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Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

142 points · 233 comments · theanonymousone

  1. radiorental · · focus · HN ↗
    This isn't binary, teachers have limited bandwidth and supplementing real teaching with AI supported research can work.

    Students need to understand what AI is and is not.

    Something got lost as we transitioned from parents telling their kids to 'go play and do not come back until dinner is ready' to us handholding & driving our kids from one social/sport activity to the next.

    While it causes fights with my kids, I blank refuse to do certain things for them (fix their internet connection, repair a toy or bike) I'll give them the tools and they know to ask when they get stuck.

    The act of learning through failure is a dying art these days. It's 'teach to the test', stressed out teachers, parents having too much to do compounded by taking on second, third jobs in this economy.

    Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.

    1. yardie · · focus · HN ↗
      As a parent I agree with you, but watching other kids get a leg up because their parents continue to jump in and save them. And your own get the double harsh reality of learning failure and then being punished for it through loss of placement and status. It's tragedy of the commons since everyone must pass no one can fail.

      > Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.

      The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.

      1. Natsu · · focus · HN ↗
        > The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.

        I remember growing up being told similar things about the internet and how you can't trust anything written on it. There was some truth to that, of course, but how many people will say that of search engines, despite them being filled with utter crap?

        1. yardie · · focus · HN ↗
          When I grew up we couldn’t use the internet as a reference for our research. There didn’t exist a standard for citing articles and blogs as there was for journals and books. Eventually, that was fixed.

          I use AI extensively now, it also cites the websites and electronic documents it uses. It’s a little frustrating in that it cites the URL but not the exact paragraph or chart cited. For that I have to read the entire article. Sometimes it gets it wrong because the context is incorrect. It’s still a great tool, but without my last generation experience in high school and undergrad research, someone without that experience would blindly follow wherever it takes you.

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