Thread

1. basilgohar · 1790517608 · focus · HN ↗

   It's going to be a rough decade but I think we're going to come out a lot better in the long run. Education, especially in the US, has been really stagnant for a long time, and primary and secondary education has been more and more obviously just a mill to turn out middle-wage earners to dutifully pay taxes and buy products and not try to think to hard about things.

   Now that we have systems that can pass for students at this baseline level, educational systems are facing a reckoning and we can, hopefully, move past cookie-cutter education solutions and recognize the need for more hands-on, engaged education. Will it be an easy transition? No. Will all schools adapt successfully? Also, no.

   But will we finally have a path away from standardized testing, middle-of-the-road education? I am hopefully optimistic. We'll rediscover the need for human growth and development in our schools. It's either that or we lose. I'll choose the optimistic route and join and support those who believe the same.

   1. zbentley · 1790523721 · focus · HN ↗

      > But will we finally have a path away from standardized testing, middle-of-the-road education? I am hopefully optimistic. We'll rediscover the need for human growth and development in our schools.

      I worry that the availability of this path will be extremely unevenly distributed, amplifying existing educational gaps along class, race, and language-proficiency lines.

      That might be better than a forced average denominator, but the social effects of further amplifying those gaps are pretty severe and don’t take that long to happen. Combine that with the fact that education isn’t like new miracle drugs, where improvements inevitably tend to become more and more widely available to different groups, and I’m not as optimistic about the future.

      1. sdenton4 · 1790528951 · focus · HN ↗

         Otoh, ai is much, much better at bridging language gaps than humans and human institutions.

         The real question for education is whether we can get 'tutor-quality' education from ai interactions. One on one education is leagues better than classroom education; it's the one-true-result in education research. There's a massive opportunity here to improve outcomes, and in a generally available way. You can't clone a good teacher, but you can give everyone an ai tutor.

         1. jfreds · 1790529723 · focus · HN ↗

            +1. I’m doing a masters now, and typically I have lectures/slides/textbook open in one tab and Claude in another. When I don’t understand something - which is frequent - I discuss it with Claude until I do. Having an always-on, infinitely patient, phenomenally knowledgeable tutor is AMAZING. Schools could mitigate equity issues by providing their own portals for this (with some guardrails to prevent abuse obviously).

            Of course the onus is on me to do this at all, I don’t need to in order to pass the class. I set my own standard for what it means to ACTUALLY understand anything rather than just say “oh yeah that makes sense” and move on.

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