Thread

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

142 points · 233 comments · theanonymousone

radiorental · 1790264419 · 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 · 1790265709 · 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. singpolyma3 · 1790286374 · focus · HN ↗
    > Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
    This is a real question though. One I've been asking since the early 00s. Learning means something different than it did in decades previous. Merely remembering easy to look up facts is not the slam dunk it used to be.
    wongarsu · 1790291380 · focus · HN ↗
    Was learning easy to look up facts ever slam dunk useful?
    It had its place in the 80s when looking up involved at least finding the right book. But that time was already on the way out in the 00s. My impression was more that education likes to ask for facts because they are easy to test for.
    What you really want to teach are concepts and broad strokes. Nobody needs to know on which weekday the Soviet Union collapsed, but an understanding of the causes of the collapse is useful. Similarly, you don't need to know the speed of light to more than one digit of precision, but knowing the role of the speed of light as the speed at which information can travel through space is useful
    That kind of knowledge also continues being useful in the age of AI. It allows you to see the connections in the world, and know which questions you even have to ask
    plourens · 1790353845 · focus · HN ↗
    Former teacher here. Your example of the USSR is a good one to demonstrate the importance of a broad base of knowledge. In order to actually understand what "the Soviet Union collapsed" means, you need to know facts about what precipitated the Cold War. What communism means, what democracy means, and so on. Where Russia is on a map, and what "satellite" countries are. These are all concepts, too, but more atomic that build to the bigger idea.
    Any "concept" is composed of interrelated facts, all the way down.

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