The US is fucking cooked
I can’t help but think this is a phenomenon unique to the US where education has been completely devalued. If the only point of education is to fulfill a requirement to make more money then it makes sense to shortcut as much as possible.
The solution is of course no computer
The education system has always been stupid and it’s about time it stopped with it’s Victorian era, one size fits all, “the student is needs to be whipped into shape” style teaching.
You do not know your students commitments outside of study. You probably also do not know how best they themselves learn. They have the right to have their time respected as much as anyone else, and they aren’t even getting paid for their time and effort
Strict deadlines are stupid. In the real world, illness happens, tragedy happens, bad traffic happens, etc and deadlines aren’t always going to be met. Closed book tests are also stupid. In the real world there is hardly ever going to be a time you cannot consult your notes.
Also, because we stand on the shoulders of giants and forever expand the scope of human knowledge, teachers are finding that they have too much content to teach and not enough time to teach it (also lack of education funding and pressure to get students into the workforce as soon as possible doesn’t help). As a consequence, students are bombarded with an avalanche of content in a short time, more content than is physically possible for a human brain to retain in such a short time. Therefore, students trying to work smarter rather than harder isn’t just understandable, but is increasingly becoming mandatory.
Do I think AI is a good substitute for a real education? Hell no. But I do think it’s use among students is the natural result of a broken education system rather than “them lazy students can’t think for themselves.”
Also I hope this rant doesn’t make it sound like I’m blaming teachers, they’re doing the best with what the system demands of them. I’m talking more about the whole damn structure of the education system. It fucks over teachers as much as it does students.
Closed book tests are also stupid. In the real world there is hardly ever going to be a time you cannot consult your notes.
What alternatives are there in the context of math tests when it comes to testing a student’s knowledge of a topic that isn’t just an algorithm of solving a particular type of problem?
There is more to math than just acting like a human calculator. We already got pocket calculators. You can create word problems or case studies in math where the student has to figure out what algorithm to apply, why, and how. Or even a combination of algorithms, plus their limitations and modifications.
There is more to math than just acting like a human calculator.
I know. I literally am a mathematician by education. I made a couple of math-related posts on Hexbear last year. That’s why I excluded relevant tests in my question.
You can create word problems or case studies in math where the student has to figure out what algorithm to apply, why, and how.
Okay, but I did exclude this sort of test in my question.
What I am much more curious about is students proving that they understand things like what Taylor series is (including its significance and relation to polynomials), or basic theorems about planes in the context of linear algebra. How does one test that students do understand that without limiting their access to notes and textbooks?
I don’t believe that closed book tests should literally never be used.
I just believe that for a lot of things, the typical test provides very limited or low quality information on the abilities of the student.
In the case of the Taylor expansion, you can test if the student has correctly memorised the formula and can plug and chug, which is what a lot of my closed book tests were like. But these tests were easy because all I had to do was memorise a few basic formulas. The home assignments and labs tested my full skills much more.
In the case of the Taylor expansion, you can test if the student has correctly memorised the formula and can plug and chug, which is what a lot of my closed book tests were like. But these tests were easy because all I had to do was memorise a few basic formulas.
You can also ask a student to actually explain the motivation for it, as well as its significance. My university exams were all in the form of explaining a few assigned topics to a teacher after being given some time to prepare notes and remember things, without access to prior notes and textbooks. Being able to use notes without restrictions would trivialise that.
Rote memorisation would not work in the case of the exams that I took.
Hexbear: AI is literally making people stupid! It’s a demonic abomination that must be abolished
Also hexbear: but not when it’s negatively impacting our shitty education system
contrasts
On one hand AI is absolutely disastrous as many cognitively offload onto LLMs reducing the onus to ever think. On the other hand it’s worth addressing the fact that the education system wasn’t working well to begin with and AI is just accelerating its downfall.
The current education system is built mostly as daycare and also to build kids into being obedient workers with maybe some minor reforms to actually teach some useful information.
Remove AI from the equation students are still mostly not engaging with the content and cheat or circumvent the system in other ways to avoid learning because the system isn’t built to make you want to learn.
Im saying this as someone who took payment to do other people’s work but also someone who flunked out in later years because of stress from never ending bullshit memorising exercises that never actually taught me why or how anything existed. Memorising equations for maths and physics sucked just like memorising quotes for 10 different potential English essays. 99% of my success was driven by my teachers predicting the exams questions and telling us to focus on that content
Nobody here thinks that AI is good. We just think that the impact of AI is heavily overstated in the field of education. People have too much recency bias and forget that all these problems were (almost) as bad as before AI as after it.
And perhaps people who haven’t been in education in a long time might have simply forgotten. But how is AI really that much worse than chegg or stackoverflow or sparknotes or any of the other tools/methods that already existed to minimise your engagement with the material? AI is the same category of such tools, it’s just the logical end point of them. The dialectic has reached its inflection point.
Yes. It absolutely is.
How so?
I meant to respond this morning and was going to write a whole lot but the day got away from me.
When people had to cheat using Cliff’s notes or whatever they still had to engage critical thinking. There were only a few places where the information was summarized and you couldn’t directly copy, so you at least had to read and interpret the summary in order to make a passable end product. With an LLM you literally don’t even need to know what the question was, you can blindfold yourself and copy/paste a prompt and then copy/paste the output.
When new “shortcuts” emerged in the past, good teachers tried to game-ify a way to teach something the students who were going to rely on them anyway. That’s so much harder to do with LLMs and the education system is finally starting to die after decades of strangulation, it’s in no position to meet this level of challenge. That means that kids and teachers will feel more like education is worthless because you’re a sucker for trying to learn or teach.
People use calculators as an example, they can do the math for you and it hasn’t led to the death of math or whatever. They can do the specific calculation for you, but the critical thinking aspect of knowing what the correct calculation should be still had to come from you. These models are changing that in a pretty terrible way.
Granted, AI is more convenient than previous tools, but it is only the final step towards the decay process rather than a qualitative leap on its own. If AI wasn’t invented, the state of education would still be backsliding. It would only be delayed a little.
To give an example, for virtually every course I have taken at university, there is a common pattern. The exam has been made easier year on year starting from about 2015-2018. This had to be done to prevent the pass rates from declining too much. And much of the decline happened before covid actually.
Not to mention that a huge portion of the current is due to covid and austerity, not necessarily AI.
It’s not that AI is more convenient, it’s that it is completely disengaging. I don’t think that AI is going to be the thing that breaks education, I think it’s going to break dramatically more than that. I’d never heard of Chegg before and that shit sounds really scummy, but at the end of the day all it could do is make you less likely to learn something about a particular assignment. People are straight up turning their brains off and leaving them that way now.
AI is bad (or at least the way it’s being implemented by capitalism is bad) but also the education system is struggling and needs to be improved somewhat.
Hexbear: AI is literally making people stupid! It’s a demonic abomination that must be abolished
Also hexbear: looks like the students using AI are reacting to their material conditions, perhaps we should improve them somewhat.You must be reading the thread on chapo.chat because here on hexbear im seeing a lot of “education has always been worthless” and “any education that AI could ruin was worthless anyway.” When literally people constantly post about how relying on AI is literally rotting people’s brains and cognitive capabilities.
This is literally just people with grievances about their time in school lashing out no matter how contradictory it is with their own position on AI in general
Also i really love the “kids should direct their own education, if you make someone learn something they hate it’s just wasting their time” shit like yes let’s let the same age group that if allowed to choose their own dinner would pick chicken tenders 10/10 nights to direct their own fucking education lol. I D E A L I S M
This is literally just people with grievances about their time in school lashing out no matter how contradictory it is with their own position on AI in general
People posting about the material conditions of their school time and how they can see why students would use AI doesn’t mean they agree with the usage of AI but that they empathize.
yes let’s let the same age group that if allowed to choose their own dinner would pick chicken tenders 10/10 nights to direct their own fucking education lol.
There’s another whoooole discussion to be had about how kids are introduced to food, how there are good foods and bad foods. Allowed and forbidden foods. Food used as punishment and as reward (you must eat everything on your plate before you get dessert). There is a reason why a lot of kids would pick chicken tenders 10/10 nights and it’s not them being stupid. That’s idealism. Looking at what material conditions leads to students cheating, not wanting to learn etc would be the materialist approach. Because kids are curious by nature but there is a systemic effort to force feed them what they’re supposed to learn killing that curiosity. Griping about that system is the opposite of idealism, it’s materialist.
Food used as punishment and as reward (you must eat everything on your plate before you get dessert). There is a reason why a lot of kids would pick chicken tenders 10/10 nights and it’s not them being stupid. That’s idealism.
I am incredibly cognizant about all of these things with my kids and expose them to a huge variety of foods, give them massive amounts of freedom to eat what they want, and generally cultivate a positive relationship with and understanding of eating. They will be dramatically less fucked up about food than 99.9% of people when they grow up. Hell, they’re already dramatically less fucked up about food than 99.9% of people, but right now they are still fucking stupid. It’s not idealism. On the other hand, the notion that if everything is exactly perfect then it will produce a still-unlikely outcome in every individual in a society is mainlining ideology.
There is a reason why a lot of kids would pick chicken tenders 10/10 nights and it’s not them being stupid
Your words, not mine, never said “kids choose this because they’re stupid” chief
Your first paragraph is fine, because your argument is a non-argument and is mostly just stating what people believe (people can both condemn AI and the Amerikkkan Education System).
Your second one is just a lack of investigation and a false contradiction. It is not contradictory to believe both the system designed by capitalists to train factory workers and managers is awful and the glorified Markov statistics algorithms masquerading as intelligence are bad. Also, the grievances you talk about are entirely valid, as they are based upon the nightmare education system that many Euro-American countries have. And sure, maybe your situation was different, but that’s a good thing for you because you didn’t have to deal with a shit school. It’s just not acceptable though to turn around and say that just because you don’t know how bad it is, that it isn’t bad. I won’t deny your trauma, and you shouldn’t deny others. Simple as that.
Your third one is just bad. Your argument is “Kids sometimes make bad choices, so they shouldn’t be able to make other choices” - am I getting that right? To that, I say that literally everyone makes bad choices, and just because someone expresses bad judgement doesn’t mean that it is right to revoke them rights or their ability to consent or revoke their consent to situations. Kids often know a lot more about themselves than people think. Not to an absurd degree, but contradictory to the “Children as unthinking property” thesis that the bourgeoisie establishment constantly touts.
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Not all kids are that stupid and treating them like they are stunts their growth.
Oh no kids have to make their own choices (under controlled environments) and must deal with the consequences (under controlled environments). Think about the horrible consequences, that kids will learn how to be responsible!
The above paragraph is somewhat disingenuous to what your argument probably is, but that’s what your argument comes across as.
This is insane, i’m convinced these answers belong to people who are still in highschool or haven’t given more than 5 minutes of their time to actually thinking about the educational system.
Ableism + children bad?
Lost facebook user?
DAE having a school curriculum is authoritarian because i can’t study le minecraft???
Who is even advocating for this? And where did “authortarianism” or minecraft come from?
Are people currently in contact with education (as students or teachers) not allowed to discuss the influence of material conditions on human beings?
Or does “materialism” mean “clench your teeth, imagine a military parade and litsen to the soviet national anthem”?
We are struggling to receive the lessons of discipline that used to come from having to complete complicated work on a tight deadline
I made every effort I could to not use AI. I never even used chegg or stackoverflow to get quick homework answers. I always did work by myself because I genuinely loved the aspect of learning where it feels like I’m solving a puzzle and trying to understand things.
And yet I fucking hate deadlines and never stopped being a procrastinator.
Many of us were propelled by a kind of frantic productivity as we approached midnight, putting the finishing touches on our ideas and work.
People knew how to take shortcuts before AI as well. What is this gaslighting? AI of this level has not been around for more than 3 years. The “frantic productivity” is nothing to reminisce happily about. I remember how many sleepless nights I had. I remember kids crying to the teacher. I remember doing other kids’ homework cause they were deep in the shit. None of it taught me anything. Instead, the constant stress has made me into less of a person.
The technology has also led students to focus on external results at the expense of internal growth.
I’m sorry kid. You gotta learn the truth early. This has been the case in the adult world forever as well. Things weren’t different in my time.
Something I once loved now feels empty.
I feel sad for this kid.
Many of us are so accustomed to outsourcing that we’re dulling the very instincts that we need to prevail in life: grit, critical thinking, and the ability to function smoothly under stress.
This kid has such an idealistic outlook in life. They have exchanged out “ass-kissing, head-lowering, parroting and coping” with these high sounding phrases.
You’re not supposed to read the article, that’s cheating. You’re supposed to glance at the headline and immediately dive into discourse.
Yet another example of shortcuts people have been taking before AI.
AI is destroying people’s critical thinking by summarising news articles for them? Oh exalted sibling, nobody was reading the articles to begin with.
To be clear, my comment here was meant as meta-commentary more than anything specific or useful. I didn’t realize that I replied to you twice and I’ll share my full thoughts in the other response but I will say that I think low quality and misleading article headlines are an early rung on the ladder to brain enshittification.
any education that can be ruined by chatgpt is an education that wasn’t valuable in the first place. you can’t force someone to learn, that’s always been true, this just reduces the burden on people who were never going to give it their all anyway. even if you manage to force some information into their brain that they’re not interested in, they’ll forget it as soon as they’re allowed. i think the solution is to structure all school like college and let kids choose which classes they want, ranging from as many as they can fit to zero. why worry about the academic integrity of kids who are literally prisoners having their time and energy stolen from them for things that they don’t think are important? everyone has interests they’ll pursue, they just need the right to choose how they spend their time and energy, and to be treated like they actually have some sort of control over their own brains. letting kids choose their own classes will not only make them happier and healthier, but more employable and more educated in what they were actually gonna end up being smart about anyway. they’ll also see the value in classes they find boring once they actually have something to apply them to. if you gave kids the option to just leave (something everyone should have at any time unless you believe in incarceration), you would see zero phones out in classrooms. also, get rid of grades, they serve absolutely no purpose other than coercion, they’re using chatgpt to get a report card that won’t make their parents mad.
Sometimes struggling with shit you hate is an important step to learning something that matters. I hated the Shakespeare plays I was forced to read and write about for the first couple of years they made us do it at school. But in the third year of this it all suddenly clicked. Had AI existed back then, I might have never come to appreciate Shakespeare.
Also, I didn’t know what the fuck I was interested in or good at as a teenager. Primary and secondary education needs to be broad and well-rounded.
Also, I didn’t know what the fuck I was interested in or good at as a teenager. Primary and secondary education needs to be broad and well-rounded.
I want to push back on this a little. All the time I spent in English literature class and French language lessons were wasted. I knew that wasn’t related to what I wanted to do for a long time, and it still isn’t. I forgot everything from those classes.
I literally took extra history classes that I didn’t need to because I was interested in that subject. But I couldn’t go all the way with them because I could only sit official exams on my official subjects.
Had I not been forced to waste time on English and French (especially french), I would have had a much better high-school experience. I might have taken up music as well.
The whole experience with subject choice really depends on the student.
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Sorry, but this is a pretty surface-level take. The Shakespearean plays and the French language are vessels for other skills. Literary criticism, argumentation, media literacy, acculturation to a shared literary canon, and even just how to talk about books are all additional aims to using Shakespeare in an English class, beyond “learn this book you hate”. A good English class can focus on these skills with any content, but Shakespeare is used for his contributions to the English language and literature in addition to his privileged place in culture (a valid avenue for argument).
The targeted plays might not be every student’s cup of tea, but some students will love Shakespeare and hate your favorite book. As long as the classroom is used as a social learning space, there will need to be shared central content used as a medium for the skills–which are more important and enduring than the exact content of the plays. It’s the same for the French grammar you don’t remember but which gave you the rudimentary skills to study another language more effectively.
definitely something every human being should have to consent to, thats all im saying
OMFG! THANK YOU!
I’m so tired of people acting like bad things are good. I know human nature is a prime beacon for chuds, but if we wanna talk about human nature, one of the things that seems so fucking lacking in a majority of people is theory of mind and empathy. It’s so ironic, because people talk about how humans “invented” those things, but then they go around and not even do it.
And I know a lot of people do have proper theory of mind and empathy BUT NOT ENOUGH FUCKING PEOPLE
I can understand that “Happy candy land where nothing goes wrong and everyone perfectly understands each other and nobody slights each other in any way” is a day dream, but people treat day dreams like we shouldn’t even consider them.
JUST BECAUSE PARADISE IS IMPOSSIBLE DOESN’T MEAN WE SHOULDN’T STRIVE FOR IT. The impossibility or difficulty of good things should never sway us from actually trying to make an effort to achieve them. Sorry for ranting, but I just needed to let that out.
Good post!
i fw what ur saying immensely. it bugs me when people reject an idea for something they like on the basis that it couldn’t happen, like why would they do their opponents’ job for them. we gotta ask for what we really want
I’m seeing rampant AI use in colleges as well. Allowing kids to choose their classes will not cause them to stop using AI if they still have requirements they need to fulfill (mandatory deadlines). I’ve even seen people use AI for their own personal passion projects.
At this point, we have to understand that people will use AI, there is no stopping it. We need better AI, stuff that is not so harmful for the planet and hallucinates less. Either that or we stop subsidizing existing AI infrastructure causing it to go under.
And even if schools allowed kids to choose classes, unless they straight up got rid of deadlines, most kids will still take shortcuts. They will want to maximize the amount of time spent socializing and minimize the amount of time learning unless the learning itself is a fun activity.
The ideal future of learning might simply look something like a more advanced version of khan academy combined with physical spaces where kids can use tools/materials to build shit. You could assess students using oral or written exams (they have a choice) that recur periodically and the kids can choose when they are ready. Another aspect that would be important is schools teaching children on how to take care of themselves properly (sleep + diet especially) so that students don’t walk in feeling like zombies. Remove the requirement that students have to be at a specific physical location at specific times (unless a teacher is holding a QA session or there is some combined activity).
a lot of the following is gonna be about me, i tried not to but i feel like you need to know to see where im coming from.
to be clear, i didnt mean to imply that college is ideal. i was kinda counting on how school before college (or at least before hs) barely has any stakes long term, you’re not there to profit. most people in college don’t really want to be there either, they go for the degree so they can get a good job (theoretically) or just because it’s what they’ve been told to do. i went to community college right before ai took off and i could definitely spot people who cared and people who didn’t, and for me personally (and i imagine most people?) it varied by class, the ones i didn’t like were the ones i was forced to take for my degree and really truly didn’t need. i can fr get into how i’d address this if you want, but it would get really really detailed explaining the whole system. i originally typed and cancelled an addendum to my post suggesting something pretty similar to the start of your third paragraph.
i have kind of a tinfoil hat theory about the thing about how kids want to maximize the amount of time socializing and minimize the amount of time learning, that definitely did cross my mind. i feel like kids are only like that because they’re so burnt out from doing schoolwork they’re not interested in, they’re given an insane amount of work for their age and it would be really strange if they were interested in anything other than relaxing in their little time off. i think when you let a kid get truly recharged and bored, they’ll have an uncontrollable urge to find something that challenges them and makes them feel accomplished. i dropped out in seventh grade and started homeschooling (with very minimal guidance or testing), and i ended up teaching myself a lot of IT just because i was interested in computers, i grew up and did a year and a half in community college for IT and already knew most of the stuff (straight A+s), got certs really easy, the point is i think i got a way better education simply by not going to high school, and i had friends in similar situations who had similar outcomes. i was rotting when i was in school, i only started learning when i dropped out. most people will never witness a kid actually free to explore what they want to, you spend every weekend and summer recovering from school, then you spend every weekend after that recovering from work.
most people will never witness a kid actually free to explore what they want to
Painfully accurate.
The Montessori School has already been disproven.
No, it hasn’t.
I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion.
It’s saying something that the rest of the article’s pretty good for the atlantic lol. A little pearl clutchy but no more than is reasonable for a teenager. Also probably written with an LLM.
eight em dashes? Either this person is trying their best to write like a journalist or they used an LLM to write this article
the — is another victim the chat bots. i’m reading a grammar obsessed writer rn and he uses them in all sorts of ways — quite liberally as well
yo fuck the em dash all my homies hate the em dash ——— i didn’t know that shit even existed until ChudGPT zombies shit them onto my screen, back in my day you only had access to two dashes on your dang keyboard, _ or -, and if you wanted your - to be longer you would just press the damn thing a few more times like this — and shit you’d mostly just use them to make dancing kirby emoticons in AOL chat <(-‘.’<) <(-‘.’-)> (>‘.’-)>
i never bother to look up how ppl made the special characters so the kirbys were always my fav (_)
some “smart” text editors would automatically emdash if you did --, like how microsoft word would … into a marginally smaller actual unicode ellipses character
The compose key has been around for ages
