write your essay is cognitive offloading but using it as a Socratic tutor that gives immediate feedback and adapts to the student is closer to the thing education research says works.
There's an equity angle as well. A school ban doesn't ban AI at home. It bans the equalizing version. Kids in educated, rich households will get AI exposure from parents. Kids without that won't get it anywhere, because the one place where the field is leveled has opted out. If AI fluency becomes a differentiator in the labor market infrastructure which is very likely a 7 year exposure gap sorted by household class is the opposite of what public education is supposed to be for.
(edit: By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.)
I feel like two decades of data that it doesn’t work seems the opposite of shortsighted and reactionary.
It's not just Norway. Here in Australia many modern style schools were leaning hard into the digitized classroom era in the 2010s. Now slowly they're realizing their mistake
The problem is, a lot of the parents have bought into the digital parenting age too. They were told ipads etc were part of getting the best education for their kid. Now they're fighting hard on rolling it back (not least because they can't comprehend that it's a problem, that their child can't focus 5 minutes without a device)
Every parent knows that the Ipad is awful for their kid's education, but it keeps them quiet, so they happily take it.
I certainly believe that, but why did school systems jump on board, especially to be such early adopters as the 2010s, when the iphone was just a few years old? We used to use TV to keep kids quiet, but schools always talked about how bad it was.
For similar convenience as parents: less work on correcting homework and such
It stinks that investments are going to be unwound, but it would be worse to engage in a sunk-cost mindset and keep it digital. Since the move was made we've had research suggesting that writing by hand is superior at generating lasting recall and learning than typing.[1] There's very early evidence that skills we use AI for begin to atrophy. [2] Erring on the side of nurturing young people's minds while their ability to learn is maximized seems completely rational to me.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529... (Article is fine, but more importantly has multiple study links)
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1
Please define "AI fluency"? From what I see, it's mainly being able to write and read at a high level, and having a strong media litteracy and critical reasoning sense something you don't need AI for.
And having no TV and no smartphone at home and at school is likely the best way to acquire it.
By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.
I feel like "detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify" is the key skill, but it's also extremely demanding.
You need to have a very solid understanding of things like sources, and bias, and how to evaluate if something is likely to be true, and how to get to a credible answer.
Given the number of people online who try to read arguments with screenshots of a ChatGPT conversation, this is not an obvious process at all.
All of those skills have a half life of like 8 months.
> By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.
It's AI; by definition alone, those who don't know how to use it will reach competence within minutes, mastery within days.
> Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.
Sounds like following the evidence.
Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8. I don’t even like LLMs and I’m against this mess. Imagine having regulations rolled out when we were 8 saying “you can’t use the internet!” And I was running my own websites by 10 years old.
Let’s stop pretending this tech is as interesting as we wish it was. If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet. I don’t see the difference at this point.
> Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8
A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp for 2023:
> Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent.
The literacy proficiency levels section on https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp describes what Level 1 means:
> Adults at level 1 are able to locate information on a text page, find a relevant link from a website, and identify relevant text among multiple options when the relevant information is explicitly cued. They can understand the meaning of short texts, as well as the organization of lists or multiple sections within a single page.
28% of US adults are just at or below that level.
in the intermediate oecd [piaacs report] pages 64ff (PDF page 66ff) there are bar charts indicating the percentiles of each level for each participating nation.
the report also visualizes not only inter country but also intra country outcomes correlating socio economic influences (age, parents, family migration history, ...) and level of education (school, high school, college and higher) with test outcome (literacy, numerics problem solving)
it also has 10y ago/now comparison.
a trove for the Q "how are we doing, capability wise?"
thanks for pointing to the study!!
[piaacs report] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
A notable effect that skews those numbers a bit is that the test for literacy is often given in English only, meaning any people in the US who can read and write Spanish but not English are counted as illiterate. (It's slightly more complex than this, some states let you take it in Spanish, some have the option but still usually give it in English most of the time, but the effect is the same)
That's a really good catch. It looks like that 28% figure is specifically Level 1 or below in English literacy, which makes that number a whole lot less interesting for evaluating education levels.
I care about ability to comprehend text in someone's fluent language. The PIAAC figures don't appear to measure that.
Do you care about trends? Like an increase from 19% to 28% between 2017 and 2023?
Sure, but if that trend turns out to be an increase in non-English speakers it tells us less about the state of literacy, which is the thing I'm interested in here.
The national results page literally has a section where it shows separate results for native-born and non-native born participants. You claim that you're interested, so it's strange to see you speculate about what "turns out" when the answer is so conveniently available.
[dead]
[flagged]
When quoting a factual statistic is "shitting on the US", you're losing the ability to address issues.
It wasn't even a discussion about the US, why did we have to bring the US into it to begin with?
I don't know, but the person who did likely is in the US and by default cares mostly about it.
The US is a context that is generally relevant to HN, and for which we have lots of data.
Literacy is a worldwide problem.
The United States has always been at the forefront of pushing higher literacy both internally and world wide. We have just had multiple crazy tech breakthroughs, a world wide pandemic, and various other uncontrolled variables like SAT tests no longer being required at some institutions. It's impossible to draw any conclusions with so many moving pieces but ultimately I'm sure we'll figure it out. A slight regression isn't the end of the world.
Your 'slight regression' has lasted a lot longer than the last ten years, and is a real problem that has a significant effect on many people's lives. Again, this is not uniquely a US problem, but it is a problem.
Jingoistic deflection doesn't change that.
I appreciate the replies that just drive home how correct the observation is. Some of you hate the US, I get it. Some of you are probably bots or shills doing it for compensation. Some are just parrots. Some are actually in the US, of course, there's no loathing like self-loathing.
In this case it's the US that's shitting on the US. These numbers don't compare the US with other countries, they compare the US in 2023 with the US in 2017. And the numbers are from the US government National Center for Education Statistics.
[flagged]
Relevance of 'magot - a seated oriental figurine, usually of porcelain or ivory, with a grotesque form' to someone who criticizes the US? The allusion is too esoteric for me I'm afraid.
They meant MAGA
[flagged]
[flagged]
No one likes us, I don't know why We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try...
(Just mixing my Randy Newman metaphors for fun. I could have also thrown in a few words in defense of our country)
imagine still thinking we are at the top. The empire is crumbling.
Check in in 20 years. The gap between the US and whoever is in second place is enormous. I don't spend enough time on Reddit to think it's close or declining.
Two things can be true at the same time
[dead]
Yeah well unfortunately the US is pretty shitty in this day and age
Congrats, reinforce the point. Keep on making the online world shittier by making sure to push the narrative.
>A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.
Yes and AI isn't to blame for that as adults predate AI. It's the governments, schools, teachers, parents, teacher's unios, who taught them(or more accurately didn't teach them) and graduated them out of school anyway regardless just so they don't look bad in statistics. Sorry but if you graduate people out of high school who can't read you should be trialed for fraud. Simple as.
People blaming AI for adults unable to read puts us back to the 90s when Doom was to blame for school shootings or back to 60s when rock music was to blame for juvenile delinquency, all of them being wrong, and they're wrong here too. People always want to blame a third party external scapegoat that isn't' the parents and isn't the government, for the problems of their kids.
Nobody is blaming AI. The point is we don’t have the luxury of throwing nonsense at our kids when they’re illiterate. Particularly not nonsense where all the evidence shows it harms on average more than it helps.
Just wanna start off by saying that with young unformed minds, it does probably harm more on average than it helps. But particularly for spelling and reading, it might maybe actually help?
To be efficient with AI and LLMs you need to be good at least two things, reading and writing. One easy way of getting better is by reading a lot, and writing a lot. Maybe if we coax the kids into understanding (believing?) that better reading and writing helps them use AI better, they'd pay more attention to it?
No, you can talk to them, and have them talk back. And it's really easy. You don't need to be good at reading or writing to use it.
You mean you can place transcript/dictation in front of them, so you don't have to type your words but you can speak them, and the LLM will receive text? If so I'd still argue it's important to be able to read and write to be able to use them effectively, but I have to also be honest, I never met/seen anyone who couldn't read/write and was using an LLM, I might be very wrong here.
AI hasn't had a chance to demonstrate if it helps or hurts education yet.
That's the big problem with education in general. If you introduce a new factor to children's education you can't realistically measure the effect it has had for about five years, because you need to wait for a cohort of kids to go through that system and then see how they did.
This means that if you introduce something with clear negative effects it will be five years before you spot them!
That's pretty catastrophic given that ChatGPT only emerged in late 2022 and only got good around early 2024.
No?
https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
This also links back up to the Ironies of Automation, which came out decades ago.
The reports from teachers for the past few years have been pretty stark, with kids completely obviating homework.
Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.
>Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.
In countries like Finland kids don't get any homework. Though their society and school system optimizes more for child happiness, not winning international math Olympiads where you need to cram to get ahead.
> Even if the Finns don't need it, research suggests it makes a positive difference. Prof Susan Hallam from the Institute of Education says there is "hard evidence" that homework really does improve how well pupils achieve. "There is no question about that," she says. A study for the Department for Education found students who did two to three hours of homework per night were almost 10 times more likely to achieve five good GCSEs than those who did no homework
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-37716005
Finns appear to have a school system that works in a manner that suits their nation, and was reformed decades ago.
>A study for the Department for Education found students who did two to three hours of homework per night were almost 10 times more likely to achieve five good GCSEs than those who did no homework
It didn't control for why they were doing the homework. I'd bet if you did a study comparing two cohorts of students with identical social-economic status and IQ, you wouldn't see a significant difference.
That's not true, it absolutely depends on effect size. I'll give you an obvious example: large lead acetate infusions. You'll notice pretty fast.
OK so you can consider it was noticed.
Right, AI isn't to blame for that, but cell phones might be? The bad number increased from 19 to 28 percent between 2017 and 2023.
From what I can tell the average school at best can aspire to teach kids how to work and how to socialize. That's it. I'd personally be very happy with computers mostly going away from school too. Most actual learning and exploring will hopefully happen at home.
This is really not true. Kids do actually learn a lot in school - includong weak students. And you actually see huge difference between places with and without schools.
> and you actually see huge difference
Correlation, causation, and all that
Those are important skills schools teach, but I'm skeptical that most learning happens at home. I strongly suspect most adults learned to read and write because of the education they received in school, not home. Especially when it comes to the high school level and learning things like how to structure an essay or more advanced math. I doubt many parents are having their 16 year olds write essays and do trigonometry problems on the weekend.
Many kids in Norwegian schools do not speak Norwegian or English. Kids need "computers" just to translate what other kid is saying.
This is true for many children of non-English speaking immigrant parents anywhere in the developed world. Schools will use language immersion and extra help to get these kids up to speed very quickly. Computers are sometimes used for educational games and activities, but these can be done just as well without.
Can I guess that you are (native/ethnic) Norwegian and upset by the recent waves of immigration to Norway? Your comment is very specific, plus you used a new throwaway account.
It's very unlikely he's Norwegian because he has no clue how education works here.
No, they don’t. Especially in elementary school.
My living example - my kiddo didn’t speak a word in English until 4.5 years, when she went into preschool. Russian speaking home and daycare do that for you.
After 9 months in American preschool, she completely switched to English language as her primary. 2 years later, and she speaks Russian with strong accent.
Do you have a source for this?
I didn't have the internet when I was in school. Neither did my kids till they got to college. We've all gone pretty far. For myself, that's in the technology world as a software engineer.
Yes, there's also a push to ban all computers in classrooms because data is showing that it's of no benefit and if anything is a negative effect on education.
There is also a push to ban certain childhood vaccines amoungst crazy people in the US. What is being said here, really?
Example: what if Internet access was removed, but the computer remained? It would still be very useful.
Yeah but one is supported by science and the other isn't. It's nothing to do with internet access. The fact is that computers/ipads in classrooms are negative regardless of whether they're connected to the internet.
At eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills. They need a lot longer to develop those in tandem.
And also you may be above average there.
>At eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills.
I have two kids and can confidently say eight year olds generally have good language skills, are capable of expressing themselves just fine, and have good comprehension of the parts of the world that they've been exposed to.
So they can conduct a nuanced debate then?
Mine couldn’t until they were much older. And I have more so perhaps that’s more statistically valid?
>So they can conduct a nuanced debate then?
Oh, can I move the goalposts too?
The original claim was that "at eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills" and that they can't conduct debate is a relevant example of that.
By sheer irony, it would also suggest that the original poster had limited language comprehension skills and wasn't capable of evaluating an eight year old.
Nope. Language is more complicated than you think it is.
Can they identify easy stylistic device, like an extended metaphor or an anaphora?
Because until they do, I will consider their comprehension skills limited.
I guess you can consider mine limited too.
When I was 8, I could use the Internet at school but every website was whitelisted.
8 years olds shouldn’t be using the internet.
> If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet.
Now we're talkin'
I'm all for it, let's teach kids the fundamentals of the world without relying on computers before we introduce them
They can use it at home.
Using it school is likely undermining their learning.
If you think an 8 year old can comprehend text at the same level of a 13 year old (or an 18 year old for that matter), I don't know what to tell you. Reading comprehension doesn't peak at 8.
AI is not the internet, it's a stochastic parrot that lays golden eggs for its shareholders.
Spend a few minutes on the teacher subreddits: /r/teachers and /r/professors, specifically. AI has been a disaster for student outcomes and educator performance, more or less across the board. It should be banned in education, but there's no way to enforce that without increasing educator workload substantially (eliminating homework and re-working lesson plans around that; moving tests and projects back into the classroom; etc.)
Computers generally are stupid for schools. There should be a computer room and computer classes, but all other learning should happen offline. Computers are far too distracting.
Half of my classmates in university failed Compsci, they could not use a computer but they somehow could install Instagram, do basic video edits there and doomscroll. It is NOT conputers! Phones should be the main target.
But computer usage proficiency is not computer science either. These skills should be teached in a separate class. Agree with the gen z lack of computer skills though.
> without increasing educator workload substantially
Isn't this a good thing, employing more educators, building more schools?
Any sane society will always invest more into its future well being and incentivize investments into education.
Not sure what country you live in, but I don't think that the US falls under your definition of a "sane society"
Any modern country invest heavily in its future. There is no easier marker for that than education - literally laying groundwork for future of everybody.
Teachers should be paid and respected as much as doctors are, all levels, all age. But they should be skilled up too, every single one of them needs to be very good ad child psychology, no exception there even effin' gym teacher. If would arrange itself easily if they would be having doctor's salaries. They should be themselves role models, its #2 after parents usually.
US is not a modern country also in this aspect, its everybody for themselves, fuck the poor they didn't try hard enough and thats it. Wealth-based class society at best. Somebody has to clean pools and houses of rich folks anyway, it ain't gonna be their work colleagues.
That used to be the case, but it no longer is. Not only are budgets limited, only a few choose for a career in education, leaving schools already understaffed. Expansion is not feasible in the short run.
I would happily make a career switch if I had the feeling my work in a school would be useful and doable. Where I live, I tried it and it was neither of the two. After having experienced efficient companies, schools feel mind-boggingly stupid. And the policy of never failing students and reluctantly enforcing rules generates an serious waste of human energy.
I mean we have trillionaires now, budget limitations are a political choice. Perhaps instead of giving all our resources to Elon we can, you know, pay teachers instead.
I think like every field this revolution reveals the cracks, good teachers use AI to enhance teaching material and experience for students while weak teachers complaint they can't keep up with student's access to Ai that out-paces them.
AI forces us all in every field to be better at what we do, and coupled with the previous innovation of the internet only reveals the drastic variance in quality of skills. Teaching is no different.
Good teachers use AI. Bad teachers complain AI is ruining their job, but I posit it's only revealing they were never able to excel beyond their students in the first place.
A savant exceeds their teacher fast. Even faster with AI.
Banning it in classrooms isn't going to fix things, not when adults are broadcasting to students that (in the actual words of Sam Altman) "intelligence will be too cheap to meter", that (in the words of Darius Amodei) half of white collar jobs will be gone by the time these students graduate school, and so on. If intelligence is too cheap to meter, mental labor is a losing proposition. We've also spent decades emphasizing STEM and de-emphasizing arts and culture. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?
So, it's no surprise they're going to opt out of a system that's investing trillions to make education useless.
Even if the people building this world are wrong -- not all students are equipped to call some of the wealthiest people in the world complete bullshitters. Not all adults are ready to call them out as bullshitters, for that matter.
> If intelligence is too cheap to meter, selling your mental labor is a losing proposition. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?
The ban is for elementary school. I don't know about you, but when I was 11, what motivated me to go to school definitely wasn't the idea that I could monetize my intelligence later on.
11 year olds don’t want to go to school.
What is your point? Are you going to subject your parenting to their whims or are you going to be an adult and discipline them into doing what is right for them?
Granted, an 11-year old who doesn't want to go to school is already symptomatic of many years of failure of parenting, but 11 is such a young age and there's certainly plenty of room to stimulate their curiosity. What kind of an adult would deliberately raise their children to know so little of this world?
lol how many kids do you have?
I’d argue education (especially those early years) is less about making them good white collar workers and moreso making them well rounded people. Education has value beyond monetary gains
"intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.
What makes you think school students are being told that? I've heard that they are told everyone will be using AI to help them write.
> "intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.
They’ve always been metering AI access (whether this is meaningfully intelligence is a separate question), but that doesn’t prove that there isn’t some time in the future where it won’t be worth metering, only that if there will be, it isn’t here yet.
OTOH, it is still worth noting that from a a consumer-of-the-service perspective, the trend is for more metering, not less (even if that is due at least in part to the rollback off unsustainable subsidies and not to the fundamnetal shifting what is sustainable farther from unmetered access.)
Do you think they're too illiterate to read what industry leaders are saying? I assure you they're not.
Hm maybe I was sheltered or something but I was definitely not reading what industry leaders were saying when I was under 13. I don't think I really even knew who industry leaders were at that time...
I was definitely reading articles online by the age of 13. This is not exactly a small part of the discourse.
I'd expect, at this point, it's rather hard to avoid hearing about AI and its impact.
it'll start to raise the question of not only is college not worth it, but why should we even have compulsory education through high school? (just think of all the money we could save aka spend on the military instead)
rising tides lift all boats
school wasn't compulsory for most of human history. private schooling was the norm, and private school, like now, was very expensive. as a result, most people worked physical jobs and gained limited skills beyond this.
the idea of public school where everyone had a fair shot of developing skills for knowledge work was an extremely progressive concept in the beginning. what you're asking is the impact of undoing this. many states are essentially trying this through private school vouchers funded by public school dollars.
i think is a very unfortunate regression; unfortunately, it takes a generation of change for impacts to realize.
> what you're asking is the impact of undoing this
I was being sarcastic. But this could become a serious question: in the (near) future, if academic skills no longer matter for the vast majority of jobs, then the State's responsibility to fund public education will be called into question -- maybe it would stop at 14 when kids can read/write and do basic math. If you want more, do it on your own dime.
I hope not, but we already have the Trump WH trying to chip away at public education - and that's without AI in the picture.
I would not build my philosophy on the marketing talk of a well-known impulsive liar. Sam, by his own admission, does not even know that much about LLMs, but he is so good at sales that somehow people take what he says for gospel anyway.
[flagged]
[flagged]
He’s either an anthropic employee or a joker, just based on basic timeline math
Yes, I hoped it would've come across as so without the /s. Just goes to show where our fellow engineers are at. "Memory safety is humanity's last problem. Once we solve that then all of life's problems will naturally follow."
I think this is basically right. You don’t hand out calculators before kids understand arithmetic. LLM version is sneakier because skipping the work still produces something that looks finished.
Actually, calculators were banned in my school until 10th grade or so. I understood the reasoning at the time and still think it was a good thing.
But I think the AI topic is a double-edged sword. Those tools can help tremendously when used in the right setting (e.g., similar to how brilliant.org works) and can easily spoil the whole learning effort when used wrongly.
I am not convinced that a ban is the solution, but probably better than doing nothing.
A calculator gives you an answer. An LLM gives you an answer that sounds like it already checked itself.
Not quite. The LLM gives you a statistically probable sounding token stream. The calculator gives you a qualified answer within documented and deterministic limits of the device.
No one knows how to use either.
That is GPT-3. Modern models are rewarded based off the accuracy of their responses.
By... another AI model. Which uses statistical generation to decide whether the answer is likely to be accurate or not.
Which still makes it more than probabilistic sounding words.
Compounding one probabilistic LLM with another seems to compound the probabilistic nature, not reduce it.
Wait, have we solved hallucination already?
We've gotten better at it, but it's not a problem that can be solved (ignoring solutions like saying I don't know to all questions).
No they are not
[flagged]
Im confused, are there tasks given to 6 to 13 year old to use AI?
In the classroom, are they just throwing gpt in front of them? Is that the modern equivalent of watching a vhs?
Or do they have homework to vibe code something or given some prompts to ask at home and save somewhere?
Serious question, what does this mean?
Teacher uses AI, creates lesson plan -> AI creates assignments -> Teacher gives assignments to students -> Students use AI to do assignment -> Teacher grades with AI -> Principal uses AI to monitor teachers progress.
This is happening at schools nationwide. It is unstoppable at this point. It's a bizarre charade.
You forgot the parasite companies that sit between the teachers/student/principal which pretend they detect the big bad AI assisted/generated work to punish individuals using AI (with a majority of false positives and always late by 1 generation of models). The charade wouldn't be complete without rent seeking intermediaries.
> eacher uses AI, creates lesson plan -> AI creates assignments -> Teacher gives assignments to students |
Up to this point, it's actually completely fine. LLMs do an excellent job up to here.
> | Teacher grades with AI -> Principal uses AI to monitor teachers progress.
Again, this is probably mostly fine. Assuming they are taking it seriously, this is also fine.
> Students use AI to do assignment
This is singularly the section of the loop that AI has no place in. The ENTIRE point of the education system is for the students to learn how to use their brains to accomplish tasks.
AI shouldn't really be needed for every lesson plan as:
* Lessons can have a generic core to base off, like learning objectives, content, methods, vocab, tools, experiments, etc.
* Routines are important for kids, so the same set of learning methods, activities are familiar and don't need to be taught themselves - there is no need (indeed it is detrimental) to have new activities each class.
* The teacher should know their class better than AI for customisation (for now, until every student gets monitored for everything); a lot of customisation from systematic marking, etc, can exist without AI and simply by being planned and using deterministic tools.
AI can spice things up, for sure. But using AI systematically for lesson planning suggests -
A. The teacher doesn't have access to what should be a solved problem: tens of thousands of teachers repeating the same lesson plan from scratch - even with AI - across the country is not efficient.
B. The teacher doens't have planning time or skills in order to implement a systematic course plan, formative assessment and on-going improvement system.
Using AI to rush or bootstrap A or B suggests their problem is systematic and that AI will not solve this. In programming lingo, AI use hides further accumulation of technical debt.
It speaks to the nonsensical structure of the education system, that it functions just fine having optimized out the education.
Nobody seems to care enough to do anything about it.
This isn't about teachers using Ai to make their life easier, otherwise it wouldn't only apply to elementary school, and from what I read it applies to students.
Students likely aren't allowed to use AI anyway for assignments. Or are they? That's the question, what is actually being banned if anything
"Students likely aren't allowed to use AI anyway for assignments"
This can be reduced to "Do students have access to a phone". Good luck after 12 years of age with that. That is a tough war.
AI starts charging money -> Everybody stops using it.
Nah, they're always going to have a free tier, that's how they get you hooked to their service. It might be even ad-supported in the future (watch an ad to earn credits, or by inserting sponsored content in the responses).
Plus the free tier gives them loads of new training data. I do agree we will see two types of adverts soon: Traditional and submarine (paid-placement).
The same thing is happening in business settings. There's more words being sent around than ever before, with an ever lowering percentage that is read by humans. There has to be a way to stop the madness.
There where no clear rules on the matter. Now the PM has given some guidance to schools so they know when they should use it and not.
If there are no guidance teachers and schools can do what they want and some teachers would probably go to far to early
I have three children in that age span in a Norwegian school. For the ages 10-13, ChatGPT and the like has frequently been used in the classroom to help with the cold start problem when doing writing assignments, and for getting feedback on written work before handing in to the teachers. Also frequently used as a brainstorming tool or for writing whole speaches or presentations that should be held in front of the class or school. As for doing homework, the school-provided and school-managed iPad has (had I should say) www.chatgpt.com whitelisted, so using these tools also for homework is at least not blocked, and sometimes encouraged.
My children has at least not yet received any tasks or homework using AI for coding. They teach less coding in school now compared to when I was at the same age, at least at my elementary school.
> ChatGPT and the like has frequently been used in the classroom to help with the cold start problem when doing writing assignments, and for getting feedback on written work before handing in to the teachers. Also frequently used as a brainstorming tool or for writing whole speaches or presentations that should be held in front of the class or school.
Aren't those things critical thinking? We do we want to prevent the acquisition of critical thinking skills.
What things do you mean represent critical thinking?
The cold start problem in creating a piece of content requires executive decision-making (planning, design, selection). That's a critical-thinking type of skill (examine existing options, determine relevancy, determine good arguments from bad, etc).
Reviewing your own work requires critical thinking, almost by definition!
Brain-storming likewise requires some elements of critical thinking.
Writing entire speeches and presentations is almost all critical thinking, as it covers the gamut from planning all the way to implementation and execution.
Completely agree, and I think outsourcing critical thinking to AI is a bad idea for learning. Here is one study that researched AI assistance in a writing/learning context: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872.
The teachers that have instructed using AI for assistance in our school seems focused on teaching how to technically use specifically ChatGPT (that particular product, not AI in general), and on the courage to speak in front of people. Learning how to speak in front of people is a noble goal, but I believe any person would be better prepared for speaking if they had done the hard work of writing in the first place.
Thank you for the first hand feedback. I am assuming that you did similar assignments at the same age. Yet, you did not have the same tools. When I think back on my own LLM-free educational experiences, brainstorming was a hard mental skill to master. Some might argue it is one of the hardest as it requires some imagination, then critical thinking skills to filter the ideas. Can you comment about this? To be clear, I am trolling/baiting with my question.
Baiting accepted :-)
Well not all types of assignments are alike, I was not required to write nor hold a speech at school, as my eldest was at 13. I would be absolutely terrified to present in front of more than half my class, and they now speak to their whole school. But on the other hand, learning how to brainstorm effectively both alone and in groups is such a rewarding skill to have. And since brainstorming is something taught from elementary school all the way up to university level (I had it as part of a master’s degree), I would assume this means some pedagogs think it is both important and difficult. If you have learned about ‘anchoring’ in negotiations or brainstorming contexts, you would know how important the initial ideas or suggestions or proposals are for the rest of the process and the outcome. So I believe that it is very negative to be outsourcing the initial stage of using your own creativity. There have been studies showing negative effects on performance, learning and memory when outsourcing the initial stage or getting help from AI in this stage, while the opposite is true when using AI for review later. Do not remember the exact source, was something that popped into my feed. So I think you are correct.
Secondly, I started learning programming in elementary school at the age of 10 in the late 90s, we had a couple of hours in the computer lab a week doing creative open-ended projects. Today the local school teaches how to use an iPad with OneNote and Kahoot in 1st-4th, and performing predefined recipies for MicroBit or BlueBot in 5th-6th grade. Not sure how that is an improvement.
So in conclusion, I support the policy to restrict the use of tech in school. The tools should support the higher goals, and sometimes doing hard work is actually required.
The post from my feed: https://davidepstein.substack.com/p/how-to-use-chatgpt-witho..., with the corresponding article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
A kid gets homework to do a writing assignment online. Kid goes on chatgpt. "Chatgpt do this work, heres the assignment' ctrl c + ctrl v Chatgpt spits out a good answer.
Kid spent no time doing homework and learned nothing
Or imagine a reading log(typing out what you read) to encourage a kid to read, you have AI that can copy and paste your homework for you
Maybe homework should be handwritten again? OCRs got good.
Well one can no longer search for information in the big search engines without it just giving you the answer.
This ruins “search and topic and write about it”
I guess Norwegian schools will have to use smaller / alternative search engines now?
Or they can disable "AI" from the search results to only get "traditional" search results.
Or books.
Yes, please.
likely preemptive
Social media execs are already known for keeping their children off their platforms* and even phones so my question is: Do the leading ML/AI people let their children interact with LLMs yes or no?
[*] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/13/youtubes-ceo-is-latest-tech-...
Broadly speaking, the wealthier the parents the more restrictive device is in general in the household.
This used to be a tech/non-tech line. It shifted to class sometime over the last ten years. The iPad kids are probably getting served slop. The AI-employed parents don’t have to directly police AI exposure because their kids’ device use is already controlled; at school, at extra-curriculars and at home.
The question is do the allow them to use their laptops to access llms. Like I assume before ai they where not allowing the kids to fry their brains doom scrolling but would allow programming. They weren't blocking all tech as they aren't raising subsistence farmers.
> I assume before ai they where not allowing the kids to fry their brains doom scrolling but would allow programming
Young kids don’t need to learn programming. They need to learn math, reading, spatial reasoning and social skills. (Among other things.)
The kids who were being taught Java in elementary school ten years ago aren’t particularly better off for it.
I figure they let them use Wikipedia, google etc. before though so I am curious where the line exists now.
there is a difference in a kid asking a LLM to explain 0! or 0^0 and to ask it to be its friend.
The difference is between asking to explain x^y and reading and understanding the why and maybe go through a test, vs asking to do my homework for me and then go back to video games quickly. If the whole idea of using LLMs is to reduce effort on the part of the pupil, you are probably holding it wrong.
Completely understandable.
My 6yo kiddo recently realized that smart speaker (Google home) can not only play her favorite songs, but answer her homework questions. And it was something not that trivial, like “which animal from the list changes color of its fur when seasons change: tiger, arctic fox, something else”.
And now I need to either disable everything or figure out how to turn that off for her.
Teach them right and yeet the surveillance device altogether
> And now I need to either disable everything or figure out how to turn that off for her.
Why?
I tell me 6yo "That's for adults only, children are not allowed to use it" and not have to worry.
Sure, he'll push boundaries here and there, but with some things he knows "No means no" and doesn't push those boundaries.
I have literally tested this: left a cookie on the table (that he wants) and told him "You can eat that cookie after you finish the thing you are reading" and left the room.
Teaching kids to not succumb to their instant-gratification instincts is part of being a parent.
You tested it, i doubt you authored it. A paternal twin can have one with good impulse control and another who's more instinctual. Even in the same family and upbringing.
At the end both will have to live in same society, and this society will not care whats their background and issues. Perform as expected and get reward, or otherwise not so much.
Everybody can be taught some degree of behavior even if it may require different amount / type of effort, I refuse to believe it ain't true apart from most extreme cases.
> A paternal twin can have one with good impulse control and another who's more instinctual. Even in the same family and upbringing.
Sure it happens, but it's unlikely.
It's why kids from certain cultures achieve better academic success on average than kids from other cultures, on average: the environment matters a lot.
It’s okay to pat yourself on the back sometimes, but you have 0 idea about me/my kid, if she’s neurotypical or neurodivergent.
So I suggest to keep unasked parental advices or expectations how other kids should behave to yourself.
> So I suggest to keep unasked parental advices or expectations how other kids should behave to yourself.
Forget it. Not gonna happen, on a story about kid's development, in a thread about lack of impulse control.
Sure, there could be physiological reasons for a given child to have a lack of impulse control, but in practice most of a child's characteristics are going to be from the environment.
If we agree that a child is a product of their environment, we have to extend that same grace to the parents (and parents’ parents ad infinitum). They are also products of their environments, genetics, and upbringings. Turtles all the way down. It’s unrealistic to expect parents who were given different tools, different neurobiology, and different levels of support to all produce children with identical levels of impulse control. The playing field isn't level.
It’s hard to parse the tone in comments like this, and I’m sorry if am off the mark here, but a little more compassion and consideration makes life and everyone better.
I'm glad this is the case. It is the correct outcome.
I've heard students actually discussing that they will just use an LLM to shortcut work. I even have friends in their 50s who can barely think for themselves now without having to refer to "AI". And at least two of them are teachers.
Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.
No one taught anything of value. No one learned anything of value. I am very worried we'll see a lost generation at some point rippling through the ages.
> Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.
They have also been explicitly told by the department of education to NOT do this, but it hasn't stopped lazy teachers all over. Apparently not doing your job, in direct contradiction to your given rules, is ok because "it's the future".
AI used to write homework should be banned.
AI in 1:1 tutor mode with proper hardware (live scanning pen and paper), harness and guardrails should be wildly successful (in terms of education outcomes) especially in elementary school.
Disagree. AI has no business being used in 1:1 tutor mode before the hallucination and sycophancy issues are completely resolved. As is, I can easily see it being a hindrance to building actual understanding.
Just one example - it's very common to see ChatGPT and the like respond with "you're absolutely correct! Great insight" to something that is a complete misunderstanding.
This is specifically a consumer model (or specifically ChatGPT) issue. e.g. IME codex does not do this, and will just tell you when you're missing something or somehow wrong, and Gemini does this weird thing where it tells you you're a genius and then immediately starts correcting everything you said.
Sycophancy is just one aspect of the problems I mentioned, though. Another huge one is hallucination, and one that is actually far worse than I thought:
> It’s been proven that when a model is trained on large volumes of highly factual and non-theoretical data, it learns to always have an answer. DeepSeek V4 Pro (1.6T params, 49B active, 44 AA Intelligence Index score) has a ludicrous 94% hallucination score on the AA-Omniscience benchmark, meaning on questions that it couldn’t figure out, it only stated that it didn’t know around 6% of the time, and the rest it confidently hallucinated an answer. GLM-5.2 scored a 28% hallucination rate, Opus 4.8 was 36%, Fable 5 was 48%, and GPT-5.5 was 86%.
https://arrowtsx.dev/bigger-models/
I think even a 5% hallucination rate would be terrible for a teacher, who should generally be comfortable with saying "I don't know off the top of my head but here is how to find resources to answer your question".
---
So, just to drive the point home, Codex has an 86.9% hallucination rate on the AA-omniscience score in this index https://benchlm.ai/models/gpt-5-3-codex - if you ask it something that wasn't sufficiently covered in its training data, it will confidently make up an answer nearly 87% of the time.
While you might think it is happy to correct you when you are wrong, you don't know that for sure since you don't know when you're wrong. Codex may have been happily agreeing with you about things you had completely backwards.
Except I generally do know when I'm wrong because I'm working in a domain I am familiar with, and it will often create experiments on the fly unprompted (well, prompted, but generically in AGENTS.MD) to check itself. My experience actually using it for software is that it almost never makes up answers. The answer for hallucinations is fairly simple: give it facts and tools to ground itself.
> Except I generally do know when I'm wrong because I'm working in a domain I am familiar with, and … My experience actually using it for software is that it almost never makes up answers.
Yes I am certain that it feels that way. However empirical testing holds a lot more weight than anecdotes.
> The answer for hallucinations is fairly simple: give it facts and tools to ground itself.
The entire danger here is that it hallucinates when you don’t know the ground facts. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know.
> Gemini does this weird thing where it tells you you're a genius and then immediately starts correcting everything you said.
That's a great way to get you to listen because your guard is down. Imagine if it told you you were an idiot and then corrected you.
Just realized 1:1 AI is 90s self-esteem medals-for-everyone parenting on steroids.
Teachers hallucinate too. I’ve had creationists and communists and tin-foil-hat (chem trails, 5g, etc) teachers. Surely you can imagine an AI tutor that is higher than zero ROI.
> I’ve had creationists and communists and tin-foil-hat (chem trails, 5g, etc) teachers.
I certainly have, too, but there is still a difference between a person who has a factually incorrect but consistent worldview and an LLM which simply reflects the worldview of the user or even changes between queries.
I don't think creationists have any business being in schools either, for what it's worth, but I think it's easier for a teenager to sort out "Mr. Smith has no clue what he's talking about" vs "I have no clue what's true because the LLM everyone expects me to learn from just confirms everything I ask regardless of what I'm asking".
A bit part of education is (should be) independent learning with textbooks and reading. You don't need to be "tutored".
Tutors should be able to approximate the ZPD better than any student can. Most students lack intrinsic motivation and it's a tutor's job to help them get started.
Okay, I was generalising from experience; most students I've met lack intrinsic motivation. School systems typically encourage students to depend on extrinsic motivation.
That’s rather disingenuous. But it seems nowadays that words have lost meaning… so, I don’t blame you. I blame the LLMs for this deterioration.
lol scraping the bottom of the barrel
We thought the same of electronic devices in general and digital learning content specifically. In actual practice both result in lowered test scores and declining critical thinking skills.
Tutor mode sucks because even if it was actually accurate and didn't hallucinate, it isn't scoped to what the class is actually covering within a given topic.
Best AI is still your own brain, trained on paying attention in class and reading the assigned content.
One to one human tutors are the best way of educating kids and they are not scoped to what a class is covering. They teach the kid as an individual: they are effective because they can adjust to the kids abilities and interests.
It would be a shitty tutor if they never asked to see your textbook and what sort of material you'd work on. You'd legitimately waste time covering stuff that won't ever be tested.
> AI in 1:1 tutor mode with proper hardware, harness and guardrails should be wildly successful
I’m open to the idea! Show me the evidence. Then we can roll it out to our kids.
Glad you’re asking. https://cepr.org/publications/dp21577
“AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years.”
Yup. Short-term metrics juice. Actual comprehension and cognition falls. This seems to be the case across the board, including with adults.
I’m genuinely optimistic that there is a way to make AI helpful in education. I just don’t think we’ve found it yet. (We certainly haven’t demonstrated it.)
> reduces completion time by 30%
This is probably the big problem, or at least one of them.. If you use less time on learning, it will probably be harder to remember what you learned also. We need to spend some time to make it stick
The behavioral issue I see is that LLM users tend to immediately reach for an LLM and do their thinking in concert with it.
This tempts users to approach problems by first feeding them into the LLM and then simply following the route the LLM lays out, which does improve task completion time for tasks that the LLM can simply regurgitate, but it stops the user from developing the actual critical thinking skills that school is supposed to teach.
It’s not just critical thinking skills, it’s also that there’s a big difference between recognition/following instructions, and recall/generating your own memories of an approach. But most students don’t recognize the difference. In other words, “following the route” is a big part of the problem - it doesn’t engage the brain the same and isn’t representative of real world use, and having something explained well doesn’t mean you can in turn explain it well yourself (the more revealing test of internalized true understanding)
Can agree on that.
The description of the paper also said:
AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.
This was a surprise too me. I would have thought otherwise.
Would love to see some evidence about if more or less people fall behind and have worse results. In my head the AI should be able to get the weakest students a bit highere.
> In my head the AI should be able to get the weakest students a bit higher
I think the evidence so far is all students lose learning and cognition, but the brighter students lose less.
Based on the paper it hits harder on the brighter
From https://cepr.org/publications/dp21577 :
The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys.
No mention of the weakest student. Which probably means they did not have a significant worse or better score
> reach for an LLM and do their thinking in concert with it
This basically models how the intellectual work is going to be overwhelmingly done in the future.
With AI — +18%, without AI — -20%. Conclusion?
I think AI could (and by some students probably already is) be used to help a student better understand the material, and faster than you could before. I still recall some parts of Physics taking a while to click, and often having to reread different sections of a textbook to try and understand the what and why behind something.
The biggest issue is a child has to want to do that, since they also could just ask the AI for the answer and then go back to playing video games. End of the day past age 13 or so I just don't see legislation making any difference, they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting.
> I think AI could (and by some students probably already is) be used to help a student better understand the material, and faster than you could before
I think so too. But we haven’t demonstrated we’ve found how, in kids or in adults.
> biggest issue is
We genuinely don’t know what the biggest issue is. We just know it doesn’t work. There is zero quality evidence for AI helping with learning or cognition in kids or adults. (Happy to be proven wrong. This is a fast-moving and big field.)
> they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting
And community. Rich towns restrict devices in school, monitor use at home and thus will have less of an issue with AI exposure.
>I think so too. But we haven’t demonstrated we’ve found how, in kids or in adults.
Ask chatgpt or claude, on their highest model (probably unnecessary but I'm sensing a vibe) to explain a simple linear algebra problem, and if you don't understand it, ask about what part you don't understand.
And if you truly believe it made something up, prove it.
This is seriously the easiest thing to prove out there, you can see for yourself in the next 5 minutes.
> And if you truly believe it made something up, prove it.
You seem to be assuming that the issue is around factual correctness, and that may be the case but the evidence we have so far doesn't support jumping to such a narrow cause.
Is the poor performance because the LLMs are frequently wrong? Unknown.
Is it because the LLMs are sycophantic? Unknown.
Is it because the chat interface is a poor one for learning? Unknown.
What we do know is that students who rely on LLMs learn less and perform worse in the long term. And that alone is enough evidence to support a ban. If better tools come along in the future and are shown to aid learning, then the ban can be re-evaluated.
Sure. I already know linear algebra. If it’s a new branch of mathematics, this is a terrible way to learn.
Again, the research points almost exclusively in one direction when it comes to learning and cognition around AI. You’ll solve more problems more quickly but wind up learning and thinking less.
Honestly, what do you think a teacher does that an llm can't? If you want to learn you absolutely can ask an llm how to _solve_ x and explain the steps and why.
My leaving out the word solve seems to have led some of you astray, I apologize.
Again the problem is you have the option to solve your problem and move on without understanding it. That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it.
I live in fear that instead of learning how to use the tool, some might just vote to ban the tool.
> what do you think a teacher does that an llm can't?
I don’t know! It’s an interesting question. All we know is it does.
> That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it
It doesn’t. But we have no evidence it can.
We have lots of evidence of people thinking they’ve learned something, taking a benchmarking test, and being found wholly deficient compared to folks who worked through a textbook, went to a class or even solved problems off YouTube videos or instructional websites.
lol people like this guy prove AI psychosis is legit.
If you can’t figure out what the value add of a human teacher is then.. fkin lmao. It’s well beyond simply transmission of information.
The best teachers have passion - that passion is infectious. I was lucky enough to experience that and it grew my curiosity.
LLM’s provide no such equivalent.
> best teachers have passion
Not everyone has the “best teachers.” And passion is undefined. This is not a real argument.
The calculus teacher I had had a 4.7 ap test average (it's a test score 1-5).
My physics teacher had a 2.2.
But even still, these teachers have 20+ students. If you struggle with a topic it can pay dividends to have it explained for you.
> to explain a simple linear algebra problem, and if you don't understand it, ask about what part you don't understand.
The goal is not to understand a linear algebra problem. The goal is to learn how to solve it using lessons and techniques taught beforehand. Aka not to get a fish, but learning how to fish.
I'm sorry the wording of my post didn't match what you wanted.
Type in "Explain how to solve a simple linear algebra problem" into the AI of your choice instead.
> Type in "Explain how to solve a simple linear algebra problem" into the AI of your choice instead.
I’ve seen this particular philosophy in college where the student focus exclusively on passing exams. They would memorize notes and past exercises. The focus is on solving a particular set of exercises instead of understanding the concepts. Change things slightly and they’re lost.
That may not matter in college where you can focus on a few disciplines and half-ass the rest. But everything in lower stages is truly foundational.
> Type in "Explain how to solve a simple linear algebra problem" into the AI of your choice instead
I’m more interested in seeing how someone who teaches themselves with this approach scores on a standardized exam of linear-algebra competence.
A crucial part of learning is struggling with understanding and overcoming problems by yourself. AI removes that part.
>AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.
Seems like there's no benefit even if it's used "correctly"?
Care to give us the bits you found interesting in the paper to spare me plonking down £6?
Would hate to dissect this just off a paragraph.
Considering that the paper concludes that even students who take the long approach and use LLMs in the most appropriate way for learning still retain less over the long term than students who simply don't use LLMs, I think it's likely they didn't read the paper in the first place.
fwiw, Alpha School is the supervised version. the New York campus is $65k/yr and not legally a school.
private school money with homeschool paperwork and an app doing the teaching.
https://www.wired.com/story/alpha-schools-new-york-city-camp...
I think AI should be used in higher level schools but with the added requirement that the output will be held to a much higher standard and that it's fact checked. Teach the students to use AI to reach a higher level while mitigating the inherent issues like hallucination and sycophancy.
Idk why you screeching AI touts are so confident about its ‘wild’ success in all areas given absolutely zero evidence to that effect.
It’s tiresome.
It's inevitably your fault for prompting incorrectly or using the wrong model.
"You just have to repeat the prompt 3 times and then spin around counter-clockwise twice! That always works for me. You obviously just don't know how to prompt the model correctly."
Every time I see LLM enjoyers yapping on like this, it just reminds me of people trying to read tea leaves. There's all these goofy little rules about how to structure the prompt and how mean or nice to be to get it to work optimally, but I think it's obvious that most of these users are just seeing incidental successful outcomes in a largely random system and extrapolating from there because it makes them feel in control.
It is, quite literally, superstition.
Instead of prompts, let’s call them incantations.
Education right now has basically become a giant AI echo chamber, and it's happening nationwide. It’s this bizarre setup where teachers use AI to make assignments, students use AI to do them, teachers use AI to grade them, and principals use AI to watch over the teachers.
Good, wholeheartedly agree with this. Too bad US legislators are impotent.
US legislators have almost no say in how schools are run. The DoE is a husk, and states call the shots. In my state of Oregon, you will have wildly different curricula and standards depending on your district, because there's almost no state oversight either.
They made a choice - US legislators effectively gave up their control of how schools are run when the conservative coalition allowed the trump administration to dismantle the DoE without congressional approval. Congress itself could legally retain control of education, but if congress refuses to assert that power then it is meaningless.
The end goal is to dismantle public education and route public money to religious and private schools.
No - US always delegated education policy decision locally. Not just the state level, but the local district has the most amount of control. Nothing material here has changed in the last few years.
> Nothing material here has changed in the last few years.
Bald faced lies from you, nothing surprising here. I could take the time in explaining how state and federal responsibilities are divided, I could go through the history of the Department of Education and how funding for schools works in the US. I could point to dozens of examples of you being wrong from any decade in the last century, from de-segregation to "no child left behind".
But there's no point, since you're just a troll and not here for a real discussion. No one interested in a sincere exchange of ideas would start from such a stupid premise. So you can go ahead and look through my comment history all you want, and respond all you want, but it'll just make you mad and get you flagged.
You would be better served by finding a large rock to kick.
Please do share how education policy has materially changed in the last couple of years instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks?
I already told you I'm not going to waste time debating you, there's no point since you aren't engaging in good faith.
I will say though, for someone so convinced that "political/ideological commentors" are harshing the vibe here on Hacker News, you sure seem eager to start and encourage political debates.
Why don't you try being the change you want to see
<3 Happy Pride Month
To be fair, the US has long followed a model prioritizing district-level control, this isn’t anything new.
Yes, that is what impotent means.
Impotent? You mean bought by these companies.
>"The most important thing in school is that our children learn to read, write and do mathematics," Stoere
Language is not a tool for thought. It's a tool for communication. This has been known for decades. People routinely lose all language related faculties and remain competent in other skills. Their only value is in creating an artifact that a teacher can then look over and update their mental model of the students knowledge. This is no longer the case since students can now easily create those artifact without having a mental model. You are entirely swapping the test for the goal when you say language is the most important thing we much teach them. You are optimizing for a large noise to signal ratio.
The EU's general obsession with deprecated tech is mindboggling. Teach you're kids these skills and you won't have to worry about getting sent to a nursing home, I guess.
The fundemental problem is motivation not AI and this is simply the result of a larger societal shift that happened to correlate with the advent of AI.
Personally I've never done any homework or assignments, when I was outside school it was over. However, this motivated me to do really well in tests which in-turn made me extremely active during the limited time I had in school and I became pretty damn efficient at absorbing information and picking things up. So on the surface at minimum it appears that we should stop grading on activities outside school.
To be honest, what worked the best for me was what my history teacher did, 5 minute tests at the start of the lesson, then 10-20 minutes of teaching + self study assignments, remaining time is grading + answering any questions and if grading goes fast they usually had time to continue teaching for a few more minutes before the lesson ended. Group study was also heavily utilized as a form to take the load off themselves when they were overwhelmed from work due to 12th grade students especially right before exams, most of our classes became group study. All the students from their class always performed exceptionally well in nationals even though it was a mid tier public school. I will recognize that I am a bit special and that students are extremely varied I picked up on this when I discovered that someone in 11th grade still couldn't grasp the pythagorean theorem.
I don't really have a solution to the motivation problem when phones are just so addicting and have an atmosphere of their own, the best way I can put it is that your child becomes an outcast if they can't play roblox because everyone in their school does which is a very real thing my friend experienced with their kids.
> I will recognize that I am a bit special
Should have started with that. No, your experience doesn't easily translate into some general good advice, you are probably way-above-average bright. I for example went through old school education with tons of home work and benefited greatly from having enough time to comprehend harder topics more deeply, without rush. Memorizing is another aspect, my mind is slow in that so I took my time, trying to remember everything at class' pace would not bring results.
Having some homework ain't something horrible, it became daily habit as part of education and I certainly don't see it negatively in hindsight. It also teaches things like a bit of self-discipline, a trait thats very rare in young these days, and probably the most important personality trait in overall long term life success. It doesn't come on its own, but can be taught/self-taught quite a bit over time. Again, in hindsight, those similarly mentally equipped but lacking it, after few decades, performed in life worse to much worse (I don't mean just money but overall life situation and happiness/fulfillment)
I highly doubt that I am special in a way where I have a "smarter" brain. I believe that I simply adapted to learning fast. I was a slow learner and by grades were awful until around 7th grade where I've started to catch up and perform really well in school.
But what you said about homework IS motivation, self-discipline IS motivation. I had zero issues digging into whatever I can find to improve at programming and grasp concepts far beyond what I would be learning at my age. I started programming at the age of 12 which I believe also manifested in the ability to do much better in school.
Nothing mentioned about the use of AI by elementary school teachers who may well be using it to generate sub-par worksheets or to rapidly, and potentially inaccurately, mark work.
Every special event flyer I get from my kids' school now seems to be AI generated. I'd be surprised if quizzes and worksheets don't head the same way.
This is Norway, not the US. They have standards and a functioning social contract.
I'm pretty certain the execs who run the large AI companies would limit their children's AI usage also.
I'd ban all technology in the classroom.
What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.
You'll never get strong by watching a video of people lifting weights. Similarly, you'll never understand math by watching a video or having an AI do the work for you. And, somehow, writing out the words and equations by hand is very effective for learning.
https://www.holdenluntz.com/artists/keystone-press-agency/al...
Here's how to tell if their homework is done by AI: if the homework was much better quality than the in-class work.
Not always. I once got accused of cheating at University because my take-home assignment was so much better than my in class work. At home there was no pressure to perform. I could practice and try things.
I once was accused of cheating as well, as my term paper was "too good". (Long before computers.) I brought in my cites (books) the next day and dumped it on his desk. He grudgingly changed the grade from F to A.
Nothing is perfect.
If your in class work is of the same quality as homework you are obviously not trying very hard.
I do not think your example is at all fair. You can definitely learn from the way AI solves a math question.
> You can definitely learn from the way AI solves a math question.
Challenge: learn some math from AI. Sleep on it. Duplicate it on paper the next day.
It’s not math but I’m using AI to help study and learn DSA. I’m finding it helpful.
But yeah you need to make attempts to apply what you’re learning and answer questions on your own. You can’t simply watch problems being solved (whether by an AI or a person) and retain it.
Many times I was sure I understood something by watching it. Then, when it came time to do it, I realized I didn't understand at all.
And it's not just for math. Try it with learning to light a fire without matches. I watched the survival experts on "Alone" fail at that, and fail at building a fireplace, and fail at building bear proof food storage, fail at archery, fail at fishing, and so on. (I'm not claiming to be a survival expert, I wouldn't last a week on that show.)
No work equals no learn.
I never understood P vs NP until I say down with AI and just kept asking for clarification after clarification until it finally clicked.
AI, used well, isn't just 'teach me this' its 'teach me this and answer all my dumb questions until I understand it'.
There are ways to make it work, but it requires using it only supplementary and with strict discipline. And it will look different for a 6-year old than a 13-year old.
But think of this trick we use about turning a tricky research paper in maths/science into something more tangible by making an LLM whip up an interactive version. That works at every level of education, and it means that you can completely tailor a piece of educational material to the kid
Tiny example: one kid was introduced to fractions and found it abstract that it was both about partitioning stuff and about numbers on a number line. So while we were practicing, I had an LLM make https://fuglede.codeberg.page/broeklegeplads/ to make it more hands-on.
Obviously for the small kids, this has to be an experience guided by teachers and parents, but for bright older kids with sufficient discipline that ought to be a useful trick for enhancing education.
Of course when we were kids, we would just write such educational programs ourselves and get the same effect /and/ learn to program (before getting banned from the computer room for putting spooky /binaries/ on the computers anyway), so maybe that's better for older kids. And maybe these kids will never have to do any maths or programming because the AI overlords have taken over when they grow up.
Is this supposed to be difficult?
Try it and see.
I have already used AI to help me study for my finals, It has helped me so I don't think I need to go out of my way to repeat again.
You might pick up tips the same way watching a workout video could give you tips. But it means nothing until you physically put it in to practice.
So is watching a trainer showing you a move and telling you to do it but you not moving at all. You need to cooperate with AI it's not a silver bullet that will.move your body for you.
Not really, you might understand it in the moment, but to learn something you need to do actual work. An example is, watch a thousand hours on photography, how to take great photos. Go out and try to take great photos, you will fail. This is why all serious tutors keep saying ”stop watching and go out and take photos, every day, all the time”. I don’t know Rust, but I can understand AI outputting some Rust code if I ask it to. Two days later I won’t be able to write it again.
I disagree. You learned something at that point it is up to you to repeat it and make it stick and make sure you learned it correctly. No teacher no AI nothing can fix that unless you take the time. Because of this I think it is irrelevant to the topic. I want to go back to the math problem, you can definitely understand the solution and learn it, then it is up to you to practice. Goof thing about AI is it can throw you many more questions to make sure it sticks and help you know what you did wrong. It is susceptible to mistakes, yes but first of all those models are not made to be math teachers and real teachers also make mistakes. One advantage of AI is it can tirelesely explain the solution to you again and again unlike a real person.
> Goof thing about AI is it can throw you many more questions
I.e. you need to answer the questions, which means work through them yourself, rather than just watching the video.
I apologize if I'm in the wrong but I do not ever remember claiming you could just lesrn through looking at AI alone. I only defended the fact you can learn by analyzing how an AI model solved an issue. To me whenever I talk about an AI talk it goes back and forth. So in my mind it was always AI talking about a topic, then giving you an example question which you yourself solve. However for topics such as history yes indeed this is absolutely possible as they depend on memorization.
Thank you for the clarification.
> I'd ban all technology in the classroom. What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.
You've prohibited technology and then listed four technologies. "Technology" needs a more concrete definition. Calculators? Computers? TVs? Overhead projectors? Musical instruments?
This is nitpicking
And sure, kids 6-13 don't need calculators, basic stuff, like multiplication tables is memorized.
I attempted to memorize the times tables. Eventually, I noticed the pattern. From then on, I used the pattern rather than memorization. For example, I compute 9*12 as 90+18.
I assume you're hinting at this, but yeah, that's the idea behind getting children to memorize and do rote math early on. There's really no better way to get people to really deep down learn strategies for dealing with numbers than repeatedly practicing and memorising stuff until they accumulate a huge bag of mental "shortcuts" and patterns and strategies they use
I don't think it's nitpicking. I think it goes to the heart of the issue: people saying "stuff I didn't use when I was a kid is BAD." The term "technology" is just being used as a veil to hide the lack of reasoning.
They appear to be equating technology with products that did not exist when they were in elementary school.
That would be correct! And all the technology added since has resulted in no discernible improvement in educational results.
In college, the classes were a lecture with a professor, 9 blackboards and colored chalk. Not even handouts (well, there was one on time dilation).
Calculators utterly wiped out slide rules when I was in college, though nobody learned any math from a calculator. Calculators just made for quicker work to more significant figures.
So you’re saying that educational technology has no noticeable negative impact on educational results. Since we know it has some practical benefits, such as accessibility, that would be a strong argument for using it.
You are correct that it does help with disabled students. The overwhelming majority of students, however, are not disabled and are not helped by technology.
"back in my day, kids listened to their elders"
> all the technology added since has resulted in no discernible improvement in educational results.
I would say it's because it's used stupidly (also I'd take a Millenial's education over a Boomer's any day). One of the best things about technology is that my kids can carry one lightweight tablet instead of 50lbs of back-breaking books. They can look up reference materials immediately instead of spending an hour looking at World Books that end up having little to know information (insert essay about being assigned a report about the golden lion tamarin in elementary school and all libraries in my town put together had one paragraph.)
Yesterday while driving my kids from camp to a celebration lunch, they asked a question about science and I was able to talk to my car's AI (apparently this is a thing in new cars!) and model how one goes about getting an overview of a topic through curious inquiry.
But plopping a kid in front of a computer isn't a panacea. I just think it's the pedagogist's fault, not the tech's.
> instead of 50lbs of back-breaking books
Are you joking? I carried one or two books from the locker to class, if that.
> instead of spending an hour looking at World Books
I had a set of World Books. Looking things up in it usually meant encountering a number of other interesting entries in it. I never ever spent an hour looking up something. It is alphabetized, after all.
I actually think students should learn how to use a computer algebra system as early as possible so that it becomes second nature. Being and expert user of a CAS makes math vastly more interesting and less tedious.
Chalkboard, pencil and paper are also technology. Ban them. Instead rely purely on the vocal chords to tell stories of old.
Found the absurdum
I already saw it in my life: a ban on calculators, a ban on computers. But after a short period of rejection, everybody starts to embrace the new tech. Instead of bans we were getting computer classes in schools.
> after a short period of rejection, everybody starts to embrace the new tech
We’re banning cell phones in school after seeing the evidence, albeit along a class gradient. We’ll probably see something similar with AI. Poor kids get AI in school (and unmonitored at home). Rich kids do not.
I did mathematics, and a fair bit of computer science on the side. This was nearly all on paper, without computers. And I'd go a week or two without a calculator sometimes, mostly employing it when I had a bad hangover.
Do we really need to force technology into everything or are we just used to doing it so see it as necessary?
I did mathematics on paper, and informatics on computers. Some of my peers weren't so lucky, so they had to do informatics on paper only. Needless to say that the magnitude of progress we were getting in informatics had day and night difference, not in the favor of paper.
AI is indeed dangerous. It gives super abilities when in the right hands. Some people don't like it as it creates competition for their mere existence. They start gaslighting campaigns - "AI is bad, dangerous, does not work, consumes too much energy etc". This is luddism of our century, but also a form of psychopathy. When everybody is being gaslit, some of the very same players who spreads false narratives use AI to their own benefit.
It’s not really though is it?
It’s a fully centrally controlled technology that reduces your ability and makes you dependent on it to perform all daily and business functions with a huge environmental and economic impact. The economic impact is both the risks imposed by it failing and the risks imposed by it being successful.
It’s not Ludditism, it’s a good attitude to risk.
Calculators might be allowed sometimes, but i dont think they are ever allowed when you are trying to teach school children how to add and multiply. Which feels like the appropriate comparison.
The opposition is a fad that will pass; until then I guess people could investigate workable ways to use AI in the circumstances people object to
The number of people--adults included--who, when don't know something they could easily think about, resort to some AI bot rather than thinking, and developing their mind and intelligence, is staggering. Giving kids a reason not to think and develop their intelligence seems a pathway to even further declines in intelligence. Seems a quick route to dementia in old age too: if you fail to exercise and maintain something it eventually stops working.
If you have fast sugars and nice fat available at you any time of day and night, why to eat healthy? If you can spend your whole life getting easy dopamine hots from games and social media, why to exercise, study, work or do anything at all.
And we have a little bot that does your thinking for you, so that we will become a society of dumb fat morons who just fill online spaces with whayever hate speech our future fascist dictators tell the AI to be the correct opinion.
This is worse than 1984.
Surprised to read this as Norway also has Sikt AI for schools, where teachers can monitor how AI systems are used. Seems like it has both embraced AI and banned it.
> Seems like it has both embraced AI and banned it.
Indeed, seemingly they done so by age/educational progression:
> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said. In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added.
I wonder if the struggle is really comprehending thoughtful selective adoption.
Schools are the place where the product is a more fully developed person. There's no LLM shortcut for generating that. There are many ways you could use LLMs that would discourage it. There may be some that can encourage it.
Personally, I can see aggressively keeping kids away from LLMs until they've learned effort, living in tension/frustration, the pleasure of breaking through to discovery, trust evaluation, hypothesis/test cycles, and good socratic dialogue from the learner's side.
It may be possible at intermediate phases to prime some models to help with this process.
Very well said. As someone who taught for 6 years it's hard enough to just stay on top of lesson planning, let alone opens my curriculum to incorporate a tool (LLMs) which I'm personally figuring out for my own use.
LLMs add the most utility to people who understand process and what a good result looks and feels like. To a novice they can't stunt the learning of this.
The only AI elementary school kids should be confronted with is any AI their Nintendo Switch uses. Let the kids be kids, man
There’s very few sensible posts in this thread. This is one of them.
I just had a discussion with 10 to 12 years old kids today. They are not using AI to learn, they are using it to cheat. It's not a moral judgement, it's what they, themselves, told me today in front of their peers. Initially they claimed it was an aid to get homework done, then their own peers asked few questions to clarify and they themselves came to the conclusion (after quite some pushback and mental gymnastic) that it was indeed to cheat.
So... ask kids themselves, see what they do and what they say, it's fascinating.
Wouldn't it matter a lot how AI is being used?
I would assume if children are allowed to use AI without rails as a shortcut it will undermine their learning, and it's used for feedback and as a patient tutor it would accelerate their learning?
It seems like the problem is that they don't have the science and tooling to use it constructively at scale, so the desperate solution is to ban it outright until a scalable constructive approach is understood?
The article doesn't explain any of this directly...
It's frustrating to me when bold statements are directed at "AI" holistically and vaguely, completely ignoring any nuance.
There is a massive gap between letting elementary students free reign use chatGPT 3.5 (hallucinations and all) to do whatever, vs using a very guard-railed pedagogically optimized app powered by a SOTA model to support students in a specific way that accelerates good outcomes.
Most respectful interpretation is that the leaders know this and have a plan to figure it out, but for some reason it's not making it's way into this article. Is the absence representative of the truth of the situation, or some editors choice to pile on to a holistic anti-ai narrative?
> it's used for feedback and as a patient tutor it would accelerate their learning?
We have mounting evidence AI hurts learning and cognition in many circumstances. I have not yet seen similar-quality evidence for it helping.
Given that balance, restricting AI in education in the general population (while studying how to best deploy it) seems prudent. Especially given the Norwegian approach, which gradually introduces AI as kids get older.
I'm actually not really criticizing the decision so much the article and communications around it. If student learning outcomes are crashing and they desperately want to turn them around I understand why they would take dramatic action.
Giving students uncontrolled access to generic LLMs probably would hurt outcomes. Research process is slow (IRB and all that) so they are dealing with data from years ago (models that confident hallucinated a lot more than current SOTA) so if thats what they are basing it on its reasonable.
My frustration isn't with the decision (hey all teachers - no more chatGPT in the classroom). My frustration is with the reporting / nuance of "until we can research this better and figure out how to harness AI to improve outcomes and not undermine them".
> the reporting / nuance of "until we can research this better and figure out how to harness AI to improve outcomes and not undermine them"
It’s balancing the irrationally exuberant narrative of the tech bros and AI pushers. You have to stop the bleeding before you can dress the wound to promote healing.
I don't think one balances a lack of nuance with more lack of nuance.
One avoids nuance for clicks or to propagate a narrative, sew division, distract, etc.
Again. As I said in both my comments, I'm not criticizing the ban, I'm criticizing the absence of any communication regarding a plan for researching potentially constructive uses. As a reader, I can't tell if the Norwegian leaders have no plan, or if they didn't communicate a plan, or if they did and Reuters chose not to include it in the article.
Not everything has to be a culture war. When we are talking about our children's future it would be cool to do so pragmatically.
Eh, if the politician thinks this is the clarity of language necessary to send the message, I think that’s fine. Studying this and that can come later. It’s not like anyone is banning that research.
And I guess that's a big part of my frustration. I don't know what the politician actually said. I don't see any link to the/an official statement in the article.
I'm just an old man shaking fist at clouds.
I'm sitting on a mountain of evidence (n=44,000) that used in a very specific way and context AI accelerates and improves lasting learning outcomes. Th3 data is new, but the science that explains it actually goes back decades, predating AI - it's based on pedagogy from texts such as How People Learn (NRC).
My data also shows that students using AI the wrong way perform way worse - the performance gap is widening between students who want to learn and struggle (and use AI to optimize struggle) and students who want instant gratification and use AI for shortcuts.
So I know that if they truly slammed the door on this potential then they threw the baby out with the bath water.
But I don't know the truth because Reuters doesn't report the truth, and that's what tips me from concerned to frustrated. But I guess by complaining about modern journalism standards in a thread about banning AI I'm breaking HN guidelines. Time for me to log off...
> sitting on a mountain of evidence (n=44,000) that used in a very specific way and context AI accelerates and improves lasting learning outcomes
Can you point to it?
AI makes me worse at programming but helps me learn things much more quickly than reading textbooks. Both can be true.
> but helps me learn things much more quickly than reading textbooks
Have you tested this against an external metric of competence? The research seems to show that AI is great at making you feel you know something. But I think the studies looking at language learning found those using AI extensively tested below peers using traditional methods.
You don't always need the same level of deep knowledge on everything you do. A lot of things in software development requires some basic level understanding of some obscure API you would never use again. LLM definitely speed up that part.
> A lot of things in software development requires some basic level understanding of some obscure API you would never use again
This is glorified look-up. AI is great at this! Learning through look-up doesn’t work.
Elsewhere in this thread is someone arguing they learned linear algebra through AI. I’d love to be surprised by their acing an exam. I’m thoroughly doubtful they could get through one. AI is trained to be a sycophant, not to teach. Maybe one day we will solve this. I have seen zero evidence we have that today.
I don't care what the studies say. It's an incredibly good tutor.
AI helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter which kind-of-but-not-quite explains the concept I am hunting for.
> It's an incredibly good tutor
It feels like a good tutor. If you aren’t externally benchmarking your comprehension, you really can’t say.
> helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter
Have you considered that learning to phrase your questions is part of indexing and thus learning a subject?
I’m not saying AI can’t help with that search process. But we have no evidence it helps and lots of evidence it hurts, and everyone with anecdotes to the contrary seems to be going off vibes around how much they learned without any external reference.
Be careful. Speed of learning isn't necessarily the goal. Durability is another metric. I learn more quickly with LLMs, too, but it's certainly questionable if that learning is as durable or deep as learning through struggling with a book.
The students of lowly-rated profs had better 10-year outcomes than those with highly-rated profs according to a study that I think came out of the Naval Institute a decade or two ago. "No shine without friction."
We need more data. Certainly turning students loose with AI stunts them. There's probably some happy medium. But where kids need the most practice with fundamentals when they're young, a blanket ban for now seems sensible. And it also seems like a good plan to introduce it when they get older. I suspect we'll learn a lot from this Norwegian experiment.
Yes, but (I assume) that you are old enough to have already gone through elementary school and perhaps further and learned and internalized a model for learning and retaining information.
I think that is what is at risk.
Oddly enough, I never was able to learn things from textbooks, except in the context of a traditional classroom lecture course. I've also met maybe one or two people in my life who were able to learn the subjects of my college majors -- math and physics -- at any level from a textbook alone.
Do you delegate all opinions to only those which have studies?
> Do you delegate all opinions to only those which have studies?
For policy decisions around something like education standards, something for which we have an established status quo (which works in Norway)? Yes. I don’t think waiting for evidence to act is imprudent in that situation.
I think soemthing ignored in the discussion is that there are "good" students who can make use of AI to further their learning versus "bad" students who use AI as a crutch that prevents them from learning well
Acknowledging this divide exists would come down to individual parenting and assessment of a student's use of the tools, rather than a blanket ban of AI tools which punish the "good" students
It's not just being ignored, I was down voted and argued with for trying to make this point.
You can straight-up bypass AI mania in schooling altogether by just keeping pen-and-paper as the primary medium, as most Asian countries do. Digitization is a meaningless overcomplication.
The problem is they were two decades late digitizing the classroom. Now we're dealing with the aftermath with the educational system still not being capable of keeping up with societal progress.
Two decades late? So they should have brought computers to primary school in the 70’s? Teach them how to connect into a mainframe from a terminal?
that's dismissing that brains need time to evolve. what if brains need to be mature enough in and by themselves before they benefit from digital support? as in "no telly before 3-4, no smartphone before 14, prioritize pen and paper proficiency until 12-14" makes sense biological brain maturity?
then "give'm a computer ASAP" is the wrong answer.
I don't think giving children tech adults don't fully understand is a goal by itself. But children shouldn't be limited by their parents' shortcomings either. Strict age limits may seem like a safe approach, but children and their capacity to bypass those rules should not be underestimated.
This feels so obvious I’m surprised it needed to be news.
I love how data driven and fast acting these European countries are. It takes forever for anything to happen in the US even with 80% support.
I think it’s quite tricky. On one side, writing is a form of thinking and cognitive training.
Just NOT doing that work by having AI simulate it is not good for anyone’s cognitive development.
At the same time, anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it.
I really feel for teachers/educators right now. It must be hard to remain demanding and insist on educating kids well while also preparing them for the future they’ll actually live in.
> anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it
Whatever AI looks like in 20 years is going to be so different from what it is today as to make distracting from basic skill-building an almost-certainly net negative educational effort.
I agree to some degree. But by that logic, should kids in the 2000s not have learned about the internet because the internet fundamentally changed between then and now?
I think that if anything, it’s really good I learned how to operate a computer and the Internet BEFORE what the Internet became.
I pity the generation who don’t understand a computer’s folder structure because they grew up with smartphones and TikTok.
> should kids in the 2000s not have learned about the internet
Yes. Emphatically yes. In elementary school? The kids who were online in elementary school—literally in school—who got like how-to-use-AOL lessons?
They almost certainly underperform those who learned about the Internet at home or later in life. This is like those stupid keyboarding classes in the 2000s. It was obviously a waste of time compared with developing basic cognition.
No AI CEO or chief engineer today grew up with AI. The idea that everyone in a ball sack or ovary is currently incurably fucked when it comes to the future is naive beyond silliness.
To be clear, I’m not presently arguing against early technology exposure. I’m arguing against the systematized exposure of nascent technologies to young children.
I agree and I think some of the comments here have shifted my perspective on this, especially given the age.
I think with teaching anything, there’s always going to be a difference between teaching the tactics (e.g. how to use AOL) vs the fundamentals (what’s the internet, how do computers work)
Your example would call more to create an "information technology" subject in schools, that updates its curriculum to include changes like the development of AI. Thus, you go to that class, some of your coursework in the year is going to involve learning about AI and how it works, what it can and cannot do, using it for some project, so on. Not using AI for doing your homework in every other subject.
Yep good point. I’m not defending using AI to do homework.
> At the same time, anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it.
There's not so much to learn they can't put it into a high school course. Adults currently in the workforce haven't been using AI since they were in elementary school, and they're adjusting fine.
I would disagree that they’re adjusting fine. So much of the stuff we see now is full AI slop clearly created with the first output of ChatGPT. It’s like saying we don’t need to teach kids about the internet because older generations grew up without it and they’re scrolling TikTok.
a) what’s the actual percentage of professionals who actively use AI? It’s much smaller than we think in tech.
b) what percentage of those people understand the very basics of how LLMs work (e.g. token prediction, context windows, etc)
c) what percentage of those people understand AI Agents (or any of their ingredients (APIs, credentials, etc.)
You quickly arrive at a tiny fraction that has a real clue about what they’re doing.
>using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do
These are elementary school kids...if they start using AI in 6th grade, they have 6 years to learn AI before graduating high school.
Fair point!
> anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it
Essentially the entire value proposition for AI, particularly as it advances, is that you don't need to learn how to do things anymore.
Imo in elementary school they should not be using computers outside of a dedicated class.
Computer literacy.
What about teachers using it to generate learning material that is just fabricated?
The traditional schooling system can't stand that they are being outcompeted by AI and are trying to use the government to maintain their monopoly and keep those tax dollars flowing.
Pretty much; as people experience AI work better than the previous arrangement it will simply be adopted and this antiquated approach will likely be phased out
> The traditional schooling system can't stand that they are being outcompeted by AI and are trying to use the government to maintain their monopoly and keep those tax dollars flowing.
Learning is a conspiracy by Big Knowing, it's all a myth. Let's just ask an LLM to all our thinking, no need to be a functional human.
LLMs can teach better than the human teacher could. Big Knowing wants to be the one to teach, but that is not the only option.
> LLMs can teach better than the human teacher could.
Clearly not, given that you seem to believe this despite it being incorrect. Every single bit of evidence gathered so far indicates LLMs are worse teachers than humans or every self-directed learning.
Students need motivation to honestly and openly talk about their doubts or lack of understanding.
I've had LLMs both help motivate myself into getting better at things and help me understand things I don't. Being open with an AI is much easier than a human since there is no risk of being judged.
Adult students who have had real world experience tend to take learning more seriously because they can see a context for it.
Yep… I mean scientific studies seem to suggest that you are completely wrong. But big science is all a conspiracy against those AI companies that work so hard for the betterment of mankind after all.
I believe my eyes more than studies. I have learned so much, so fast through the process of talking with LLMs.
And you are a pedagogy expert and a teacher to young children?
If not, perhaps accept that the people who have more than absolutely zero experience have more informed opinions.
Such as?
A lot of finance related concepts I wasn't very familiar with and I used a LLM to understand them. I was able to ask questions to make sure that I understood things correctly.
It's absolutely the right move. We're already seeing declines in cognitive capabilities among adults using AI. We're going to wind up with future generations of ignorants if we let them start as kids.
We are seriously in danger of "we need AI" becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as humanity becomes too stupid to do anything without AI, and we end up with a few companies essentially holding the keys to our collective ability to produce anything of value. Am I the only one freaked out about that?
Please ban Bluetooth too
"..ban on smart phones.." "..ban on gen AI.." "..ban on social media.."
yes YES YASSSSSSSSSSSS
Ban all the things for kids. I don't want to be interviewing people in 10 years and decline every candidate because they can't correctly answer the question "You are 50ft away from the car wash. Do you walk or drive?"
To be fair, norwegian kids would probably fail because they don't have a clue how much 50 feet are.
> To be fair, norwegian kids would probably fail because they don't have a clue how much 50 feet are.
I... are you an LLM? The distance doesn't matter - you probably don't want to walk to the car wash.
I did walk to a car wash. Automated one. To look at how it worked. I don't drive to a car wash often. Maybe once in few years. I don't see the point. The car is out in the elements all the time. It gets clean and dirty randomly.
I was going to comment that you missed the joke. However, it was still curious to me that you took it so seriously, so I looked at your comment history.
It is almost all political (and outraged) commentary, and you tend to dominate posts like this with many comments, without adding nuance, substance, or listening to the other side.
It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.
> It is almost all political (and outraged) commentary, and you tend to dominate posts like this with many comments, without adding nuance, substance, or listening to the other side.
Facts don't care about your feelings, bud. And neither do I.
> It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.
Yes I'm certain you will be happier if you ignore everything that challenges you.
You've probably made 20 comments just in this post alone, all attacking people and treating things as black and white. Do you really don't realize that this makes Hacker News worse, and is probably not healthy for you either?
Got'em! Yes, this one right here officer; that's the clanker!
The question is slightly vague (since I could be going there not to wash my car), but I'm pretty sure in the intended interpretation, the actual distance is irrelevant. :)
>50ft
I only have two feet, so if I am to get there, I must use a vehicle.
Good for Norway. AI turns your brain into slop real quick, especially in the formative years.
just ban everyone from using ai completely lets go back to how it used to be
What a dream. If we could also somehow get rid of social media at the same time (or at least algorithmic recommendations and other predatory practices), the world would be a significantly better place.
can't come fast enough
this tech is unsustainable by design
Am I imagining things, or are all of the "vaguely pro-AI" comments being brigaded into oblivion?
I can't remember ever seeing this many reasonable posts being downvoted to the point of greying out.
HN is an extremely biased hivemind like Reddit
The anti-AI stance seems like a fashionable contrarianism, not sure what will end up changing it
What's really interesting to me is seeing people who are pro-technology but anti-AI, like... if you're anti-tech, you become something like the Amish. If you're pro-tech, AI is the logical next development along that path of technology - whatever tech you preciously enjoyed, was part of the package deal of building this AI that we now see.
So I guess I am curious to see if more anti-AI people become something like the Amish or if they come to terms with their championing of technology being equivalent to embracing AI.
Fuck yeah go to hell AI. Kids shouldn't be touching that IP infringement slop producer with a 10 foot pole.
It's just "rock and roll and video games are bad" popular nonsense. AI is the best learning tool you could possibly ask for, it's literally your own personal ultra knowledgeable teacher that has all day to answer questions from you. I remember being in school and the most I could hope for was to raise my hand and ask one (1) question sometimes. The teacher would then already be miffed if I asked another follow up and made sure to quickly keep talking so that I wouldn't ask anything else alongside all kinds of other social cues or just outright tell me to look at it at home. I remember falling behind in understanding some basic math concepts and literally never ending up understanding them fully. When you are a child nobody cares in the slightest, you are alone. How could AI possibly make this situation any worse? Life is already at the near maximum pain for children, you barely get to ask a question before you get shut down and you get to reread the same exact useless textbook explanation 30 times in a row. AI is a 100% net gain, it's like having 50 extra teachers on standby. Is having teachers suddenly a bad thing? Of course not. Especially not if the only reason you dislike the teachers is because you can't tell the child to use the teachers intelligently for maximum, fastest gain in understanding.
In the future we should be getting rid of nearly the entire teaching position and instead be going with a model where human teachers are more like guidance counselors that can offer some extra experience and anecdotes from how things will be in real life, something that AI will inherently have less ability to do. All these restrictions are just made by adults who literally don't care to think about how life is for children and have long forgotten. They just want to give orders from the top without having to think about it. Is there a danger that children will abuse it? Of course, it's a massive danger. Without AI there is also a massive danger that children will never learn something properly because nobody has time to teach them. Does anyone care about that danger? Does anyone care that a child will waste years of its life in schooling that is boring? No because that damage is invisible to people who do not care, the children will become intellectually stunted and stop caring about learning or doing productive things. Life is full of dangers, the goal should be to use all the tools we have in their optimal way and if that includes teaching children how to use AI, when to use it and the value of understanding things then the time for that is as soon as possible. I have a feeling that all these complaints about AI come from people who themselves never learned the value of independent thinking and stopped thinking at some point. They went through schooling but with rote memorization and repetition and little to no curiosity or drive to do anything other than the exact homework that the teacher gave them.
This is especially ridiculous: "In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added.". So when you are already an adult and went through over a decade of schooling you can finally use AI? When you are 14 there are children these days that are already making videogames, there is no reason whatsoever to hold children back. Stop treating children like their time is worthless. This is their life time, you don't get to take it away from them however you like as if they are dumb pets that just need to be taught how to behave.
Buddhism identifies three stages of wisdom:
1. Wisdom through dogma. 2. Wisdom through reasoning. 3. Wisdom through experience.
AI is just stage 1. Instant and easily digestible. Traditional learning forces you to go to Stage 2, because you are often given too much information and you need to compress it to memorise it. And the best way to compress it, is by finding some kind of logical structure in the information.
I feel like in the context of AI in education, "wisdom through dogma" still doesn't capture it. It's not even wisdom nor dogma, but something in the form of wisdom developed through something in the form of dogma. "Wisdom" implies you actually believe it and embody it, but students don't believe it or embody it as much as just pass it along to finish the assignment. "Dogma" implies there's a coherent logic of accepted doctrine, but the output is more a stretched and morphed version of the most generalized doctrine imaginable.
In my country, education is the basic minimum for any social status. Dropping before the high school diploma is basically saying that you're going to be mediocre for your whole life. Anyone will try to get the basic down otherwise that means being ridiculed for your whole life basically.
Good connection, never thought of it that way.
I learned it as: 1 Knowing what it is. 2 Knowing how it works. 3 Knowing what it can become.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
Great, yet another "no child and no teacher left behind!"
I was gifted kid, bored to death at basic school. I was reading books under the table, and was lucky to have tolerant teacher. Total ban would just push me to misbehaving and disrupting the class.
AI is amazing tool for learning, if Norway can not harness it, there is something deeply wrong with the educational system. Perhaps teachers unions?
Norway has a big problem with young immigrant kids at school not speaking Norwegian. Right now other kids are expected to teach them basic language, holding back their own development (like learning reading and writing)! Again, AI could provide amazing help here!
Calculators are amazing at multiplication tables. Let's just give those to the kids too. It's the same thing. This type of thinking is ruining kids' futures.
Some kids can understand and memorize multiplication tables in a day. Are they just suppose to sit idle, for rest of semester not to disrupt "normal kids"?
Should we ban programming as well? You know, kid could program multiplication and cheat this way! I can not believe I am reading opinions like this on "hacker" news!
So I take it you have some expertise in teaching? At what level? K-12? Middle school?
What, in your professional opinion as an educator, should schools do about AI in schools?
I would allow schooling in other languages in primary schools in Norway. Basic education is a human right, and it is not right to force kids out of their mother tongue. Insisting on some obscure language is just misplaced nationalism!
AI could help with that.
The the only conclusion I can draw from that is that you know nothing about education and even less about Norway.
FYI: all Norwegians learn at least one foreign language in school. It is mandatory. That means you have to, in case that’s a big word for you.
If you so prefer you will have the option to learn one or two more in middle school and one or two more in high school.
By the time I was 15 I spoke three languages. Everyone at that age would know at least two. Some would know four.
Is it so much to ask that you at least consult the AI tools you speak so fondly of as tools of education before babbling about something you so obviously are deeply ignorant of? If nothing else then at least in lieu of growing a brain?
> all Norwegians learn at least
But this is not about Norwegian kids. And many imigrants have no use for Norwegian (obscure) language. I have polish and ukrainian friends in Norway.
So now you are arguing what? That the AI tools, that so thoroughly failed to educate you on education, should be used to teach immigrants in their mother tongue?
And keep in mind, if you move to a country you kind of have to accept that they won’t be able to offer you education in every possible language. In fact, learning the language is often a prerequisite for permanent residency.
I am not going to ask you how you envision that AI somehow magically solves this, since we have already established that education isn’t something you appear to know much about. The last thing we need is more speculation, fantasy or anecdote.
Have the courtesy of at least researching things online for more than 2 minutes before you expect to be taken seriously.
we clearly disagree on many things.
People from EU already have residency in Norway, and some are not planning to stay there permanently.
One reason to avoid native language (outside of waste of time), is to avoid Barnevernet. It is much harder to take child away from parents, into permament Norwegian foster care, if it does not even speak local language.
So let me see if I get this: we need AI in Norwegian schools so immigrants don’t have to learn Norwegian or English, or else child protective services will take away their children?
It isn’t so much that you and I disagree. It is more that you disagree with reality. To the extent you are aware of reality.
> or English
I never said english, just Norwegian. Many people are fine with english only education, but goverment will still demand Norwegian lessons.
> we need AI in Norwegian schools so immigrants don’t have to learn
No, you need AI so kids who do not speak Norwegian, can learn to read and write. It is more important than forcing them into Norwegian first.
AI also comes to spotlight with homeschooling.
> else child protective services will take away their children
Yes!? I admit my informations are precovid, perhaps it is different now (at least the economy in Poland is much stronger, and there is less incentive to work in Norway). But Barnevernet has horrible reputation in Poland.
Common legal advice (when one of the parents works in Norway) is to avoid ties to Norway when it comes to kids, not to establish long term residency for kids (rotate kids every second semester and holidays back to Poland), avoid norwegian language...
It is much harder for Barnevernet to pull their stunt, if you do not give up Polish residency!
You offer no concrete explanation of how AI will magically remove the language barrier. Have you ever taught a class? How, in practice would you make language go away? In concrete terms. Exactly how do you envision interaction between teacher and student and between students happening? Again, in plain practical terms that can be implemented easily?
Teaching isn’t just about delivering a monologue. Even at university level. It is about connecting and interacting with people. Or else people would derive no more benefit from education than simply reading a list of curriculum books and hand in papers.
How do you envision that this plays out, right now, with AI, when teaching at a K-12 and high school level? Which is much more demanding because you are doing far more than just throwing knowledge and facts at people.
You don’t know what you are talking about which makes you invent fantasies that have no contact with concrete, observable reality. But rather than realize that you are talking nonsense and perhaps educate yourself and think things through, you just carry on.
Again, look at what the original post was about, and what corner you have painted yourself into. Did you, at any point, ask yourself if you had gone off the rails somewhere?
> Exactly how do you envision interaction between teacher and student
Some sort of teacher avatar. Works great for teaching english in china. And we had this during covid. I can write one in a weekend, easy.
> between students happening?
How about playing football or other physical activities?
> Which is much more demanding because you are doing far more than just throwing knowledge and facts at people
It is demanding only because single teacher has to manage 20 kids. With individual tutor, kids can teach much faster, and have more for socializing.
> how AI will magically remove the language barrier
I dated a girl via google translate, worked pretty well.
I wonder if at some point we will look back on stuff like this as back in the 1990s schools banning internet research and search engines. Obviously that seems ridiculous now, but the internet was big and scary back then too.
Those bans were implemented without evidence. We have evidence AI exposure reduces learning and cognition. There are probably situations where it enhances it. But we haven’t delineated those yet, and so shouldn’t be rolling out a half-baked system more likely to hurt than to help.
what is the evidence
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1
[flagged]
Were schools banning search engines? I remember teachers recommending Dogpile (because it would combine search engines), and we did some computer lab stuff in the 00s, but there was no one saying that we should ignore search or the internet altogether.
In middle school I remember being assigned a book report that would include the author's biography. I'd just finished a book (The Gammage Cup) and of course my local library did not have any information about the author. So in that situation it was assumed that you would learn traditional research methods, but also that you would just pick a classic book where the information was readily available.
Few schools allow unrestricted internet access these days.
The general question here is risks vs rewards and with any new technology both are unknown making caution perfectly reasonable be that internet searches or anything else.
So sure in 30 years the policy will look different, but that doesn’t mean they are making the wrong decision.
It is wrong to think kids should not use AI. They actually need to use AI the most.
Childhood is the age when you constantly ask “why” until you get to the bottom of the problem. It is the age of enormous curiosity. But schools, teachers, and parents do not have enough time or knowledge to answer every single “why.”
AI is here to stay, and I believe the future of AI is education.
But that also means we need to change how we test students. We should bring back more oral exams and in-person writing exams. But to learn things please use AI.