Every public school teacher I know comes home crying from time to time because of the emotional load. The husband of my wife’s best friend is a music teacher who’s been assaulted by students multiple times. The science teacher who inspired me to study physics showed me the classroom, years later, where he teaches, and there were so many chairs packed in I asked “has the fire marshall been here?”
That is, a huge part of the job is dealing with unruly behavior and bullshit and not even instruction. If AI is going to make a positive difference in education it’s going to have to take a bite out of that!
The untold truth about teaching is that it’s equal parts social worker as educator.
Not just with bad behaviour, but with diagnosing child with needs, identifying domestic abuse, and so on.
It’s heart breaking some of the shit they need to do and which any normal person wouldn’t even consider as part of the job.
My wife has had to handle more than one incident with serious child sexual abuse. This isn’t something teachers expect to do when they apply for their jobs.
> My wife has had to handle more than one incident with serious child sexual abuse. This isn’t something teachers expect to do when they apply for their jobs.
My spouse also taught and heard some difficult stories of home troubles. But she did have school counselors she could recommend.
I'm not sure there is a better alternative. Someone has to be on the front lines with kids. Perhaps all kids should have to talk to a (school?) counselor or social worker periodically? It would certainly be money better spent than burning money on crypto mining, AI, or cutting taxes of the top 10%.
And that's yet another unintended consequence of the COVID lockdowns. Teachers as social workers had trouble diagnosing domestic abuse or other problems encountered by their remote students. One of those things we will be dealing with for a long time to come
I've heard similar anecdotes. I am of the opinion that AI can't fix that. That will require school boards and parents willing to change budget allocation to school police and local governments that implement zero tolerance on [instigating] violence. Parents of violent kids will of course get upset and emit crocodile tears because their "little darling" would "never hurt anyone". Cameras in classrooms, body cams on teachers, school police and lock up the little darlings will take a bite out of it. Short of that and we just lose more good teachers. Kids can earn back camera free classrooms once the violent ones are weeded out.
I would put the AI in juvenile hall to teach the violent kids. It will be a dystopian environment but they earned it and can earn their way out of it.
[Edit] - I learned today that school districts have been lazy and using "zero tolerance" to even include defending ones self vs instigation of violence. This is indefensible. I will be encouraging POTUS to end all pax payer funded education and federal funding to states if schools and states can not get their act together and change verbiage to be zero tolerance for instigators of violence.
> Cameras in classrooms, body cams on teachers, school police and lock up the little darlings will take a bite out of it.
This has been the status quo in many schools for a while now. Whether or not it helped is unclear and a subject of ongoing debate. If you want things to change, you need a novel intervention.
As for zero tolerance policies, they are exhausting to implement and feel deeply unjust to everyone involved. Having to suspend or expel a student for defending themselves never feels good. But if one doesn’t, the policy is no longer zero tolerance.
You don’t need any creepy surveillance tech, just teachers with the proper rights to punish those who violate the rules.
As long as teachers can’t say or do anything without parents rushing to the school and threatening with lawsuits, nothing will change, no matter how much surveillance tech we throw at the problem.
> I would put the AI in juvenile hall to teach the violent kids. It will be a dystopian environment but they earned it and can earn their way out of it.
I feel that this would only further embitter the violent children and would cause more problems than it would theoretically solve.
>I would put the AI in juvenile hall to teach the violent kids. It will be a dystopian environment but they earned it and can earn their way out of it.
Children didn't "earn" being born to shit heads. Fuck off.
> Those with means (and I would be one) send their kids to private schools for a variety of reasons.
I don't think this is true at all. There are plenty of areas where the public schools do a fantastic job, and plenty of people "with means" sending their children there.
Obviously an orderly school is preferable to a disorderly school, but I doubt it's enough.
I am completely convinced by the arguments for individual tutoring. I got some in languages and I liked the outcome (it was also a fun social thing to do with my parents). It would have saved a lot of time to also get it in maths, physics, chemistry and biology.
Public education is considered one of the greatest successes of the 20th century, if you have a better idea might I suggest you and your techno-libertarian brethren try it on the Moon, or whatever other non-Earth body your amazing education has convinced you will support life.
There are at least two lessons to learn from this article. First, humans have a penchant for over-extrapolating from scientific discovery. My favorite example is soon after Röntgen discovered X-rays science fiction and comic books extrapolated a huge variety of "rays". We have such a strong yearning for great change, even as we fear it.
Second, there exists a basic "least common denominator" existence that has held since farming was invented: we are born, we live and work, we die, and between that time we live in a house, go to school, fall in love, eat, sleep, and (more recently) read. These features of human life don't change much since they are tied to our biology, which is in turn tied to the time and place of our emergence. Books are wonderful inventions - they are low cost, require no power to operate, have a very high information density, can be shared and reused over many generations of humans. They fit us so well, we will probably never "transcend" them, just like we'll probably always have diapers and pillows, no matter how far we go. And honestly, what's wrong with that?
Universal public schooling in its modern form is very recent and certainly not some sort of biological imperative. Before cheap books and universal literacy (which is frankly something of an overstatement), it wasn't remotely plausible to expect reading books to be a near ubiquitous pastime, and even now recreational reading has decreased in the past few decades. You may quite like to read, but framing it a some kind of eternal and universal experience is just complete nonsense.
There is a qualitative difference to the argument: lectures (from before millennia), books (in the last few hundred years), and movies (in the last few decades), were all non-interactive. A student would sit and consume passively. There is a limit to how well you can learn with passive instruction alone. The promise of AI is to bring the Oxford model - 1:1 studying with a tutor, with whom the student engages and to whom the tutor gives their full attention - down to a price point at which it would become feasible to educate the masses with it.
Are LLMs actually capable of re-producing a good-enough simulation of the Oxford model? Will this simulation of the Oxford model produce better educational outcomes at scale - something that has been theorized but was of course far too expensive to prove - when deployed to the masses through public education? Maybe? Who knows? Time will tell.
For what it's worth - I don't think books will become obsolete, either in schools or anywhere else. Paper books might become obsolete, but there is no option on the table that proposes to completely replace the art of science of having life experience and committing it to longform. As long as copyright protects its commercialibility, it will continue.
There is a naive belief that media does not matter so long as the same content is presented. For various reasons, I believe books are far better learning tools than digital devices for most things. Among other things, memory is linked to place and space. A physical book is a link to the real world that grounds the learning in space and differentiates it from other materials. My theory, based on my personal experience, is that reading a physical book, you have an experience with that object that helps link the content into the spacial memory system.
Physical books can be totemic symbols of learning. Just having them around is a reminder of what you've learned, or what you've been putting off if they remain unread.
Physical books are also wonderful gifts that digital can never replicate. A wise old man once gave me a book that he cherished and had been given to him in commemoration of his contribution to its production (it was a very important book). Every one of the hundreds of pages was filled with many of his annotations. Whenever I read from it, I am connected to him and his study. What would be the equivalent for digital? Giving someone a used phone?
This reminds me of a quote from Bob Monkhouse who wrote a lot for radio. Paraphrasing, "I admit TV can do some things radio can't do. But it can't do some of the things radio can do."
As somebody that used to drag about 10kg worth of books back and forth to high school in the eighties, I don't think getting rid of that is necessarily that bad. And there are only so many books you can drag with you. And most of the educational books were pretty crappy and uninspiring as I recall.
Modern kids can have access to a wealth of information. AIs doing what teachers don't have time to do might actually be an improvement. I had some great teachers that went above and beyond, and also quite a few burned out not so great ones too. Modern schools weren't created to enlighten people but to turn kids into productive factory workers meeting bare minimum standards. Historically, there always was a big difference between the rich and the poor on this front. And whisking away the few smart kids and training those up properly was something left for higher education.
Modern tech creates potential for more bespoke and tailored teaching but also lots of challenges for teachers.
That prediction is assuming everything else to remain static. Why are the children learning in school? What should they be learning? What exactly is the goal of schooling? What future work are they training for?
A lot of projections for future trends are made using isolated contexts, as if the world around them is not moving or changing.
I’ve learned a lot more from talking directly to people, watching videos, participating in forums, and doing things than I ever have from books. This is especially true now. I’m not sure the 1913 take was wrong.
For the past year or so, whenever I’ve wanted to learn something from a book, I’ve downloaded the Kindle edition, converted to plain text, given it to Claude, and asked it to tutor me chapter by chapter.
If it were PDFs or static HTML files you could save and handle like a book this would be great.
Anyone who's had the misfortune of graduating college in the past ten years and experiencing the detritus from Pearson students are forced to pay hundreds of dollars for knows this is actually a massive regression.
Readit News
That is, a huge part of the job is dealing with unruly behavior and bullshit and not even instruction. If AI is going to make a positive difference in education it’s going to have to take a bite out of that!
The untold truth about teaching is that it’s equal parts social worker as educator.
Not just with bad behaviour, but with diagnosing child with needs, identifying domestic abuse, and so on.
It’s heart breaking some of the shit they need to do and which any normal person wouldn’t even consider as part of the job.
My wife has had to handle more than one incident with serious child sexual abuse. This isn’t something teachers expect to do when they apply for their jobs.
My spouse also taught and heard some difficult stories of home troubles. But she did have school counselors she could recommend.
I'm not sure there is a better alternative. Someone has to be on the front lines with kids. Perhaps all kids should have to talk to a (school?) counselor or social worker periodically? It would certainly be money better spent than burning money on crypto mining, AI, or cutting taxes of the top 10%.
I would put the AI in juvenile hall to teach the violent kids. It will be a dystopian environment but they earned it and can earn their way out of it.
[Edit] - I learned today that school districts have been lazy and using "zero tolerance" to even include defending ones self vs instigation of violence. This is indefensible. I will be encouraging POTUS to end all pax payer funded education and federal funding to states if schools and states can not get their act together and change verbiage to be zero tolerance for instigators of violence.
This has been the status quo in many schools for a while now. Whether or not it helped is unclear and a subject of ongoing debate. If you want things to change, you need a novel intervention.
As for zero tolerance policies, they are exhausting to implement and feel deeply unjust to everyone involved. Having to suspend or expel a student for defending themselves never feels good. But if one doesn’t, the policy is no longer zero tolerance.
As long as teachers can’t say or do anything without parents rushing to the school and threatening with lawsuits, nothing will change, no matter how much surveillance tech we throw at the problem.
Deleted Comment
It's not very clear cut but sometimes it seems like kids just end up being punished for having bad parents.
I feel that this would only further embitter the violent children and would cause more problems than it would theoretically solve.
Deleted Comment
Why do you think kids should be punished for getting bullied?
Children didn't "earn" being born to shit heads. Fuck off.
Dead Comment
Taxing people to fund education seems to be reducing the product to glorified day care.
Those with means (and I would be one) send their kids to private schools for a variety of reasons.
This deserves more analysis.
I don't think this is true at all. There are plenty of areas where the public schools do a fantastic job, and plenty of people "with means" sending their children there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
I am completely convinced by the arguments for individual tutoring. I got some in languages and I liked the outcome (it was also a fun social thing to do with my parents). It would have saved a lot of time to also get it in maths, physics, chemistry and biology.
Second, there exists a basic "least common denominator" existence that has held since farming was invented: we are born, we live and work, we die, and between that time we live in a house, go to school, fall in love, eat, sleep, and (more recently) read. These features of human life don't change much since they are tied to our biology, which is in turn tied to the time and place of our emergence. Books are wonderful inventions - they are low cost, require no power to operate, have a very high information density, can be shared and reused over many generations of humans. They fit us so well, we will probably never "transcend" them, just like we'll probably always have diapers and pillows, no matter how far we go. And honestly, what's wrong with that?
Are LLMs actually capable of re-producing a good-enough simulation of the Oxford model? Will this simulation of the Oxford model produce better educational outcomes at scale - something that has been theorized but was of course far too expensive to prove - when deployed to the masses through public education? Maybe? Who knows? Time will tell.
For what it's worth - I don't think books will become obsolete, either in schools or anywhere else. Paper books might become obsolete, but there is no option on the table that proposes to completely replace the art of science of having life experience and committing it to longform. As long as copyright protects its commercialibility, it will continue.
Physical books can be totemic symbols of learning. Just having them around is a reminder of what you've learned, or what you've been putting off if they remain unread.
Physical books are also wonderful gifts that digital can never replicate. A wise old man once gave me a book that he cherished and had been given to him in commemoration of his contribution to its production (it was a very important book). Every one of the hundreds of pages was filled with many of his annotations. Whenever I read from it, I am connected to him and his study. What would be the equivalent for digital? Giving someone a used phone?
Modern kids can have access to a wealth of information. AIs doing what teachers don't have time to do might actually be an improvement. I had some great teachers that went above and beyond, and also quite a few burned out not so great ones too. Modern schools weren't created to enlighten people but to turn kids into productive factory workers meeting bare minimum standards. Historically, there always was a big difference between the rich and the poor on this front. And whisking away the few smart kids and training those up properly was something left for higher education.
Modern tech creates potential for more bespoke and tailored teaching but also lots of challenges for teachers.
A lot of projections for future trends are made using isolated contexts, as if the world around them is not moving or changing.
For the past year or so, whenever I’ve wanted to learn something from a book, I’ve downloaded the Kindle edition, converted to plain text, given it to Claude, and asked it to tutor me chapter by chapter.
Anyone who's had the misfortune of graduating college in the past ten years and experiencing the detritus from Pearson students are forced to pay hundreds of dollars for knows this is actually a massive regression.