I’m 40 and I can’t remember a time when teachers were OK, I can only imagine how bad it’s gotten in this day and age. I weep for the future
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I'll extend this further - students are also not ok.
What I've observed this year is that a lot of students are opting for AI taught methods, or asking AI to summarise course materials for them. They then make bad copies into their notes, conflate these methods with those taught in class, then fail hard when an open note exam comes around.
The truth of the matter is we'll see a post-AI degree lose its value against a pre-AI degree, and this will create a new vehicle of intergenerational inequality.
Teachers are never going to be ok - we're "essential workers", and we all know what that means. Our students though, they believe their actions are buying them a better future; when they learn otherwise, they'll need all the support they can get!
Correction: Education is not OK.
AI is just giving poor kids the same opportunities rich kids have had for decades. Opportunities for cheating the system that was made specifically not to give students the best education possible but instead to bring them up to speed on the bare minimum required to become factory workers.
Except we don't have very many factories any more. And we don't have jobs for all these graduates that pay a living wage.
The banks are going to have to get involved soon. They're going to have to figure out a way to load up working-age people with long term debt without college being involved.
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We may have to revise our education system so that it's not connected to our credential system.
There's a story about Einstein teaching physics and letting the kids who didn't want to be there leave and do something else with the time. The ones who remained were quite attentive.
There are multiple models for teaching that do something similar, let kids approach a subject when they're ready. Yes, they goof off a lot early on, but eventually even STEM and literature call to them, and they pass equivalency exams in their late teens.
In the meantime even when I was in high school in the 1980s, our system was created to sort kids into sports stars that might become college players, STEM kids that might become scientists and engineers, and House Hufflepuff (common laborers).
The education system has only gotten progressively worse since then, as its budget increases have not kept up with inflation. And then there's the whole effort to insert evangelist Christianity (+ American Exceptionalism + Conservativism--Capitalism) into public school.
And to this day, we still use the lecture / lab / test model that excludes a lot of alternative comprehension and learning models. We're not looking to teach kids, rather we're looking to harvest the geniuses, and turn the others into bonded laborers and soldiers for billionaire vanity projects.
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AI is so far from being the main problem with our current US educational system that I'm not sure why we bother to talk about it. Until we can produce students who meet minimum standards for literacy and critical thinking, AI is a sideshow.
Have they ever been?
45 comments in c/news@lemmy.world view that post
I think the whole issue is much deeper, and stems from the fact that we (as in humanity, not any particular country) have perverted the very reason and purpose of education (assuming it ever was clear and uncorrupted, but that's another story).
Overwhelming majority of students don't learn because they want to. They don't want to become well read and spoken, they don't want to be able to answer questions without having to check on their phones, and so on and so forth. They "learn" because they have to. Because if there aren't enough check marks next to their name in an Excel spreadsheet somewhere, they're going to get in trouble. And that's why, if there's an easier way to get those check marks, of course they're going to use it!
Why spend days or weeks reading a long book if I can read an AI summary in 5 minutes and put a checkmark in the "read a book" column? Why spend time on writing an essay, if I can have ChatGPT do it and get a checkmark in the "essay" column?
I don't have a solution to this problem by the way, because I used to be a nerdy kid that actually enjoyed learning and craved more of it, but the real problem is not AI or LLMs, it's the whole approach to education (and to work afterwards: see the "oh shit, only a month until HR eval, what the hell were my personal goals that I made up at the beginning of the quarter?" situation so many of us face...)
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Move to majority in-class assignments instead of piles of homework.
I understand the fear of technology stunting critical thinking but LLMs are pretty darn recent, what happened to these highschoolers the last 14-15 or so years that left them with little to no reading or critical thinking skills? Where is the talk of parental involvement, teachers and educational systems prior to this?
Teachers have an incredibly hard job but the constant stream of these articles feels more like they’re trying to pass off the failures of our education system and failures of parents/society for decades onto the admittedly retarded technology that’s very recently entered existence…
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Why is this NSFW?
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I'm just gonna repost my comment to the original post on the 404media community:
Here's a funny story: I once got a D on an essay for my History of Physics class because it was so good that the TA was certain I had plagiarized it. The only reason I didn't end up in front of the ethics board was because she couldn't find any evidence of me doing so... because I hadn't. How many students are in the same situation due to overzealous teachers who have a bone to pick with AI?
Notice how most of the proposed "solutions" focus on bans, and ways to catch and punish students with almost none on improving archaic teaching techniques. Oral presentations, debates, real-world projects, essays on local subjects, using class to discuss subjects students previously studied instead of pontificating for 2 hours, doing away with homework, actually engaging students so they don't feel like cheating... there's loads of ways to teach without AI being a hindrance but it requires teachers to actually adapt instead of being stubborn, lazy twats with an inferiority complex.
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If the educational system is not working, if AI has destroyed our educational system, and I think it's fair to say it has, if teachers feel there's nothing they can do to fix it, then throw it away and don't waste our tears on it. We must find other ways to educate. This is imperative, education is non-negotiable. I am not giving up in defeat, I am saying we must retreat from battles that are simply not viable anymore. Use them as a delaying action if you can, but if kids are learning from LLMs and Video games and Netflix and Youtube and Tiktok now, we need to find ways to get as much good educational content as we can onto those platforms. We need to find ways to manipulate their algorithms. We need alternative platforms that aren't corporate-controlled cesspools, where we can make the rules. Governments and institutions will be too slow to react. The only advantage we have is that we can act and react fast, even faster than the corporate interests that are burning down the Internet of Alexandria and blowing up the world into the next dark age. We can, and should, and must organize an educational resistance.
Literally nobody wants their kids to grow up like this. Not even the billionaires exploiting and profiting from this garbage. We have the advantage that everybody in the world will soon understand the scale of this problem as they are confronted with it themselves. Will it be too late? Maybe, but we have to assume it will be better if we at least try. Even if we have to rescue people one mind at a time, every effort is worthwhile and every victory is worth celebrating.
This isn't much different from what teachers said about the internet, search engines, and Wikipedia...
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