> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said.<p>Sounds right to me. Kids under 13 need to learn to read, write and comprehend text. Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.<p>They can play with AI at home, and after 13 they can learn how to use AI productively and, ideally, in a way that enhances rather than detracts from their education.<p>Also from the story:<p>> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.<p>A big hooray for that. Will be interesting to see what impact that has on Norway education - a quick search just now didn't turn up any detailed studies, presumably those will show up eventually.
Totally agree!<p>For anyone who still thinks kids should use AI, another argument to make is we are still figuring out AI (hence the constant debate on it, hype, uncertainty, boundaries of its capabilities etc etc). I don't think anyone with right mind can disagree with that. Keeping that mind, wouldn't it make sense to at-the-very-least tread with caution when it comes to kids.
The counterargument is that kids will live in a world different from our own.<p>For example, in many countries children lost the ability to write cursive; that used to be a critical skill comparable to literacy itself. But in our current society, that's no longer the case and you can be very successful without it, but there are other skills, such as using technology, that became critical.<p>Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.
But how do you <i>know</i> that letting kids use AI at a way earlier age is the right way to equip them for the world that they would live in? You don't even know what that world will be like, so you can't even draw the conclusion that teaching them AI today will create career success in the future.<p>And then there's the other solid supporting arguments:<p>- Humans today were able to comprehend and use AI as soon as ChatGPT became popular so kids today will be able to pick it up quickly as grown-ups.<p>- "Using AI" isn't really a skill because there isn't much to learn beyond typing to a chatbot and reading the output (creating agentic workflows are very much for power users).<p>- The form of AI tech today might not even be the same as its form in the future, so you're already teaching them something obsolete.
> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.<p>I don't think this is as clear as you make it out to be.<p>There are areas (e.g. personal care as per the impact map released by Anthropic a few months ago) where the impact of AI will be less than in the ones HN often discusses. Communicating with people is important in many of these areas so making sure that kids "should learn" how to communicate is a good investment regardless of how rapidly technology is shifting. There are different time tested ways of doing this and while you can "disrupt" these a little, throwing them out completely is, at least to me, a bad idea.<p>OTOH, doubling down on learning "skills for the future" which are all bold bets while sacrificing things that have served humanity through multiple moments of change is probably a bad idea.<p>As for cursive writing (or atleast handwriting) itself, there are several studies of learning it being associated with developing fine motor control, improving memory, improving focus. I can't find them right now but I remember reading them because of my own interest in calligraphy. Many older (especially religious) traditions place emphasis on using written (rather than digitally typeset) books for memorisation because the slight changes in the shapes of the letters act as reinforcements for the process. I know this from experience as well so I think there's definitely value there.
Everybody and their grandma can "use AI". Reading (and understanding what you read), writing (coherently) and calculating (in your head) are those basic skills that need to be trained and will give you an advantage no matter in what kind of world you live.
Isn't that a straightforward argument for preserving the status quo as much as possible in learning? We know how to get people to learn without AI, so we should keep doing it until someone figures out how to use AI effectively.
My 6 year olds have been writing cursive at school all year, they have a zero policy about phones until the age ~15, and still use books for everything. Not many schools do this anymore, but there are schools that still do.
>> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.<p>I'm not really sure what point you are making here. We can talk about stuff based on what we know now. AI definitely isn't there yet. Even adults are figuring it out, the limits of its capabilities and shortcomings. Its not even been 5 years, and we want to change everything everywhere.<p>So if we don't know if we should or should not, and take into account all the hype, marketing, hype, advantages and some potential disadvantages (which are quite serious) why not just go ahead when there is more confidence.
I went through a Steiner school from pre-school to end of high school.
It’s highly opinionated and very controlling <i>initially</i>.
When you paint, you start with one colour. Then another day you get the next (there were only primary colours, because of course).<p>You eat at your desk, then you’re allowed to play. This was dropped after a year or so.<p>You don’t learn to read until you’re 7, etc etc.<p>However, by the end of high school it was up to the individual how much they achieved, and there was minimal pressure. As long as you weren’t messing with other kids, you could do a little or much as you please, and consequences were minimal.<p>Tools and skills were introduced at a developmentally appropriate age - not sure who chose that age though.<p>There was a lot wrong with the school and the system, but there was a lot more that was right in my opinion.
Yeah, I we considered a Steiner school because I think that extensive play is a super critical part of a good education. The problem is you also need to be able to be part of the mainstream system at some point, and it felt like it didn't necessarily quite meet that goal.
> The problem is you also need to be able to be part of the mainstream system at some point<p>There is a requirement to meet certain state mandated standards and the one I went to also took state funding, leading to dilution of Steiner influence/an improved curriculum. It depended which side you were on.
Also worth considering is that it is part of a broader ideology of Anthroposophy which sometimes aproaches semi cult status in how people identify with it<i>. A lot of the principles of Steiner schools are actually pretty cool, but sending your kid there, depending on the school they will also be dealing with the more esoteric bits of all of this that have very little to do with didactic or pedagogic sound principles.<p></i> Some if it includes some schools teaching some of the more racists views of Mr Steiner.
From a UK perspective it's very weird that kids in America don't learn to write joined-up.<p>How can you write sufficiently fast in an English or History exam (where you have to write a whole essay in limited time) if you're writing one letter at a time like a 6 year old?
I agree, but its also somewhat weird that the main reason kids learn to write cursive is for exams - its not a skill most of us use in adult life, and even for kids writing outside exams is often done on computers (e.g. my daughter's A level history coursework was done on, and submitted from, a computer).<p>Some of the exam boards are trialling computerised exams where exams are completed on computers instead of paper. Its cheaper for them to not have to handle paper (which gets scanned anyway). Its long been possible as an accessibility arrangement but it might become the norm.
If your history exam grade hinges on your "typing speed", you had a bad teacher.
It's not like you can not write sufficiently quickly using block letters.
Kids won't grow up into a world where it's not beneficial to know how to read or write or think.
You're absolutely right! Joined-up penmanship is <i>exactly the same</i> as our current asymmetry in absorbing reams of soullessly verbose, arrogant pablum shat out by the latest crop of "frontier" LLMs.<p><pre><code> Heirloom Groceries
Sponsored
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In stock • $14.99 • 25-35 minutes
Ads do not influence the answers you get from ChatGPT. Your chats stay private.
Learn about ads and personalization ></code></pre>
Whether they should or not is a moot point. They are using it and we need to figure out how to organise society to deal with it.
We're in like year 2 or 3 of LLMs being serious tools, still with many disadvantages over humans. There's plenty of time to figure things out, we don't need to experiment on children right now.
Return to pen and paper, particularly for testing.
Extend school time for doing supervised "homework" that doesn't involve the Internet.<p>Like that?
> figure out how to organise society to deal with it.<p>Yea, need to figure out to form society with participants who are incapable of thinking...<p>And to make matters worse the LLMs that is causing this cannot even really think!
> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.<p>I think it's more complex than this.<p>AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.<p>The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.)<p>On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.
I understand the first part, but I don't understand the second one. It's probably my ignorance for not having children and being out of touch with schooling.
When I was in school very little grading was based on homework, mostly was grading by testing in class. For example math, I'm absolutely sure it was 100% a few grading tests every semester. You could cheat by copying the homework of your classmates, it was the same set of problems for, but with 0 understanding, you would not pass.
The obvious way to square this circle is to go back to how things used to be: less emphasis on coursework and more on old-fashioned tests in an examination environment with just pen and paper.<p>You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams. On the other hand, students who use LLMs to augment their learning will do fine
> You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams<p>This might sound principled, but we need to recognize that school administrators are incentivised to have as few kids as possible fail their exams; and consequently, so are the teachers. Either exams will change, or the teaching will change.
This is definitely what's going to happen. But there is still a problem - people (not just children) are fundamentally lazy and put things off. People always leave assignments until the last minute. I used to smoothly transition from "I've got plenty of time, no need to start" to "there's not enough time to do it, there's no point starting".<p>They will 100% just use AI for the whole year and then panic and fail the exam when the time comes.<p>So I think not only will we see more invigilated exams, but they'll become more frequent and shorter. Which I would say is a good thing anyway. I always hated learning a whole year of stuff for a 3 hour exam.
In what countries were the exams only once a year? When I grew up in the 90s in Sweden we would have tests and exams frequently, usually at the end of each module. This continued all the way through university. I think we had 3 separate exams for the first math course (which lasted a quarter of a year, so roughly one exam per month).<p>(Though they didn't give formal grades for the first several years of elementary school, which I'm not sure was a good idea.)
In the UK. In high school (age ~11 to 16) the only exams that mattered were SATs at ages 7, 11 and 14 (though I just checked and apparently they've scrapped the 14 year old ones for some reason), and GCSEs at 16. After that you have A-levels for two years (age 17 and 18) where IIRC it was just one big group of exams at the end of each year, and then university where I guess maybe it varies but at least at Cambridge it was one big group of 3-hour long exams at the end of each year.<p>Though Cambridge does have "tutorials" which are 1:2 tutoring sessions where you probably couldn't completely rely on AI.<p>Your way definitely sounds better to me.
There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.
It's the same old argument about knives and technology. But we don't give children knives.
Learning is also impacted when homework/test questions are created and graded by AI.<p>The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map…<p>Why have teachers?<p>The AI might as well grade
itself.
Hard agree. AI generated questions should be absolutely forbidden. In our university I helped a instructor set up a custom Gemini Gem to let students grade themselves in recording because we did not have time to read the final scores in time, It was a nightmare to restrict or get consistent results.
It’s not complex. One must first learn HOW TO LEARN before they can use any tool to help them learn.<p>There’s no substitution for human connection (social media) and there’s no substitution for traditional learning (robot teachers).<p>Everyone who wants to “disrupt” this fundamental human quality is chasing delusion. If you want to help, pay teachers a couple billion from the hundreds-of-billions going into AI maybe?
> and the best technology ever invented for learning.<p>This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement.<p>Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into <i>good</i> research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.
AI is a terrible teacher though. It makes stuff up all the time, and for some subjects it has a remarkably low accuracy rate
I would argue it has gotten way better. Depending on the subject it can be really helpful and some tools even have a learning mode built in now that can generate questions and tests. They are often way too easy to solve but it does not demotivate i guess.
It has always gotten better, just like how self-driving cars have gotten better, and how the case for bitcoin is always getting stronger.<p>Many people have stopped believing this lie. Yes AI has gotten better by some metric which AI companies are pushing. It has not gotten good enough to be a qualified teacher, and it never will.
>> It makes stuff up all the time<p>There are a few reasons AI is not the best teacher, but this is not one of them because teachers are also frequently wrong. I say that as someone who comes from a family of teachers, ranging from kindergarten to PhD.<p>And here is the problem: unlike AI, a lot of teachers don’t like being questioned or challenged. If your teacher doesn’t know a subject well, and you realize this, your options as a student are pretty limited. This is especially true at lower grades.<p>I don’t believe that AI can replace teachers. But, if used well, it can supplement them. I think Norway is making the right call here with elementary schools, but I wouldn’t support this kind of policy at higher grades where levels.
> AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.<p>Yeah, right. Did you forget a /s<p><a href="https://chatgpt.com/share/6a363b6d-92ac-83ea-a619-41b2ecd9f5d1" rel="nofollow">https://chatgpt.com/share/6a363b6d-92ac-83ea-a619-41b2ecd9f5...</a><p>This is a popular game, still doing sales almost 18 years after release, with dozens of wiki fansites containing all the information, and with hundreds, if not thousands, of reddit postings... <i>and it falls apart on the first answer!</i><p>No. Kids in school <i>should not</i> be using AI, because:<p>1. They won't be using the latest models, and<p>2. They can't tell if the info is accurate
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Stupid people never have the appetite or ability to 'tackle' anything. It's their defining characteristic.<p>It's not more complex than stupid people in charge, stupid results follow. Smart people with integrity in charge, good things follow.<p>AI changes nothing.
AI has existed for decades. The average person has just discovered it / had it forced upon them. And just a small-subset of AI. The average person does not use real AI. And AI is not even well-defined.<p>Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning. AI will be used as a tool as a way of 'shaping' the mind of young people. Similar to using standardized textbooks. AI is too much of a political tool to be useful.<p>AI is a tool for propaganda.
> Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning<p>I am curious where you were educated to come to this conclusion.
I don't think your statement holds generally true for all education as it is by definition teaching knowledge.<p>Sure, there might be institutions that do teaching and propaganda, but I think it shows a lack of awareness to generalize this to all education.
> AI is a tool for propaganda.<p>In my experience so far it's less of a propaganda than basically any other medium massively consumed today. It might become it one day though, like all othe media became it.
> They can play with AI at home<p>Actually, in Europe, Gemini is officially not available for kids even at home [1]. In some countries like Germany, the restriction applies until 16 [2]. I find unsettling that even for supervised account, parents are forbidden to let their kids learn how to use Gemini, even between 14 and 16 yo.<p>Note that this restriction does not seem to appear from other AI company. So from outside, it looks like unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.<p>[1]: <a href="https://support.google.com/families/answer/16109150?hl=en#availability" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/families/answer/16109150?hl=en#av...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1350409?sjid=7871472644837759375-EU#zippy=%2Ceurope" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1350409?sjid=7871...</a>
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.<p>I remember seeing an nyt article where there was mixed results on cell phone bans. While they increased socialization among students, the school didnt see better test scores.<p>We'll have to see if a ban on AI can improve test scores-I am bullish on the idea tho
I would see that as an absolute win. Socialization is the main point I send my kids to school.<p>Socialization leads to discourse which leads to learning.
British schools are often pretty clear that kids are not there to socialise - they will say it in so many words.<p>It also depends what you by socialisation. in terms of school people usually mean two distinct things: have opportunities to spend time in social interactions, and learning social skills.<p>My experience of taking kids out of school is that the first reduces (because they spend less time with other kids each day) but the second increases (because they meet a greater variety of people in a grater variety of places).<p>That takes me to my greatest concern with AI. That kids will socialise (in both senses) with AI rather than people. What will that do to their social skills? There are plenty of examples of adults doing that (visible in places like /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI ), but at least they grew up developing some social skills. If AI is a big part of your interactions, what will the effects of that be?
I agree but unfortunately the US education budget is driven by test scores.<p>Unless theres strong evidence that test scores will increase, Karen from the PTA insists that her child be given access to their phone
Socialization goes out of fashion at a rapid pace. If I were to guess, technology deprived kids will quickly catch up with the trend when they age out of the ban.<p>Also use of technology anti-correlated with alcohol and drug use so there might be unwelcome side effects.
Here in Ontario they "banned" phones in class/school and the teens just ignore it and the teachers are unable/scared to enforce it. As parents we've tried over and over with both our kids to lay down the law -- including taking phones away, consequences etc -- but the attitude is intense with both them and their peers and enforcement becomes very difficult once they're out of "child account" parental control range.<p>It's a shitty time to be a parent of a teen.
Canadian schools operate under the principle of <i>in loco parentis</i>. Your administrators are just unwilling to do their jobs. If they laid down strict policies of zero tolerance and consequences for offenders that inconvenience the parents there would be compliance. Any parent not on board with such policies can send their kids elsewhere.
How about if we target the social media apps for their predatory algorithms?
13? there is no reason a minor should use a brain rotting technology like AI, in fact, AI for pretty much most teens is way WAY more damaging than even tiktok ever was.
Connect the dots also banned, though there is some discussion of loosening the rules to allow interpolating up to four points.
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.<p>Isn't that expected in most countries in Europe? There's an aging overall population that is shrinking and immigration is rising. So you get a progressively rising percentage of immigrants among school students, many of those coming from 3rd world countries with non-functioning education systems.
I don't understand what the controversy is in the US about banning phones in schools. I graduated highschool in the mid 2000s and cell phones were just starting to gain adoption in my town in the last couple years I was in school. I don't recall anyone using a phone in class, but Game Boys were definitely not allowed. I was surprised when I found out that kids were regularly on their phones in class. Why was that ever allowed? Did it get too hard to enforce and they gave up on it until recently?
I've heard a big problem is the parents - they want to be able to communicate with their kids while they are in school, so many parents oppose phone bans.
a large florida school district banned cell phones in schools, and after two years, the total benefit that was measured to be likely caused by this was +0.9 percentiles on their standardized achievement test.<p>in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.<p>how do dozens if not low hundreds of hours of time you are not spending on your phone at school translate to only the same benefit as doing ONE hour of studying? well, if there is no mechanism, then yeah, that's what happens.<p>so why was it ever allowed? either tests are severely limited in what they measure, or the impact of cell phones on education is actually quite small. it cannot be both.
Just ignoring the flimsy SAT metric, there's something most aren't considering in these sort of data. Cell phones enable and are fairly widely used for all sorts of cheating. Banning them gets rid of that, and so if there was no positive effect from a phone ban you'd actually probably expect a slight decrease on scores because of this effect.<p>So the fact that basically every school region that bans phones is seeing marginal to moderate <i>gains</i> is just huge. And as others have mentioned, test scores are but one aspect of this. Breaks where kids are playing and interacting more regularly are a million times better than ones where everybody whips out their screen and turns into a zombie.
Schooling is more than just exams, I'm sorry. There is no need for a cell phone in a classroom.
Why was it allowed in the first place because why was it treated any different than other distractions in the classroom?
> in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.<p>[citation needed]
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Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8. I don’t even like LLMs and I’m against this mess. Imagine having regulations rolled out when we were 8 saying “you can’t use the internet!” And I was running my own websites by 10 years old.<p>Let’s stop pretending this tech is as interesting as we wish it was. If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet. I don’t see the difference at this point.
> Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8<p>A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.<p><a href="https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp" rel="nofollow">https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp</a> for 2023:<p>> Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent.<p>The literacy proficiency levels section on <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp" rel="nofollow">https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp</a> describes what Level 1 means:<p>> Adults at level 1 are able to locate information on a text page, find a relevant link from a website, and identify relevant text among multiple options when the relevant information is explicitly cued. They can understand the meaning of short texts, as well as the organization of lists or multiple sections within a single page.<p>28% of US adults are just <i>at or below that level</i>.
in the intermediate oecd [piaacs report] pages 64ff (PDF page 66ff) there are bar charts indicating the percentiles of each level for each participating nation.<p>the report also visualizes not only inter country but also intra country outcomes correlating socio economic influences (age, parents, family migration history, ...) and level of education (school, high school, college and higher) with test outcome (literacy, numerics problem solving)<p>it also has 10y ago/now comparison.<p>a trove for the Q "how are we doing, capability wise?"<p>thanks for pointing to the study!!<p>[piaacs report] <a href="https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2024/12/do-adults-have-the-skills-they-need-to-thrive-in-a-changing-world_4396f1f1/b263dc5d-en.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...</a>
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<i>>A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.</i><p>Yes and AI isn't to blame for that as adults predate AI. It's the governments, schools, teachers, parents, teacher's unios, who taught them(or more accurately didn't teach them) and graduated them out of school anyway regardless just so they don't look bad in statistics. Sorry but if you graduate people out of high school who can't read you should be trialed for fraud. Simple as.<p>People blaming AI for adults unable to read puts us back to the 90s when Doom was to blame for school shootings or back to 60s when rock music was to blame for juvenile delinquency, all of them being wrong, and they're wrong here too. People always want to blame a third party external scapegoat that isn't' the parents and isn't the government, for the problems of their kids.
Nobody is blaming AI. The point is we don’t have the luxury of throwing nonsense at our kids when they’re illiterate. Particularly not nonsense where all the evidence shows it harms on average more than it helps.
Just wanna start off by saying that with young unformed minds, it does probably harm more on average than it helps. But particularly for spelling and reading, it might maybe actually help?<p>To be efficient with AI and LLMs you need to be good at least two things, reading and writing. One easy way of getting better is by reading a lot, and writing a lot. Maybe if we coax the kids into understanding (believing?) that better reading and writing helps them use AI better, they'd pay more attention to it?
AI hasn't had a chance to demonstrate if it helps or hurts education yet.<p>That's the big problem with education in general. If you introduce a new factor to children's education you can't realistically measure the effect it has had for about <i>five years</i>, because you need to wait for a cohort of kids to go through that system and then see how they did.<p>This means that if you introduce something with clear negative effects it will be five years before you spot them!<p>That's pretty catastrophic given that ChatGPT only emerged in late 2022 and only got good around early 2024.
That's not true, it absolutely depends on effect size. I'll give you an obvious example: large lead acetate infusions. You'll notice pretty fast.
No?<p><a href="https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/" rel="nofollow">https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...</a><p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1</a><p><a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/lee_2025_ai_critical_thinking_survey.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...</a><p>This also links back up to the Ironies of Automation, which came out decades ago.<p>The reports from teachers for the past few years have been pretty stark, with kids completely obviating homework.<p>Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.
<i>>Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.</i><p>In countries like Finland kids don't get any homework. Though their society and school system optimizes more for child happiness, not winning international math Olympiads where you need to cram to get ahead.
> Even if the Finns don't need it, research suggests it makes a positive difference.
Prof Susan Hallam from the Institute of Education says there is "hard evidence" that homework really does improve how well pupils achieve.
"There is no question about that," she says.
A study for the Department for Education found students who did two to three hours of homework per night were almost 10 times more likely to achieve five good GCSEs than those who did no homework<p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/education-37716005" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/education-37716005</a><p>Finns appear to have a school system that works in a manner that suits their nation, and was reformed decades ago.
Right, AI isn't to blame for that, but cell phones might be? The bad number increased from 19 to 28 percent between 2017 and 2023.
Someone always finds a way to shit on the US. Every single time.
When quoting a factual statistic is "shitting on the US", you're losing the ability to address issues.
The US is a context that is generally relevant to HN, and for which we have lots of data.<p>Literacy is a worldwide problem.
The United States has always been at the forefront of pushing higher literacy both internally and world wide. We have just had multiple crazy tech breakthroughs, a world wide pandemic, and various other uncontrolled variables like SAT tests no longer being required at some institutions. It's impossible to draw any conclusions with so many moving pieces but ultimately I'm sure we'll figure it out. A slight regression isn't the end of the world.
Your 'slight regression' has lasted a lot longer than the last ten years, and is a real problem that has a significant effect on many people's lives. Again, this is not uniquely a US problem, but it is a problem.<p>Jingoistic deflection doesn't change that.
In this case it's the US that's shitting on the US. These numbers don't compare the US with other countries, they compare the US in 2023 with the US in 2017. And the numbers are from the US government National Center for Education Statistics.
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Relevance of 'magot - a seated oriental figurine, usually of porcelain or ivory, with a grotesque form' to someone who criticizes the US? The allusion is too esoteric for me I'm afraid.
Yeah well unfortunately the US is pretty shitty in this day and age
Price of ruling the world I guess
From what I can tell the average school at best can aspire to teach kids how to work and how to socialize. That's it. I'd personally be very happy with computers mostly going away from school too. Most actual learning and exploring will hopefully happen at home.
Those are important skills schools teach, but I'm skeptical that most learning happens at home. I strongly suspect most adults learned to read and write because of the education they received in school, not home. Especially when it comes to the high school level and learning things like how to structure an essay or more advanced math. I doubt many parents are having their 16 year olds write essays and do trigonometry problems on the weekend.
This is really not true. Kids do actually learn a lot in school - includong weak students. And you actually see huge difference between places with and without schools.
Many kids in Norwegian schools do not speak Norwegian or English. Kids need "computers" just to translate what other kid is saying.
This is true for many children of non-English speaking immigrant parents anywhere in the developed world. Schools will use language immersion and extra help to get these kids up to speed very quickly. Computers are sometimes used for educational games and activities, but these can be done just as well without.<p>Can I guess that you are (native/ethnic) Norwegian and upset by the recent waves of immigration to Norway? Your comment is <i>very</i> specific, plus you used a new throwaway account.
No, they don’t. Especially in elementary school.<p>My living example - my kiddo didn’t speak a word in English until 4.5 years, when she went into preschool. Russian speaking home and daycare do that for you.<p>After 9 months in American preschool, she completely switched to English language as her primary. 2 years later, and she speaks Russian with strong accent.
Do you have a source for this?
I didn't have the internet when I was in school. Neither did my kids till they got to college. We've all gone pretty far. For myself, that's in the technology world as a software engineer.
At eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills. They need a lot longer to develop those in tandem.<p>And also you may be above average there.
>At eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills.<p>I have two kids and can confidently say eight year olds generally have good language skills, are capable of expressing themselves just fine, and have good comprehension <i>of the parts of the world that they've been exposed to</i>.
So they can conduct a nuanced debate then?<p>Mine couldn’t until they were much older. And I have more so perhaps that’s more statistically valid?
Can they identify easy stylistic device, like an extended metaphor or an anaphora?<p>Because until they do, I will consider their comprehension skills limited.
> If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet.<p>Now we're talkin'<p>I'm all for it, let's teach kids the fundamentals of the world without relying on computers before we introduce them
8 years olds shouldn’t be using the internet.
When I was 8, I could use the Internet at school but every website was whitelisted.
They can use it at home.<p>Using it school is likely undermining their learning.
Yes, there's also a push to ban all computers in classrooms because data is showing that it's of no benefit and if anything is a negative effect on education.
There is also a push to ban certain childhood vaccines amoungst crazy people in the US. What is being said here, really?<p>Example: what if Internet access was removed, but the computer remained? It would still be very useful.
AI is not the internet, it's a stochastic parrot that lays golden eggs for its shareholders.
If you think an 8 year old can comprehend text at the same level of a 13 year old (or an 18 year old for that matter), I don't know what to tell you. Reading comprehension doesn't peak at 8.
You mean chatgpt style AI won't help them with those skills?<p>If a human parent or teacher can help with skills like reading, an AI system can too, once it's trained and designed to do so. (How good are humans at teaching reading anyway?)
>How good are humans at teaching reading anyway?<p>Writing developed thousands of years BCE. So, considering we as a species have been successfully teaching our offspring how to read for hundreds of generations, I'd say we're probably pretty decent at it.
Yeah, it baffles me that the sentiment here is that AI can only hurt kids' reading ability, when AI (in the form of a chatbot) is practically a tool that <i>forces</i> its users to read a lot.<p>I still support for some sort of AI restriction for kids, though, since school is a place for kids to socializing. It's a more aspect important than reading and writing.
They need those skills to be able to communicate with others, not to .. research?
and with a structured tool, what better place to practice writing, process, iteration, revision, editing.<p>this happens constantly, every day. a current implementation of a technology isnt optimal so the entire class of anything related to that technology is treated as equally flawed.<p>the solution here is better tools, not preventing better tools from being created.
Sounds dystopian.<p>What kids need to learn to read is an adult to engage with them, listen to how they read and engage them on the contents of the book.
LOL
"and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.<p>A big hooray for that."<p>I don't suppose they are allowed to use physical violence again, still I would like to know what exactly you are cheering here for?
Why is this the most upvoted comment, yet when the UK repents teens form social media it’s met with “aDulTs arE bEiNg monItoRed”.<p>I agree with Norway here, and it’s slightly exhausting to see people attack any country that’s trying to protect kids as somehow coming for everyone’s supposed sovereignty.<p>I care about the youth and know they are in the midst of a culture war with adults, leave them out of it until we figure out a path forward.<p>edit: (crazy to see +11 on my comment, and also -1 when refreshing. Clearly my comment is divisive. This is honestly validating that adults simply cannot find common ground in this topic - especially HN)
Because banning smartphones in schools doesn’t affect adults not in those schools, whereas age verification does?<p>How you implement these protections matter.
Age verification does not affect adults. But often when they say age verification they want to make you give out more data than "i am over 18"
The rhetoric I often see online is forcing children to identify themselves which, obviously leads to adults being required to identify themselves.<p>How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?<p>It’s all complicated, but I am exhausted from reading doom articles of how the UK wants adults to not exist online while trying to force children offline for their own existence and long term health..<p>It’s worth me noting that I’m extremely liberal, but I’ve admittedly been failing to see how we keep children safe online without forcing identity of adulthood. We do not allow teens to buy cigarettes or vapes based on vibes either, right?<p>(please correct or roast me, I really am struggling with this and am tired of reading refutes that are not productive)
> How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?<p>It's pretty much impossible, so we should stop trying. It's exhausting seeing politicians et al continue to push for age verification despite it being impossible to be even remotely effective. (I hedge because technically we could demand photo ID for every HTTP request, I guess, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.)<p>The best we can do is ask parents to raise their children themselves and teach children to be mindful online (as we expect them to be IRL).
In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful. And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy, and the sites themselves not entirely infrequently demand ID from accounts at their own arbitrary and whimsical discretion.
The digital world is not like the real one. When you show your ID once all it's details are saved and can be searched across. When showing your ID to the cigarette vendor they will not notice most data and will have forgotten it a while later. So we need to be more careful with the data we give out digitally.<p>No ID is needed, just proof that you are above a certain age. There are technological solutions to just give out that data, but politicians seem to not want to go that way. This is the real issue, not age checking. The fear that age-checking means tracking...
In my view, it’s very simple. There are places like schools, or parents buying phone plans, to identify children. Will some children get access outside of that? Sure. But 100% enforcement isn’t possible even if you thought it was worth destroying privacy on the internet.
Is Norway forcing all internet users to provide their ID to access all internet services?
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Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.<p>Plus "Generative AI" isn't one single thing. Using it to write your essay is cognitive offloading but using it as a Socratic tutor that gives immediate feedback and adapts to the student is closer to the thing education research says works.<p>There's an equity angle as well. A school ban doesn't ban AI at home. It bans the equalizing version. Kids in educated, rich households will get AI exposure from parents. Kids without that won't get it anywhere, because the one place where the field is leveled has opted out. If AI fluency becomes a differentiator in the labor market infrastructure which is very likely a 7 year exposure gap sorted by household class is the opposite of what public education is supposed to be for.<p>(edit: By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.)
I feel like two decades of data that it doesn’t work seems the opposite of shortsighted and reactionary.
It's not just Norway. Here in Australia many modern style schools were leaning hard into the digitized classroom era in the 2010s. Now slowly they're realizing their mistake<p>The problem is, a lot of the parents have bought into the digital parenting age too. They were told ipads etc were part of getting the best education for their kid. Now they're fighting hard on rolling it back (not least because they can't comprehend that it's a problem, that their child can't focus 5 minutes without a device)
Please define "AI fluency"? From what I see, it's mainly being able to write and read at a high level, and having a strong media litteracy and critical reasoning sense something you don't need AI for.<p>And having no TV and no smartphone at home and at school is likely the best way to acquire it.
By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.
I feel like "detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify" is the key skill, but it's also <i>extremely</i> demanding.<p>You need to have a very solid understanding of things like sources, and bias, and how to evaluate if something is likely to be true, and how to get to a credible answer.<p>Given the number of people online who try to read arguments with screenshots of a ChatGPT conversation, this is not an obvious process at all.
> By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.<p>It's AI; by definition alone, those who don't know how to use it will reach competence within minutes, mastery within days.
All of those skills have a half life of like 8 months.
> Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.<p>Sounds like following the evidence.
It stinks that investments are going to be unwound, but it would be worse to engage in a sunk-cost mindset and keep it digital. Since the move was made we've had research suggesting that writing by hand is superior at generating lasting recall and learning than typing.[1] There's very early evidence that skills we use AI for begin to atrophy. [2] Erring on the side of nurturing young people's minds while their ability to learn is maximized seems completely rational to me.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529...</a> (Article is fine, but more importantly has multiple study links)<p>[2] <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1</a>
Spend a few minutes on the teacher subreddits: /r/teachers and /r/professors, specifically. AI has been a disaster for student outcomes and educator performance, more or less across the board. It should be banned in education, but there's no way to enforce that without increasing educator workload substantially (eliminating homework and re-working lesson plans around that; moving tests and projects back into the classroom; etc.)
Computers generally are stupid for schools. There should be a computer room and computer classes, but all other learning should happen offline. Computers are far too distracting.
Half of my classmates in university failed Compsci, they could not use a computer but they somehow could install Instagram, do basic video edits there and doomscroll. It is NOT conputers! Phones should be the main target.
> without increasing educator workload substantially<p>Isn't this a good thing, employing more educators, building more schools?<p>Any sane society will always invest more into its future well being and incentivize investments into education.
That used to be the case, but it no longer is. Not only are budgets limited, only a few choose for a career in education, leaving schools already understaffed. Expansion is not feasible in the short run.
Not sure what country you live in, but I don't think that the US falls under your definition of a "sane society"
Banning it in classrooms isn't going to fix things, not when adults are broadcasting to students that (in the actual words of Sam Altman) "intelligence will be too cheap to meter", that (in the words of Darius Amodei) half of white collar jobs will be gone by the time these students graduate school, and so on. If intelligence is too cheap to meter, mental labor is a losing proposition. We've also spent decades emphasizing STEM and de-emphasizing arts and culture. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?<p>So, it's no surprise they're going to opt out of a system that's investing trillions to make education useless.<p>Even if the people building this world are wrong -- not all students are equipped to call some of the wealthiest people in the world complete bullshitters. Not all adults are ready to call them out as bullshitters, for that matter.
> If intelligence is too cheap to meter, selling your mental labor is a losing proposition. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?<p>The ban is for <i>elementary school</i>. I don't know about you, but when I was 11, what motivated me to go to school definitely wasn't the idea that I could monetize my intelligence later on.
I’d argue education (especially those early years) is less about making them good white collar workers and moreso making them well rounded people. Education has value beyond monetary gains
"intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.<p>What makes you think school students are being told that? I've heard that they are told everyone will be using AI to help them write.
> "intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.<p>They’ve always been metering AI access (whether this is meaningfully intelligence is a separate question), but that doesn’t prove that there isn’t some time in the future where it won’t be worth metering, only that if there will be, it isn’t here yet.<p>OTOH, it is still worth noting that from a a consumer-of-the-service perspective, the trend is for more metering, not less (even if that is due at least in part to the rollback off unsustainable subsidies and not to the fundamnetal shifting what is sustainable farther from unmetered access.)
Do you think they're too illiterate to read what industry leaders are saying? I assure you they're not.
I would not build my philosophy on the marketing talk of a well-known impulsive liar. Sam, by his own admission, does not even know that much about LLMs, but he is so good at sales that somehow people take what he says for gospel anyway.
it'll start to raise the question of not only is college not worth it, but why should we even have compulsory education through high school? (just think of all the money we could save aka spend on the military instead)
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He’s either an anthropic employee or a joker, just based on basic timeline math
Yes, I hoped it would've come across as so without the /s. Just goes to show where our fellow engineers are at. "Memory safety is humanity's last problem. Once we solve that then all of life's problems will naturally follow."
I think this is basically right. You don’t hand out calculators before kids understand arithmetic. LLM version is sneakier because skipping the work still produces something that looks finished.
Completely understandable.<p>My 6yo kiddo recently realized that smart speaker (Google home) can not only play her favorite songs, but answer her homework questions. And it was something not that trivial, like “which animal from the list changes color of its fur when seasons change: tiger, arctic fox, something else”.<p>And now I need to either disable everything or figure out how to turn that off for her.
> And now I need to either disable everything or figure out how to turn that off for her.<p>Why?<p>I tell me 6yo "That's for adults only, children are not allowed to use it" and not have to worry.<p>Sure, he'll push boundaries here and there, but with some things he knows "No means no" and doesn't push those boundaries.<p>I have literally tested this: left a cookie on the table (that he wants) and told him "You can eat that cookie after you finish the thing you are reading"
and left the room.<p>Teaching kids to not succumb to their instant-gratification instincts is part of being a parent.
It’s okay to pat yourself on the back sometimes, but you have 0 idea about me/my kid, if she’s neurotypical or neurodivergent.<p>So I suggest to keep unasked parental advices or expectations how other kids should behave to yourself.
> So I suggest to keep unasked parental advices or expectations how other kids should behave to yourself.<p>Forget it. Not gonna happen, on a story about kid's development, in a thread about lack of impulse control.<p>Sure, there <i>could be</i> physiological reasons for a given child to have a lack of impulse control, but in practice most of a child's characteristics are going to be from the environment.
You tested it, i doubt you authored it. A paternal twin can have one with good impulse control and another who's more instinctual. Even in the same family and upbringing.
> A paternal twin can have one with good impulse control and another who's more instinctual. Even in the same family and upbringing.<p>Sure it happens, but it's unlikely.<p>It's why kids from certain cultures achieve better academic success on average than kids from other cultures, on average: the environment matters <i>a lot</i>.
Teach them right and yeet the surveillance device altogether
The only AI elementary school kids should be confronted with is any AI their Nintendo Switch uses. Let the kids be kids, man
Im confused, are there tasks given to 6 to 13 year old to use AI?<p>In the classroom, are they just throwing gpt in front of them? Is that the modern equivalent of watching a vhs?<p>Or do they have homework to vibe code something or given some prompts to ask at home and save somewhere?<p>Serious question, what does this mean?
There where no clear rules on the matter. Now the PM has given some guidance to schools so they know when they should use it and not.<p>If there are no guidance teachers and schools can do what they want and some teachers would probably go to far to early
A kid gets homework to do a writing assignment online. Kid goes on chatgpt.
"Chatgpt do this work, heres the assignment' ctrl c + ctrl v
Chatgpt spits out a good answer.<p>Kid spent no time doing homework and learned nothing<p>Or imagine a reading log(typing out what you read) to encourage a kid to read, you have AI that can copy and paste your homework for you
I have three children in that age span in a Norwegian school. For the ages 10-13, ChatGPT and the like has frequently been used in the classroom to help with the cold start problem when doing writing assignments, and for getting feedback on written work before handing in to the teachers. Also frequently used as a brainstorming tool or for writing whole speaches or presentations that should be held in front of the class or school. As for doing homework, the school-provided and school-managed iPad has (had I should say) www.chatgpt.com whitelisted, so using these tools also for homework is at least not blocked, and sometimes encouraged.<p>My children has at least not yet received any tasks or homework using AI for coding. They teach less coding in school now compared to when I was at the same age, at least at my elementary school.
> ChatGPT and the like has frequently been used in the classroom to help with the cold start problem when doing writing assignments, and for getting feedback on written work before handing in to the teachers. Also frequently used as a brainstorming tool or for writing whole speaches or presentations that should be held in front of the class or school.<p>Aren't those things critical thinking? We do we want to prevent the acquisition of critical thinking skills.
Thank you for the first hand feedback. I am assuming that you did similar assignments at the same age. Yet, you did not have the same tools. When I think back on my own LLM-free educational experiences, brainstorming was a hard mental skill to master. Some might argue it is one of the hardest as it requires some imagination, then critical thinking skills to <i>filter</i> the ideas. Can you comment about this? To be clear, I am trolling/baiting with my question.
Well one can no longer search for information in the big search engines without it just giving you the answer.<p>This ruins “search and topic and write about it”
Teacher uses AI, creates lesson plan -> AI creates assignments -> Teacher gives assignments to students -> Students use AI to do assignment -> Teacher grades with AI -> Principal uses AI to monitor teachers progress.<p>This is happening at schools nationwide. It is unstoppable at this point. It's a bizarre charade.
You forgot the parasite companies that sit between the teachers/student/principal which pretend they detect the big bad AI assisted/generated work to punish individuals using AI (with a majority of false positives and always late by 1 generation of models). The charade wouldn't be complete without rent seeking intermediaries.
> eacher uses AI, creates lesson plan -> AI creates assignments -> Teacher gives assignments to students |<p>Up to this point, it's actually completely fine. LLMs do an excellent job up to here.<p>> | Teacher grades with AI -> Principal uses AI to monitor teachers progress.<p>Again, this is probably mostly fine. Assuming they are taking it seriously, this is also fine.<p>> Students use AI to do assignment<p>This is singularly the section of the loop that AI has no place in. The ENTIRE point of the education system is for the students to learn how to use their brains to accomplish tasks.
AI shouldn't really be needed for every lesson plan as:<p>* Lessons can have a generic core to base off, like learning objectives, content, methods, vocab, tools, experiments, etc.<p>* Routines are important for kids, so the same set of learning methods, activities are familiar and don't need to be taught themselves - there is no need (indeed it is detrimental) to have new activities each class.<p>* The teacher should know their class better than AI for customisation (for now, until every student gets monitored for everything); a lot of customisation from systematic marking, etc, can exist without AI and simply by being planned and using deterministic tools.<p>AI can spice things up, for sure. But using AI systematically for lesson planning suggests -<p>A. The teacher doesn't have access to what should be a solved problem: tens of thousands of teachers repeating the same lesson plan from scratch - even with AI - across the country is not efficient.<p>B. The teacher doens't have planning time or skills in order to implement a systematic course plan, formative assessment and on-going improvement system.<p>Using AI to rush or bootstrap A or B suggests their problem is systematic and that AI will not solve this. In programming lingo, AI use hides further accumulation of technical debt.
It speaks to the nonsensical structure of the education system, that it functions just fine having optimized out the education.<p>Nobody seems to care enough to do anything about it.
This isn't about teachers using Ai to make their life easier, otherwise it wouldn't only apply to elementary school, and from what I read it applies to students.<p>Students likely aren't allowed to use AI anyway for assignments. Or are they? That's the question, what is actually being banned if anything
The same thing is happening in business settings. There's more words being sent around than ever before, with an ever lowering percentage that is read by humans. There has to be a way to stop the madness.
AI starts charging money -> Everybody stops using it.
Nah, they're always going to have a free tier, that's how they get you hooked to their service. It might be even ad-supported in the future (watch an ad to earn credits, or by inserting sponsored content in the responses).
likely preemptive
AI used to write homework should be banned.<p>AI in 1:1 tutor mode with proper hardware (live scanning pen and paper), harness and guardrails should be wildly successful (in terms of education outcomes) especially in elementary school.
Disagree. AI has no business being used in 1:1 tutor mode before the hallucination and sycophancy issues are completely resolved. As is, I can easily see it being a hindrance to building actual understanding.<p>Just one example - it's very common to see ChatGPT and the like respond with "you're absolutely correct! Great insight" to something that is a complete misunderstanding.
This is specifically a consumer model (or specifically ChatGPT) issue. e.g. IME codex does not do this, and will just tell you when you're missing something or somehow wrong, and Gemini does this weird thing where it tells you you're a genius and then immediately starts correcting everything you said.
Sycophancy is just one aspect of the problems I mentioned, though. Another huge one is hallucination, and one that is actually far worse than I thought:<p>> It’s been proven that when a model is trained on large volumes of highly factual and non-theoretical data, it learns to always have an answer. DeepSeek V4 Pro (1.6T params, 49B active, 44 AA Intelligence Index score) has a ludicrous 94% hallucination score on the AA-Omniscience benchmark, meaning on questions that it couldn’t figure out, it only stated that it didn’t know around 6% of the time, and the rest it confidently hallucinated an answer. GLM-5.2 scored a 28% hallucination rate, Opus 4.8 was 36%, Fable 5 was 48%, and GPT-5.5 was 86%.<p><a href="https://arrowtsx.dev/bigger-models/" rel="nofollow">https://arrowtsx.dev/bigger-models/</a><p>I think even a 5% hallucination rate would be terrible for a teacher, who should generally be comfortable with saying "I don't know off the top of my head but here is how to find resources to answer your question".<p>---<p>So, just to drive the point home, Codex has an 86.9% hallucination rate on the AA-omniscience score in this index <a href="https://benchlm.ai/models/gpt-5-3-codex" rel="nofollow">https://benchlm.ai/models/gpt-5-3-codex</a> - if you ask it something that wasn't sufficiently covered in its training data, it will confidently make up an answer nearly 87% of the time.<p>While you might <i>think</i> it is happy to correct you when you are wrong, you don't know that for sure since <i>you don't know when you're wrong</i>. Codex may have been happily agreeing with you about things you had completely backwards.
Except I generally do know when I'm wrong because I'm working in a domain I <i>am</i> familiar with, and it will often create experiments on the fly unprompted (well, prompted, but generically in AGENTS.MD) to check itself. My experience actually using it for software is that it almost never makes up answers. The answer for hallucinations is fairly simple: give it facts and tools to ground itself.
> Gemini does this weird thing where it tells you you're a genius and then immediately starts correcting everything you said.<p>That's a great way to get you to listen because your guard is down. Imagine if it told you you were an idiot and then corrected you.
Just realized 1:1 AI is 90s self-esteem medals-for-everyone parenting on steroids.
Teachers hallucinate too. I’ve had creationists and communists and tin-foil-hat (chem trails, 5g, etc) teachers. Surely you can imagine an AI tutor that is higher than zero ROI.
> I’ve had creationists and communists and tin-foil-hat (chem trails, 5g, etc) teachers.<p>I certainly have, too, but there is still a difference between a person who has a factually incorrect but consistent worldview and an LLM which simply reflects the worldview of the user or even changes between queries.<p>I don't think creationists have any business being in schools either, for what it's worth, but I think it's easier for a teenager to sort out "Mr. Smith has no clue what he's talking about" vs "I have no clue what's true because the LLM everyone expects me to learn from just confirms everything I ask regardless of what I'm asking".
A bit part of education is (should be) independent learning with textbooks and reading. You don't need to be "tutored".
That’s rather disingenuous. But it seems nowadays that words have lost meaning… so, I don’t blame you. I blame the LLMs for this deterioration.
lol scraping the bottom of the barrel
Tutor mode sucks because even if it was actually accurate and didn't hallucinate, it isn't scoped to what the class is actually covering within a given topic.<p>Best AI is still your own brain, trained on paying attention in class and reading the assigned content.
> <i>AI in 1:1 tutor mode with proper hardware, harness and guardrails should be wildly successful</i><p>I’m open to the idea! Show me the evidence. Then we can roll it out to our kids.
fwiw, Alpha School is the supervised version. the New York campus is $65k/yr and not legally a school.<p>private school money with homeschool paperwork and an app doing the teaching.<p><a href="https://www.wired.com/story/alpha-schools-new-york-city-campus-isnt-actually-a-school/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/story/alpha-schools-new-york-city-camp...</a>
We thought the same of electronic devices in general and digital learning content specifically. In actual practice both result in lowered test scores and declining critical thinking skills.
I think AI should be used in higher level schools but with the added requirement that the output will be held to a much higher standard and that it's fact checked. Teach the students to use AI to reach a higher level while mitigating the inherent issues like hallucination and sycophancy.
Idk why you screeching AI touts are so confident about its ‘wild’ success in all areas given absolutely zero evidence to that effect.<p>It’s tiresome.
Education right now has basically become a giant AI echo chamber, and it's happening nationwide. It’s this bizarre setup where teachers use AI to make assignments, students use AI to do them, teachers use AI to grade them, and principals use AI to watch over the teachers.
I'm glad this is the case. It is the correct outcome.<p>I've heard students actually discussing that they will just use an LLM to shortcut work. I even have friends in their 50s who can barely think for themselves now without having to refer to "AI". And at least two of them are teachers.<p>Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.<p>No one taught anything of value. No one learned anything of value. I am very worried we'll see a lost generation at some point rippling through the ages.
> Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.<p>They have also been explicitly told by the department of education to NOT do this, but it hasn't stopped lazy teachers all over. Apparently not doing your job, in direct contradiction to your given rules, is ok because "it's the future".
The fundemental problem is motivation not AI and this is simply the result of a larger societal shift that happened to correlate with the advent of AI.<p>Personally I've never done any homework or assignments, when I was outside school it was over. However, this motivated me to do really well in tests which in-turn made me extremely active during the limited time I had in school and I became pretty damn efficient at absorbing information and picking things up. So on the surface at minimum it appears that we should stop grading on activities outside school.<p>To be honest, what worked the best for me was what my history teacher did, 5 minute tests at the start of the lesson, then 10-20 minutes of teaching + self study assignments, remaining time is grading + answering any questions and if grading goes fast they usually had time to continue teaching for a few more minutes before the lesson ended. Group study was also heavily utilized as a form to take the load off themselves when they were overwhelmed from work due to 12th grade students especially right before exams, most of our classes became group study. All the students from their class always performed exceptionally well in nationals even though it was a mid tier public school. I will recognize that I am a bit special and that students are extremely varied I picked up on this when I discovered that someone in 11th grade still couldn't grasp the pythagorean theorem.<p>I don't really have a solution to the motivation problem when phones are just so addicting and have an atmosphere of their own, the best way I can put it is that your child becomes an outcast if they can't play roblox because everyone in their school does which is a very real thing my friend experienced with their kids.
Good, wholeheartedly agree with this. Too bad US legislators are impotent.
US legislators have almost no say in how schools are run. The DoE is a husk, and states call the shots. In my state of Oregon, you will have wildly different curricula and standards depending on your district, because there's almost no state oversight either.
They made a choice - US legislators effectively gave up their control of how schools are run when the conservative coalition allowed the trump administration to dismantle the DoE without congressional approval. Congress itself could legally retain control of education, but if congress refuses to assert that power then it is meaningless.<p>The end goal is to dismantle public education and route public money to religious and private schools.
To be fair, the US has long followed a model prioritizing district-level control, this isn’t anything new.
Yes, that is what impotent means.
Impotent? You mean bought by these companies.
The number of people--adults included--who, when don't know something they could easily think about, resort to some AI bot rather than thinking, and developing their mind and intelligence, is staggering. Giving kids a reason not to think and develop their intelligence seems a pathway to even further declines in intelligence. Seems a quick route to dementia in old age too: if you fail to exercise and maintain something it eventually stops working.
I'd ban all technology in the classroom.<p>What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.<p>You'll never get strong by watching a video of people lifting weights. Similarly, you'll never understand math by watching a video or having an AI do the work for you. And, somehow, writing out the words and equations by hand is very effective for learning.<p><a href="https://www.holdenluntz.com/artists/keystone-press-agency/albert-einstein-writing-on-blackboard/" rel="nofollow">https://www.holdenluntz.com/artists/keystone-press-agency/al...</a>
Chalkboard, pencil and paper are also technology. Ban them. Instead rely purely on the vocal chords to tell stories of old.
Here's how to tell if their homework is done by AI: if the homework was much better quality than the in-class work.
Not always. I once got accused of cheating at University because my take-home assignment was so much better than my in class work. At home there was no pressure to perform. I could practice and try things.
If your in class work is of the same quality as homework you are obviously not trying very hard.
I do not think your example is at all fair. You can definitely learn from the way AI solves a math question.
> You can definitely learn from the way AI solves a math question.<p>Challenge: learn some math from AI. Sleep on it. Duplicate it on paper the next day.
It’s not math but I’m using AI to help study and learn DSA. I’m finding it helpful.<p>But yeah you need to make attempts to apply what you’re learning and answer questions on your own. You can’t simply watch problems being solved (whether by an AI or a person) and retain it.
Many times I was sure I understood something by watching it. Then, when it came time to do it, I realized I didn't understand at all.<p>And it's not just for math. Try it with learning to light a fire without matches. I watched the survival experts on "Alone" fail at that, and fail at building a fireplace, and fail at building bear proof food storage, fail at archery, fail at fishing, and so on. (I'm not claiming to be a survival expert, I wouldn't last a week on that show.)<p>No work equals no learn.
There are ways to make it work, but it requires using it only supplementary and with strict discipline. And it will look different for a 6-year old than a 13-year old.<p>But think of this trick we use about turning a tricky research paper in maths/science into something more tangible by making an LLM whip up an interactive version. That works at every level of education, and it means that you can completely tailor a piece of educational material to the kid<p>Tiny example: one kid was introduced to fractions and found it abstract that it was both about partitioning stuff and about numbers on a number line. So while we were practicing, I had an LLM make <a href="https://fuglede.codeberg.page/broeklegeplads/" rel="nofollow">https://fuglede.codeberg.page/broeklegeplads/</a> to make it more hands-on.<p>Obviously for the small kids, this has to be an experience guided by teachers and parents, but for bright older kids with sufficient discipline that ought to be a useful trick for enhancing education.<p>Of course when we were kids, we would just write such educational programs ourselves and get the same effect /and/ learn to program (before getting banned from the computer room for putting spooky /binaries/ on the computers anyway), so maybe that's better for older kids. And maybe these kids will never have to do any maths or programming because the AI overlords have taken over when they grow up.
Is this supposed to be difficult?
I never understood P vs NP until I say down with AI and just kept asking for clarification after clarification until it finally clicked.<p>AI, used well, isn't just 'teach me this' its 'teach me this and answer all my dumb questions until I understand it'.
You might pick up tips the same way watching a workout video could give you tips. But it means nothing until you physically put it in to practice.
Not really, you might understand it in the moment, but to learn something you need to do actual work.
An example is, watch a thousand hours on photography, how to take great photos.
Go out and try to take great photos, you will fail. This is why all serious tutors keep saying ”stop watching and go out and take photos, every day, all the time”.
I don’t know Rust, but I can understand AI outputting some Rust code if I ask it to. Two days later I won’t be able to write it again.
I disagree. You learned something at that point it is up to you to repeat it and make it stick and make sure you learned it correctly. No teacher no AI nothing can fix that unless you take the time. Because of this I think it is irrelevant to the topic. I want to go back to the math problem, you can definitely understand the solution and learn it, then it is up to you to practice. Goof thing about AI is it can throw you many more questions to make sure it sticks and help you know what you did wrong. It is susceptible to mistakes, yes but first of all those models are not made to be math teachers and real teachers also make mistakes. One advantage of AI is it can tirelesely explain the solution to you again and again unlike a real person.
I actually think students should learn how to use a computer algebra system as early as possible so that it becomes second nature. Being and expert user of a CAS makes math vastly more interesting and less tedious.
> I'd ban all technology in the classroom. What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.<p>You've prohibited technology and then listed four technologies. "Technology" needs a more concrete definition. Calculators? Computers? TVs? Overhead projectors? Musical instruments?
They appear to be equating technology with products that did not exist when they were in elementary school.
That would be correct! And all the technology added since has resulted in no discernible improvement in educational results.<p>In college, the classes were a lecture with a professor, 9 blackboards and colored chalk. Not even handouts (well, there was one on time dilation).<p>Calculators utterly wiped out slide rules when I was in college, though nobody learned any math from a calculator. Calculators just made for quicker work to more significant figures.
This is nitpicking<p>And sure, kids 6-13 don't need calculators, basic stuff, like multiplication tables is memorized.
I attempted to memorize the times tables. Eventually, I noticed the pattern. From then on, I used the pattern rather than memorization. For example, I compute 9*12 as 90+18.
I assume you're hinting at this, but yeah, that's the idea behind getting children to memorize and do rote math early on. There's really no better way to get people to really deep down learn strategies for dealing with numbers than repeatedly practicing and memorising stuff until they accumulate a huge bag of mental "shortcuts" and patterns and strategies they use
Nothing mentioned about the use of AI by elementary school <i>teachers</i> who may well be using it to generate sub-par worksheets or to rapidly, and potentially inaccurately, mark work.<p>Every special event flyer I get from my kids' school now seems to be AI generated. I'd be surprised if quizzes and worksheets don't head the same way.
I'm pretty certain the execs who run the large AI companies would limit their children's AI usage also.
What about teachers using it to generate learning material that is just fabricated?
The problem is they were two decades late digitizing the classroom. Now we're dealing with the aftermath with the educational system still not being capable of keeping up with societal progress.
that's dismissing that brains need time to evolve. what if brains need to be mature enough in and by themselves before they benefit from digital support? as in "no telly before 3-4, no smartphone before 14, prioritize pen and paper proficiency until 12-14" makes sense biological brain maturity?<p>then "give'm a computer ASAP" is the wrong answer.
I don't think giving children tech adults don't fully understand is a goal by itself. But children shouldn't be limited by their parents' shortcomings either. Strict age limits may seem like a safe approach, but children and their capacity to bypass those rules should not be underestimated.
Surprised to read this as Norway also has Sikt AI for schools, where teachers can monitor how AI systems are used. Seems like it has both embraced AI and banned it.
> Seems like it has both embraced AI and banned it.<p>Indeed, seemingly they done so by age/educational progression:<p>> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said. In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added.
I wonder if the struggle is really comprehending thoughtful selective adoption.<p>Schools are the place where the product is a more fully developed person. There's no LLM shortcut for generating that. There are many ways you could use LLMs that would discourage it. There may be some that can encourage it.<p>Personally, I can see aggressively keeping kids away from LLMs until they've learned effort, living in tension/frustration, the pleasure of breaking through to discovery, trust evaluation, hypothesis/test cycles, and good socratic dialogue from the learner's side.<p>It may be possible at intermediate phases to prime some models to help with this process.
Wouldn't it matter a lot how AI is being used?<p>I would assume if children are allowed to use AI without rails as a shortcut it will undermine their learning, and it's used for feedback and as a patient tutor it would accelerate their learning?<p>It seems like the problem is that they don't have the science and tooling to use it constructively at scale, so the desperate solution is to ban it outright until a scalable constructive approach is understood?<p>The article doesn't explain any of this directly...<p>It's frustrating to me when bold statements are directed at "AI" holistically and vaguely, completely ignoring any nuance.<p>There is a massive gap between letting elementary students free reign use chatGPT 3.5 (hallucinations and all) to do whatever, vs using a very guard-railed pedagogically optimized app powered by a SOTA model to support students in a specific way that accelerates good outcomes.<p>Most respectful interpretation is that the leaders know this and have a plan to figure it out, but for some reason it's not making it's way into this article. Is the absence representative of the truth of the situation, or some editors choice to pile on to a holistic anti-ai narrative?
> <i>it's used for feedback and as a patient tutor it would accelerate their learning?</i><p>We have mounting evidence AI hurts learning and cognition in many circumstances. I have not yet seen similar-quality evidence for it helping.<p>Given that balance, restricting AI in education in the general population (while studying how to best deploy it) seems prudent. Especially given the Norwegian approach, which gradually introduces AI as kids get older.
I'm actually not really criticizing the decision so much the article and communications around it. If student learning outcomes are crashing and they desperately want to turn them around I understand why they would take dramatic action.<p>Giving students uncontrolled access to generic LLMs probably would hurt outcomes. Research process is slow (IRB and all that) so they are dealing with data from years ago (models that confident hallucinated a lot more than current SOTA) so if thats what they are basing it on its reasonable.<p>My frustration isn't with the decision (hey all teachers - no more chatGPT in the classroom). My frustration is with the reporting / nuance of "until we can research this better and figure out how to harness AI to improve outcomes and not undermine them".
AI makes me worse at programming but helps me learn things much more quickly than reading textbooks. Both can be true.
> <i>but helps me learn things much more quickly than reading textbooks</i><p>Have you tested this against an external metric of competence? The research seems to show that AI is great at making you feel you know something. But I think the studies looking at language learning found those using AI extensively tested below peers using traditional methods.
You don't always need the same level of deep knowledge on everything you do. A lot of things in software development requires some basic level understanding of some obscure API you would never use again. LLM definitely speed up that part.
> <i>A lot of things in software development requires some basic level understanding of some obscure API you would never use again</i><p>This is glorified look-up. AI is great at this! Learning through look-up doesn’t work.<p>Elsewhere in this thread is someone arguing they learned linear algebra through AI. I’d love to be surprised by their acing an exam. I’m thoroughly doubtful they could get through one. AI is trained to be a sycophant, not to teach. Maybe one day we will solve this. I have seen zero evidence we have that today.
I don't care what the studies say. It's an incredibly good tutor.<p>AI helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter which kind-of-but-not-quite explains the concept I am hunting for.
> <i>It's an incredibly good tutor</i><p>It <i>feels</i> like a good tutor. If you aren’t externally benchmarking your comprehension, you really can’t say.<p>> <i>helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter</i><p>Have you considered that learning to phrase your questions is part of indexing and thus learning a subject?<p>I’m not saying AI can’t help with that search process. But we have no evidence it helps and <i>lots</i> of evidence it hurts, and everyone with anecdotes to the contrary seems to be going off vibes around how much they learned without any external reference.
Be careful. Speed of learning isn't necessarily the goal. Durability is another metric. I learn more quickly with LLMs, too, but it's certainly questionable if that learning is as durable or deep as learning through struggling with a book.<p>The students of lowly-rated profs had better 10-year outcomes than those with highly-rated profs according to a study that I think came out of the Naval Institute a decade or two ago. "No shine without friction."<p>We need more data. Certainly turning students loose with AI stunts them. There's probably some happy medium. But where kids need the most practice with fundamentals when they're young, a blanket ban for now seems sensible. And it also seems like a good plan to introduce it when they get older. I suspect we'll learn a lot from this Norwegian experiment.
Yes, but (I assume) that you are old enough to have already gone through elementary school and perhaps further and learned and internalized a model for learning and retaining information.<p>I think that is what is at risk.
Oddly enough, I never was able to learn things from textbooks, except in the context of a traditional classroom lecture course. I've also met maybe one or two people in my life who were able to learn the subjects of my college majors -- math and physics -- at any level from a textbook alone.
Do you delegate all opinions to only those which have studies?
> <i>Do you delegate all opinions to only those which have studies?</i><p>For policy decisions around something like education standards, something for which we have an established <i>status quo</i> (which works in Norway)? Yes. I don’t think waiting for evidence to act is imprudent in that situation.
I think soemthing ignored in the discussion is that there are "good" students who can make use of AI to further their learning versus "bad" students who use AI as a crutch that prevents them from learning well<p>Acknowledging this divide exists would come down to individual parenting and assessment of a student's use of the tools, rather than a blanket ban of AI tools which punish the "good" students
This feels so obvious I’m surprised it needed to be news.
Social media execs are already known for keeping their children off their platforms* and even phones so my question is: Do the leading ML/AI people let their children interact with LLMs yes or no?<p>[*] <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/13/youtubes-ceo-is-latest-tech-boss-limiting-his-kids-social-media-use.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/13/youtubes-ceo-is-latest-tech-...</a>
Broadly speaking, the wealthier the parents the more restrictive device is in general in the household.<p>This used to be a tech/non-tech line. It shifted to class sometime over the last ten years. The iPad kids are probably getting served slop. The AI-employed parents don’t have to directly police AI exposure because their kids’ device use is already controlled; at school, at extra-curriculars and at home.
there is a difference in a kid asking a LLM to explain 0! or 0^0 and to ask it to be its friend.
The difference is between asking to explain x^y and reading and understanding the why and maybe go through a test, vs asking to do my homework for me and then go back to video games quickly. If the whole idea of using LLMs is to reduce effort on the part of the pupil, you are probably holding it wrong.
I already saw it in my life: a ban on calculators, a ban on computers. But after a short period of rejection, everybody starts to embrace the new tech. Instead of bans we were getting computer classes in schools.
> <i>after a short period of rejection, everybody starts to embrace the new tech</i><p>We’re banning cell phones in school after seeing the evidence, albeit along a class gradient. We’ll probably see something similar with AI. Poor kids get AI in school (and unmonitored at home). Rich kids do not.
The opposition is a fad that will pass; until then I guess people could investigate workable ways to use AI in the circumstances people object to
I did mathematics, and a fair bit of computer science on the side. This was nearly all on paper, without computers. And I'd go a week or two without a calculator sometimes, mostly employing it when I had a bad hangover.<p>Do we really <i>need</i> to force technology into everything or are we just used to doing it so see it as necessary?
I did mathematics on paper, and informatics on computers. Some of my peers weren't so lucky, so they had to do informatics on paper only. Needless to say that the magnitude of progress we were getting in informatics had day and night difference, not in the favor of paper.<p>AI is indeed dangerous. It gives super abilities when in the right hands. Some people don't like it as it creates competition for their mere existence. They start gaslighting campaigns - "AI is bad, dangerous, does not work, consumes too much energy etc". This is luddism of our century, but also a form of psychopathy. When everybody is being gaslit, some of the very same players who spreads false narratives use AI to their own benefit.
It’s not really though is it?<p>It’s a fully centrally controlled technology that reduces your ability and makes you dependent on it to perform all daily and business functions with a huge environmental and economic impact. The economic impact is both the risks imposed by it failing and the risks imposed by it being successful.<p>It’s not Ludditism, it’s a good attitude to risk.
Calculators might be allowed sometimes, but i dont think they are ever allowed when you are trying to teach school children how to add and multiply. Which feels like the appropriate comparison.
I think it’s quite tricky. On one side, writing is a form of thinking and cognitive training.<p>Just NOT doing that work by having AI simulate it is not good for anyone’s cognitive development.<p>At the same time, anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it.<p>I really feel for teachers/educators right now. It must be hard to remain demanding and insist on educating kids well while also preparing them for the future they’ll actually live in.
> <i>anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it</i><p>Whatever AI looks like in 20 years is going to be so different from what it is today as to make distracting from basic skill-building an almost-certainly net negative educational effort.
I agree to some degree. But by that logic, should kids in the 2000s not have learned about the internet because the internet fundamentally changed between then and now?<p>I think that if anything, it’s really good I learned how to operate a computer and the Internet BEFORE what the Internet became.<p>I pity the generation who don’t understand a computer’s folder structure because they grew up with smartphones and TikTok.
> <i>should kids in the 2000s not have learned about the internet</i><p>Yes. Emphatically yes. In elementary school? The kids who were online in elementary school—literally in school—who got like how-to-use-AOL lessons?<p>They almost certainly underperform those who learned about the Internet at home or later in life. This is like those stupid keyboarding classes in the 2000s. It was obviously a waste of time compared with developing basic cognition.<p>No AI CEO or chief engineer today grew up with AI. The idea that everyone in a ball sack or ovary is currently incurably fucked when it comes to the future is naive beyond silliness.<p>To be clear, I’m not presently arguing against early technology exposure. I’m arguing against the systematized exposure of nascent technologies to young children.
I agree and I think some of the comments here have shifted my perspective on this, especially given the age.<p>I think with teaching anything, there’s always going to be a difference between teaching the tactics (e.g. how to use AOL) vs the fundamentals (what’s the internet, how do computers work)
Your example would call more to create an "information technology" subject in schools, that updates its curriculum to include changes like the development of AI. Thus, you go to that class, some of your coursework in the year is going to involve learning about AI and how it works, what it can and cannot do, using it for some project, so on. Not using AI for doing your homework in every other subject.
> At the same time, anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it.<p>There's not so much to learn they can't put it into a high school course. Adults currently in the workforce haven't been using AI since they were in elementary school, and they're adjusting fine.
I would disagree that they’re adjusting fine. So much of the stuff we see now is full AI slop clearly created with the first output of ChatGPT. It’s like saying we don’t need to teach kids about the internet because older generations grew up without it and they’re scrolling TikTok.<p>a) what’s the actual percentage of professionals who actively use AI? It’s much smaller than we think in tech.<p>b) what percentage of those people understand the very basics of how LLMs work (e.g. token prediction, context windows, etc)<p>c) what percentage of those people understand AI Agents (or any of their ingredients (APIs, credentials, etc.)<p>You quickly arrive at a tiny fraction that has a real clue about what they’re doing.
>using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do<p>These are elementary school kids...if they start using AI in 6th grade, they have 6 years to learn AI before graduating high school.
> anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it<p>Essentially the entire value proposition for AI, particularly as it advances, is that you don't need to learn how to do things anymore.
You can straight-up bypass AI mania in schooling altogether by just keeping pen-and-paper as the primary medium, as most Asian countries do. Digitization is a meaningless overcomplication.
>"The most important thing in school is that our children learn to read, write and do mathematics," Stoere<p>Language is not a tool for thought. It's a tool for communication. This has been known for decades. People routinely lose all language related faculties and remain competent in other skills. Their only value is in creating an artifact that a teacher can then look over and update their mental model of the students knowledge. This is no longer the case since students can now easily create those artifact without having a mental model. You are entirely swapping the test for the goal when you say language is the most important thing we much teach them. You are optimizing for a large noise to signal ratio.<p>The EU's general obsession with deprecated tech is mindboggling. Teach you're kids these skills and you won't have to worry about getting sent to a nursing home, I guess.
"..ban on smart phones.." "..ban on gen AI.." "..ban on social media.."<p>yes
YES
YASSSSSSSSSSSS<p>Ban all the things for kids. I don't want to be interviewing people in 10 years and decline every candidate because they can't correctly answer the question "You are 50ft away from the car wash. Do you walk or drive?"
I love how data driven and fast acting these European countries are. It takes forever for anything to happen in the US even with 80% support.
just ban everyone from using ai completely lets go back to how it used to be
What a dream. If we could also somehow get rid of social media at the same time (or at least algorithmic recommendations and other predatory practices), the world would be a significantly better place.
can't come fast enough<p>this tech is unsustainable by design
Fuck yeah go to hell AI. Kids shouldn't be touching that IP infringement slop producer with a 10 foot pole.
Am I imagining things, or are all of the "vaguely pro-AI" comments being brigaded into oblivion?<p>I can't remember ever seeing this many reasonable posts being downvoted to the point of greying out.
HN is an extremely biased hivemind like Reddit<p>The anti-AI stance seems like a fashionable contrarianism, not sure what will end up changing it<p>What's really interesting to me is seeing people who are pro-technology but anti-AI, like... if you're anti-tech, you become something like the Amish. If you're pro-tech, AI is the logical next development along that path of technology - whatever tech you preciously enjoyed, was part of the package deal of building this AI that we now see.<p>So I guess I am curious to see if more anti-AI people become something like the Amish or if they come to terms with their championing of technology being equivalent to embracing AI.
The traditional schooling system can't stand that they are being outcompeted by AI and are trying to use the government to maintain their monopoly and keep those tax dollars flowing.
Pretty much; as people experience AI work better than the previous arrangement it will simply be adopted and this antiquated approach will likely be phased out
> The traditional schooling system can't stand that they are being outcompeted by AI and are trying to use the government to maintain their monopoly and keep those tax dollars flowing.<p>Learning is a conspiracy by Big Knowing, it's all a myth. Let's just ask an LLM to all our thinking, no need to be a functional human.
Yep… I mean scientific studies seem to suggest that you are completely wrong. But big science is all a conspiracy against those AI companies that work so hard for the betterment of mankind after all.
It's absolutely the right move. We're already seeing declines in cognitive capabilities among adults using AI. We're going to wind up with future generations of ignorants if we let them start as kids.<p>We are seriously in danger of "we need AI" becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as humanity becomes too stupid to do anything without AI, and we end up with a few companies essentially holding the keys to our collective ability to produce anything of value. Am I the only one freaked out about that?
Buddhism identifies three stages of wisdom:<p>1. Wisdom through dogma.
2. Wisdom through reasoning.
3. Wisdom through experience.<p>AI is just stage 1. Instant and easily digestible. Traditional learning forces you to go to Stage 2, because you are often given too much information and you need to compress it to memorise it. And the best way to compress it, is by finding some kind of logical structure in the information.
I feel like in the context of AI in education, "wisdom through dogma" still doesn't capture it. It's not even wisdom nor dogma, but something in the form of wisdom developed through something in the form of dogma. "Wisdom" implies you actually believe it and embody it, but students don't believe it or embody it as much as just pass it along to finish the assignment. "Dogma" implies there's a coherent logic of accepted doctrine, but the output is more a stretched and morphed version of the most generalized doctrine imaginable.
Good connection, never thought of it that way.<p>I learned it as:
1 Knowing what it is.
2 Knowing how it works.
3 Knowing what it can become.
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Great, yet another "no child and no teacher left behind!"<p>I was gifted kid, bored to death at basic school. I was reading books under the table, and was lucky to have tolerant teacher. Total ban would just push me to misbehaving and disrupting the class.<p>AI is amazing tool for learning, if Norway can not harness it, there is something deeply wrong with the educational system. Perhaps teachers unions?<p>Norway has a big problem with young immigrant kids at school not speaking Norwegian. Right now other kids are expected to teach them basic language, holding back their own development (like learning reading and writing)! Again, AI could provide amazing help here!
So I take it you have some expertise in teaching? At what level? K-12? Middle school?<p>What, in your professional opinion as an educator, should schools do about AI in schools?
Calculators are amazing at multiplication tables. Let's just give those to the kids too. It's the same thing. This type of thinking is ruining kids' futures.
Some kids can understand and memorize multiplication tables in a day. Are they just suppose to sit idle, for rest of semester not to disrupt "normal kids"?<p>Should we ban programming as well? You know, kid could program multiplication and cheat this way! I can not believe I am reading opinions like this on "hacker" news!
I wonder if at some point we will look back on stuff like this as back in the 1990s schools banning internet research and search engines. Obviously that seems ridiculous now, but the internet was big and scary back then too.
Those bans were implemented without evidence. We have evidence AI exposure reduces learning and cognition. There are probably situations where it enhances it. But we haven’t delineated those yet, and so shouldn’t be rolling out a half-baked system more likely to hurt than to help.
Were schools banning search engines? I remember teachers recommending Dogpile (because it would combine search engines), and we did some computer lab stuff in the 00s, but there was no one saying that we should ignore search or the internet altogether.<p>In middle school I remember being assigned a book report that would include the author's biography. I'd just finished a book (The Gammage Cup) and of course my local library did not have any information about the author. So in that situation it was assumed that you would learn traditional research methods, but also that you would just pick a classic book where the information was readily available.
Few schools allow unrestricted internet access these days.<p>The general question here is risks vs rewards and with any new technology both are unknown making caution perfectly reasonable be that internet searches or anything else.<p>So sure in 30 years the policy will look different, but that doesn’t mean they are making the wrong decision.