I teach 18 year olds who range in reading levels from preschool to college, but the majority of them are in the lower half that range. I am devastated by what AI and social media have done to them. My kids don’t think anymore. They don’t have interests. Literally, when I ask them what they’re interested in, so many of them can’t name anything for me. Even my smartest kids insist that ChatGPT is good “when used correctly.” I ask them, “How does one use it correctly then?” They can’t answer the question. They don’t have original thoughts. They just parrot back what they’ve heard in TikToks. They try to show me “information” ChatGPT gave them. I ask them, “How do you know this is true?” They move their phone closer to me for emphasis, exclaiming, “Look, it says it right here!” They cannot understand what I am asking them. It breaks my heart for them and honestly it makes it hard to continue teaching. If I were to quit, it would be because of how technology has stunted kids and how hard it’s become to reach them because of that.
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…)
“When the measure becomes the goal, it ceases to be a good measure”
Because we care about grades kids learn to get good grades. Oral exams can fix this, but it’s more time consuming for teachers.
How much of the issue is the system vs the students?
When I was in school, I remember dealing with hours of homework on top of extracurriculars and eventually working a job.
My choices were do homework or sleep. Either way I lost. So I definitely used chegg so I could get sleep and not fail.
I think our expectations for kids are just… not realistic? And I think that fuels a lot of the resentment for school.
Homework definitely is an issue, and a big one. I don’t find it useful at all, and sometimes it can actually be detrimental, because until it’s checked it can reinforce errors and make them more difficult to correct later… I’m not a teacher, but from a layperson’s perspective I would be totally fine with zero homework. People need some downtime to relax, and kids are people too (or so I’m told), so they should have time to rest, play games or do whatever after school…
The real solution is taking all that money that is going to these VC funds to milk public services and putting that into the actual service. It doesn’t take a huge amount of investment to do it, just make teachers happy to be there, and give them time to nurture children’s curiosity. So much education has ended up in this cycle based on exactly what you’re talking about, looking at spreadsheets and grades, and cramming knowledge into kids rather than teaching the process of learning.
The only reasons I like some of the things I like is because I had teachers behind me that saw that spark and nurtured it, not because of the stuff I crammed into my head. If anything you end up passionate about stuff in spite of the curriculum instead of because of it most of the time (in my case at least)
Great point. Somewhere along the way we started teaching facts and formulas instead of showing kids that learning is fun and encouraging them to do it on their own because they enjoy it and not because they have to…
Sigh, imagine an education system like that, instead of the current pipeline for creating obedient drones, holy crap…
I think the easiest way to achieve something like that is to homeschool together with a like minded commune that has the knowledge and passion for teaching, that way the kid doesn’t lose out on the social aspects of school, but it’s not ideal. Wish education would get more investment before other things, it’s the best long term investment for a country, invest in smarter future generations to get a better country for all
While I don’t like the right wing ideology behind it unschoolers have the right idea. Make learning enjoyable and tailored to the child’s interests and they will actually want to attend school. The idea that kids should all sit still all day and learn in the same way is deeply flawed.