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.
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.
Also from the story:
> 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.
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.
I think it's more complex than this.
AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.
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.)
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.
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
They will 100% just use AI for the whole year and then panic and fail the exam when the time comes.
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.
(Though they didn't give formal grades for the first several years of elementary school, which I'm not sure was a good idea.)
Though Cambridge does have "tutorials" which are 1:2 tutoring sessions where you probably couldn't completely rely on AI.
Your way definitely sounds better to me.
Before uni though, we would get a grade or two every week, be it from short tests, classwork, homework or exams.
I also think we can use project work as an ongoing assessment.
My thinking here is that you might want to also introduce more “viva voce” (verbal defense) style tests. These have been expensive to administer but my hunch is that you can scale these with AI administering the first round, random human review or participation. This feels like a better endpoint than essays under time pressure (but also maybe you can elect one or the other?)
My other angle is to break completely from the past. I want to see more project work. If AI makes it easier to fake or attain any given level of knowledge, we need to ask more of students, ie ask them to demonstrate mastery by building real things. More open-ended projects are harder to grade (use AI to scale grading), but more fun and engaging for students.
This doesn’t just refer to STEM of course; why not ask students to write a play, compose a symphony, etc?
My core thesis is that most students would work harder and engage with things that interest them, and the fundamental problem with Taylorized education is that one-size-fits-all is only interesting to some.
It’s normal and was done for centuries (and still done in many countries) for a reason, it works and it’s equally hard for everyone so it’s not unfair.
(3 hours straight is brutal though)
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.
Yes, things will have to change. That’s the idea.
I mean is this being done to help kids? Or to protect the jobs of teachers who have no real interest in teaching?
I am not sure. It would be like sending a kid to a beautiful garden with full of life and stuff, and then micromanaging what they can do there!
The beauty of the books is that the books talk to you, and you cannot talk back. You have to talk to yourselves, go down some wrong path, and course correct on your own at some point, and that is where true learning happens..
By contrast LLMs constantly get things wrong and once they get something wrong will begin weaving that into everything create entirely fake realities of the sort that is more akin to a schizophrenic than somebody being mistaken on this fact or that.
The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.
Agreed. With the way LLMs often are quite artuculate and confident sounding, it's only a matter of time until kids will be suspicious of actual people that are articulate and confident from putting effort into improving their speech and speaking about things they are right to be confident about due to being proficient in the subject.
Either that or kids will see that LLMs aren't "getting punished" for being "convincing liars" and will grow up convincing the socially correct way to interact with others is by speaking to them respectfully while going all in on long-game gaslighting.
Every single household I've seen benevolent use of phones/tablets/tv/computer/consoles (quite often all of it), kids were unruly, had shitty grades, living empty lives without good role models and very little passions or hobbies, and overall were more depressed than happy.
I do get why - its supremely easier to just throw tech at them and let them drown in endless cheap dopamine content, triple that for already-addicted parents. The whole principle of active screen itself is so overpowering and addictive compared to good old physical toys, drawing, paint, reading etc.
As a parent of young kids, its much harder to come up, continuously, with good motivating program out there, or even indoors, ie climbing. But - I didn't get kids to have easiest possible life, coursing through our short lives deep in comfort zone is a failure IMHO, thats not life well lived, that's life avoided. I am not kind to such parents - its the biggest achievement, or failure, in one's life, biggest challenges bring biggest rewards. Rather few people put in corresponding effort continuously, compared to careers, relaxing and other aspects of adult lives.
And then folks wonder why so many old people are sour, seeing in more life-successful others all the stuff one could/should have done if not so lazy is deeply depressing, usually amounts to biggest life regrets.
The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map…
Why have teachers?
The AI might as well grade itself.
There’s no substitution for human connection (social media) and there’s no substitution for traditional learning (robot teachers).
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?
I disagree that humans are required to bootstrap meta-learning; I think it is quite deeply wired into the human brain and there is no reason that we can’t create digital gyms that give opportunities to learn the same insights.
I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.
University professors will likely agree that AI makes students worse at learning overall. No need to cite this there are articles all over the place.
So whatever solution you’re talking about, even when purpose-built, should be replaced by higher paid teachers. Ultimately the AI-First model is about moving money into mega-corps and paying teachers less.
I don’t agree that this means all potential or current uses of AI are harmful.
I also don’t agree that simply paying teachers more is a solution. This lever has always existed and as a society we fail to pull it. So for the majority of people who use public schools, improving quality at current spend levels would be a major win, and we should explore the obvious possibilities here.
I’m also pretty skeptical about your culture-war assertion that this is about wealth transfer to mega-corps. This can easily be a sovereign AI product. (I also never proposed “AI first” FWIW, I am a proponent of humans augmented by AI for this and most use-cases. Banning AI entirely operates at the margin of forbidding mostly-human use-cases from using any AI.)
You seem to think you're making some kind of valid argument here by backing up your opinion about one thing by providing evidence of something unrelated aside from both things happening to involve AI. I'm guessing only reason it seems obvious to you is because it's not obvious to you that what you're disagreeing is something different than what's going on to begin with.
I haven't seen anyone say the best education would be pure-human provided. The entire point of the article is that the effect AI has had on the education of children so far has not been beneficial.
The fact that AI useful for GPs for getting relatively simple yet time consuming administrative work taken care of has nothing to do with children's education. GPs aren't doing paperwork to develop their fundamental reading and math skills. Less time dealing with the non-medical portions of running a practice means they can spend more time with their patients. Spending more time with their patients allows them to better understand their symptoms and make a better informed, more accurate diagnosis even if AI is never used in a patient-facing capacity. In no way does that indicate that AI is currently a suitable to deploy in education.
I don't know if you used AI to learn about what you were arguing with and gather information to back up your argument, but if you did then that's another example of why there's so much concern about little kids using it. Eventually it will be worked into something without such a double edged nature when applied to early learning. Everyone already knows it can be an educational boon for people who have the skills to use it properly. So far, statistics indicate students do not have those skills. The rate of failure among undergraduate students is only continuing to accelerate.
I took GP to be saying exactly that, and the OP’s full ban on AI in schools is also enforcing pure-human.
> I don't know if you used AI to learn about what you were arguing with and gather information to back up your argument
Accusing someone of mindless AI slop is a bad faith read. It’s also against the HN community guidelines. Please don’t do this.
Where is the data on this?
Typically there's not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7 anyways.
Homework levels between elementary school and start of junior might look something like this:
Division I / early elementary - no formal assignments should be made, though 5–10 minutes of systematic study or reading was recommended.
Division II / upper elementary - formal homework could be assigned at the teacher’s discretion, but generally should be reading or study-type work and not exceed about 20 minutes.
Starting from junior high - students are expected to study one-half to one hour per school night.We had a fuckton of homework at every grade, here in Hungary.
AI can't detect AI, not because AI undetectable, but because it lacks judgment. Its shtick is random generation; the proverbial monkey on a typewriter.
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.
Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good 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.
Everyone uses AI all the time now. People's impressions are not mediated by marketing.
> Ask two follow-up questions.
> Ask about a seeming contradiction between the original answer and the answer to the second follow-up question.
> Get congratulated for raising such a great point and get parroted back your objection as a "correction."
Useful as a learning aid if applied cautiously but maybe not the "best thing ever."
_used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities, AI is the best technology ever invented for learning. If you don’t believe this as a technical HN person at the epicenter of this technology’s capability set, I probably can’t persuade you. But you can do a lot better than your transcript.
Used in the default mode, or with a desire to take shortcuts, or a desire to minimize what is perceived (often correctly in the case of many school curriculae) as BS fake work, it is the best technology ever invented to avoid learning.
How often do children do things the "correct way" or know how to get the most out of a thing?
And then we are back to the discussion at hand none the wiser; what forms of AI are safe to use for kids?
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.
I suspect it is the last one. This is a trillion dollar industry and if the AI companies claim this, then they should be able to to show it with quality research, they however have not, and the reason is that this is a lie. AI is not better then anything for self-learning. Go to the library and check out a chess book, go to r/trumpet, join a weekly meetup to practice you Spanish, etc. etc. all of these are vastly superior then AI.
You claim self-learning via is hustle free, perhaps you are right, however I suspect that there is no such thing as hustle free learning. If you want to learn something you have to use your brain, and you have to struggle. AI will just act like you got this, flatter you for a minute, and in the worst cases, you may start to believe the AI when it lies to you about how much you’ve learned.
That last part I actually know from experience. A couple of months ago I tried to use Qwen AI to help me study Japanese for exactly one week, my prompt specifically asked to link to sources with every grammar explanation. I know very well how to find grammar explanations using traditional search engines, it is rather easy actually. However Qwen AI would hallucinate non-existing links 3 times out of every 4. After 2 days I removed it from the prompt it was so useless, and it still kept hallucinating links to non-existing resources.
If you want to go beyond and read outside the material using a library or a search engine is much much much better for your learning. If you want to have a discussion, try web forums, discord servers, join a group class, hire an tutor on e.g. italki etc. etc. Pick anything at random which we have been doing for decades and is a proven solution, it will be better for your learning than using AI.
For myself though, I have found a friend who will be helping me learn a new language this summer. I will of course use his help and sources and AI to supplement my learning. I don't just tell AI to teach stuff I use it as intended, as a tool.
At this point it's just PEBKAC. You're holding it wrong brother.
The value of all of these self-learning routes has increased enormously due to existence of AI assistants. At least the way I do it now, I get the initial structure for a subject from YouTube/Udemy/textbooks and then fill out my personal comprehension gaps with the help of AI. You can even point AI to a specific material you're trying to grasp and usually it will rephrase a point you failed to get in a simpler language.
Previously, you'd need some trained person to explain to you something that led you to hit a roadblock. Now, the level of understanding you get easily beats most of the tutors in public schools or community colleges.
This is a lie and most of us know it. AI companies have been lying and lying and lying and lying. If you believe this then the AI companies have successfully lied to you and are making you pay money for an inferior product. If this weren’t a lie then the AI companies should have the research to prove it, they have not, because it is not true. AI does not help anybody learn anything better then using traditional methods.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, right. Did you forget a /s
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a363b6d-92ac-83ea-a619-41b2ecd9f5...
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... and it falls apart on the first answer!
No. Kids in school should not be using AI, because:
1. They won't be using the latest models, and
2. They can't tell if the info is accurate
It's not more complex than stupid people in charge, stupid results follow. Smart people with integrity in charge, good things follow.
AI changes nothing.
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.
AI is a tool for propaganda.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And then there's the other solid supporting arguments:
- 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.
- "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).
- 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.
What you can do though, is to offer them broad exposure to things that are interesting to them and their generation; my eastern block clone of the 8bit/48KB Spectrum computer didn't really help me excel at math, reading or history, nor was it to be the future of technology, but it did change my life significantly by letting me understand and relate to people that I couldn't otherwise have business dealings decades later.
It seems imprudent to cut children off from futuristic technology just because of a moral panic that it causes brain rot. Unless we know it's soma, a drug so powerful that it subdues volition and curtails intellectual development; we don't.
I don't think this is as clear as you make it out to be.
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.
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.
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.
You eat at your desk, then you’re allowed to play. This was dropped after a year or so.
You don’t learn to read until you’re 7, etc etc.
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.
Tools and skills were introduced at a developmentally appropriate age - not sure who chose that age though.
There was a lot wrong with the school and the system, but there was a lot more that was right in my opinion.
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.
Some if it includes some schools teaching some of the more racists views of Mr Steiner.
It needs addressing. The school was white wealthy hippies when I was there. It’s vastly more representative now.
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.
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.
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Learn about ads and personalization >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?
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.
You use an ipad and keyboard or some other similar device. The only times in my life I have had to use cursive were in elementary school, pretty useless skill to have in this day and age.
You're allowed to use a biro though, quills and inkwells are optional
I'd say this is the case in times of technological stability as well.
Education has always been based on heuristics: Teach A, B, and C, with the hope that people will gain X, Y, and Z. Avoid P, Q, and R. The suspicion that some forms of education are fructifying, and others are stultifying, are largely a matter of guesswork and social bias. Attempts to clear things up with "studies" tends to produce results on a par with pseudoscience. Our biases are all we've got.
The reaction to AI isn't the first time that parents have had to decide on the merits of educational technologies: Radio, TV, the early Internet, social media, etc. Even books. There was certainly a suspicion that TV and social media caused brain rot, or a related issue, moral rot.
Regarding your comment below, I was born in the 60s, and was certainly educated for the web era. I'm more adept with technology today, including AI, than most people half my age.
My children were required to learn Microsoft Office in elementary school, "for their careers."
Like that?
[1] https://www.onetonline.org/link/localwages/25-2021.00?st=CA
We don't need people stressing and struggling financially for the privilege of teaching our youth. That leaves those without a better option or have a working spouse.
For example, if you were able to get free education for your children as part of your payment, wouldn't that have made your life a lot easier?
That pay range is roughly what teachers get in former-USSR/Warsaw Pact eastern Europe, and in those countries it's a comfortable income.
Also, going back to what they did a few years ago isn't "more work". May actually be less, given how often people look at AI output, roll their eyes, and say "ugh, slop".
Also also, questions of pay are obviously after society decides what it wants the role of a teacher to be and finds out how much it needs to spend to hire enough people who will do whatever that job turns out to be.
“Workload” has been a constant argument for just about any tech product we acquired at school. I’m very conflicted about this issue to be honest. I’m a member of one of those parent management boards type things, not sure what’s it called in English.
One the one hand I know how busy teachers are, on the other I also know how they never work to 5PM have twice my vacation days, while somehow never being able to meet to talk about issues. We get one ten minute session every few months at best.
If you put pressure on them they call in sick for weeks and good luck finding a replacement. I’m deeply worried that if teaching as a whole doesn’t get it together we will slowly be forced to use AI for everything because of lack of alternatives.
Yea, need to figure out to form society with participants who are incapable of thinking...
And to make matters worse the LLMs that is causing this cannot even really think!
There’s another study by MSFT on a similar topic, and yesterday there was an article from Nature shared here on HN.
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.
We'll have to see if a ban on AI can improve test scores-I am bullish on the idea tho
Socialization leads to discourse which leads to learning.
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.
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).
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?
Unless theres strong evidence that test scores will increase, Karen from the PTA insists that her child be given access to their phone
Also use of technology anti-correlated with alcohol and drug use so there might be unwelcome side effects.
Looking at that meta study, the conclusions seems to be that this kind of studies on children take a lot of time and generally lack any control group, thus conclusions are going to be weak.
It's a shitty time to be a parent of a teen.
That said, my youngest just reads gaming wikis and hangs out on Discords for roguelike video games and this somehow consumes 900% of their attention span.
there's also parent who would boohoo about not being able to contact their kids all hours of the day
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.
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.
[1]: https://support.google.com/families/answer/16109150?hl=en#av...
[2]: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1350409?sjid=7871...
> unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.
They are a company offering a product and they decided not to offer it to kids. It's not like they are telling you as a parent what you need to do. Why don't you get a similar product from a different company for your kids?
Fair enough! Indeed that would be a true issue only if the company had a monopoly.
in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.
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.
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.
So the fact that basically every school region that bans phones is seeing marginal to moderate gains 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.
Of course I don't want kids to be distracted in school. I just think that if things were as easy as a ban, or some other kind of coercion, education would be easy.
It's not like we're making incremental progress over time. Education has become a dumpster fire, and it's getting worse. The solution is simple - stop changing stuff, and just go back to classical education methods that did work, phenomenally. Tech is clearly having detrimental effects on education, so get rid of it in the classroom. Starting with phones there is a mind bogglingly obvious low bar.
[1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...
[citation needed]
A big hooray for that."
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?
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?)
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.
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.
As a child, your willingness to question a tool that’s already better then you at most tasks probably isn’t going too high, and if you go through early education without exercising critical thinking… well we can point to cursive reading/writing as an example of a skill that completely disappears from a generation when not practiced enough.
Not "we should keep teaching cursive indefinitely."
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.
the solution here is better tools, not preventing better tools from being created.
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.
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 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.
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.
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)
How you implement these protections matter.
How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?
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..
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?
(please correct or roast me, I really am struggling with this and am tired of reading refutes that are not productive)
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.)
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).
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...
And on top of this those sites also have a tendency of demanding ID at their own whimsical and arbitrary discretion and often in even more invasive ways, like requiring a selfie of a person holding their ID along with a scanned, not even photographed, image of said id with all details clearly visible.
[1] - https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/spaces/EU...
By what possible measure have they been overwhelmingly successful? Pornography and alcohol are still used regularly by a double-digit percentage of youth.
By contrast, the rate of alcoholism among youth is extremely low. What do you think it would be if alcohol were completely legal? Prohibition on something doesn't mean it disappears. I fully expect my children to have some drinks when they go to parties, as I did. And I also fully expect they'll try, and fail, to hide their breath/drunkenness from me. And that's fine, I'll also play the role of being tricked. The whole point of the prohibition is that it denormalizes the behavior and keeps it hidden away, which does an overall phenomenal job of minimizing excessive consumption.
Without an enforcement mechanism that punishes site owners the whole system fails. And you can't reasonably expect site owners to be responsible for checking ID on every request. So, it's (practically) impossible.
> 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
Yep, and we* lost that argument and "think of the children" hysteria won.
* I would bet the same folks opposed to ID requirements now were opposed to phone number then
The companies that would be punished in this case would be Google/Facebook/etc if found to be willingly complicit in enabling fraudulent underage access. And the poetic thing about this is that this is where their endless datamining comes back to bite them square in the ass. That'll be day 1 discovery in the lawsuits, because Google/Facebook/etc already know full well who's e.g. under 14, with an extremely high degree of accuracy.
..now kids have /r/ihatemyfamily or #fuckeverything
The last person who divulged any details about what he meant when he said 'parents should parent' went on to reveal that parents should learn to manually configure home routers, a solution that is technologically unattainable for most parents. Again I ask, do you have a solution or a slogan?
The burden of proof is on those who put forward a solution.
Of course that isolates them from their peers who have less caring parents that give them access.
That said, the only cess pool that existed at the time was 4chan - which I avoided, despite actually knowing the founder.
The internet has obviously evolved a lot since, and I feel adults unfairly believe that all persons deserve the fully open internet. We’ve clearly reached beyond the point where most companies care about children, as it’s all profit at the end of the day for engagement. If you keep up with Apple, it’s no surprise they concisely spent a large portion of their precious WWDC showcase on child safety. There’s obvious pressure on them, but I also believe firmly Apple is fully aware the online world cannot behave the same way it has with children having access more easily than ever. It’s not like families share a single desktop computer anymore in the living room where all can see…
My (probably) bad comparison is still vapes and porn. Why should kids be allowed to purchase and view this online, but if they went into a retail store they would be denied? Why the double standard? Why immediately presume it’s about tracking adults? What proof do we have that identity verification is leading to adults being scrutinised and tracked? It all just feels like a tin foil hat fan fiction that has no proven purpose other than conspiracy and proof that every person should never be restricted, regardless of age.
In the end, yes there is a possibility that this won't happen, but there is a much bigger possibility that it will happen based on the track record of past bills.
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.
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.
(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.)
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)
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529... (Article is fine, but more importantly has multiple study links)
And having no TV and no smartphone at home and at school is likely the best way to acquire it.
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.
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.
It's AI; by definition alone, those who don't know how to use it will reach competence within minutes, mastery within days.
Sounds like following the evidence.
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.
A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp for 2023:
> 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.
The literacy proficiency levels section on https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp describes what Level 1 means:
> 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.
28% of US adults are just at or below that level.
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)
it also has 10y ago/now comparison.
a trove for the Q "how are we doing, capability wise?"
thanks for pointing to the study!!
[piaacs report] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
I care about ability to comprehend text in someone's fluent language. The PIAAC figures don't appear to measure that.
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.
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.
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?
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 five years, because you need to wait for a cohort of kids to go through that system and then see how they did.
This means that if you introduce something with clear negative effects it will be five years before you spot them!
That's pretty catastrophic given that ChatGPT only emerged in late 2022 and only got good around early 2024.
https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
This also links back up to the Ironies of Automation, which came out decades ago.
The reports from teachers for the past few years have been pretty stark, with kids completely obviating homework.
Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-37716005
Finns appear to have a school system that works in a manner that suits their nation, and was reformed decades ago.
It didn't control for why they were doing the homework. I'd bet if you did a study comparing two cohorts of students with identical social-economic status and IQ, you wouldn't see a significant difference.
Correlation, causation, and all that
Can I guess that you are (native/ethnic) Norwegian and upset by the recent waves of immigration to Norway? Your comment is very specific, plus you used a new throwaway account.
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.
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.
Example: what if Internet access was removed, but the computer remained? It would still be very useful.
And also you may be above average there.
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 of the parts of the world that they've been exposed to.
Mine couldn’t until they were much older. And I have more so perhaps that’s more statistically valid?
Oh, can I move the goalposts too?
Because until they do, I will consider their comprehension skills limited.
Now we're talkin'
I'm all for it, let's teach kids the fundamentals of the world without relying on computers before we introduce them
Using it school is likely undermining their learning.
Isn't this a good thing, employing more educators, building more schools?
Any sane society will always invest more into its future well being and incentivize investments into education.
Teachers should be paid and respected as much as doctors are, all levels, all age. But they should be skilled up too, every single one of them needs to be very good ad child psychology, no exception there even effin' gym teacher. If would arrange itself easily if they would be having doctor's salaries. They should be themselves role models, its #2 after parents usually.
US is not a modern country also in this aspect, its everybody for themselves, fuck the poor they didn't try hard enough and thats it. Wealth-based class society at best. Somebody has to clean pools and houses of rich folks anyway, it ain't gonna be their work colleagues.
AI forces us all in every field to be better at what we do, and coupled with the previous innovation of the internet only reveals the drastic variance in quality of skills. Teaching is no different.
Good teachers use AI. Bad teachers complain AI is ruining their job, but I posit it's only revealing they were never able to excel beyond their students in the first place.
A savant exceeds their teacher fast. Even faster with AI.
So, it's no surprise they're going to opt out of a system that's investing trillions to make education useless.
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.
The ban is for elementary school. 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.
Granted, an 11-year old who doesn't want to go to school is already symptomatic of many years of failure of parenting, but 11 is such a young age and there's certainly plenty of room to stimulate their curiosity. What kind of an adult would deliberately raise their children to know so little of this world?
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.
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.
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.)
I'd expect, at this point, it's rather hard to avoid hearing about AI and its impact.
school wasn't compulsory for most of human history. private schooling was the norm, and private school, like now, was very expensive. as a result, most people worked physical jobs and gained limited skills beyond this.
the idea of public school where everyone had a fair shot of developing skills for knowledge work was an extremely progressive concept in the beginning. what you're asking is the impact of undoing this. many states are essentially trying this through private school vouchers funded by public school dollars.
i think is a very unfortunate regression; unfortunately, it takes a generation of change for impacts to realize.
I was being sarcastic. But this could become a serious question: in the (near) future, if academic skills no longer matter for the vast majority of jobs, then the State's responsibility to fund public education will be called into question -- maybe it would stop at 14 when kids can read/write and do basic math. If you want more, do it on your own dime.
I hope not, but we already have the Trump WH trying to chip away at public education - and that's without AI in the picture.
But I think the AI topic is a double-edged sword. Those tools can help tremendously when used in the right setting (e.g., similar to how brilliant.org works) and can easily spoil the whole learning effort when used wrongly.
I am not convinced that a ban is the solution, but probably better than doing nothing.
No one knows how to use either.
In the classroom, are they just throwing gpt in front of them? Is that the modern equivalent of watching a vhs?
Or do they have homework to vibe code something or given some prompts to ask at home and save somewhere?
Serious question, what does this mean?
This is happening at schools nationwide. It is unstoppable at this point. It's a bizarre charade.
Up to this point, it's actually completely fine. LLMs do an excellent job up to here.
> | Teacher grades with AI -> Principal uses AI to monitor teachers progress.
Again, this is probably mostly fine. Assuming they are taking it seriously, this is also fine.
> Students use AI to do assignment
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.
* Lessons can have a generic core to base off, like learning objectives, content, methods, vocab, tools, experiments, etc.
* 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.
* 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.
AI can spice things up, for sure. But using AI systematically for lesson planning suggests -
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.
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.
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.
Nobody seems to care enough to do anything about it.
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
This can be reduced to "Do students have access to a phone". Good luck after 12 years of age with that. That is a tough war.
If there are no guidance teachers and schools can do what they want and some teachers would probably go to far to early
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.
Well not all types of assignments are alike, I was not required to write nor hold a speech at school, as my eldest was at 13. I would be absolutely terrified to present in front of more than half my class, and they now speak to their whole school. But on the other hand, learning how to brainstorm effectively both alone and in groups is such a rewarding skill to have. And since brainstorming is something taught from elementary school all the way up to university level (I had it as part of a master’s degree), I would assume this means some pedagogs think it is both important and difficult. If you have learned about ‘anchoring’ in negotiations or brainstorming contexts, you would know how important the initial ideas or suggestions or proposals are for the rest of the process and the outcome. So I believe that it is very negative to be outsourcing the initial stage of using your own creativity. There have been studies showing negative effects on performance, learning and memory when outsourcing the initial stage or getting help from AI in this stage, while the opposite is true when using AI for review later. Do not remember the exact source, was something that popped into my feed. So I think you are correct.
Secondly, I started learning programming in elementary school at the age of 10 in the late 90s, we had a couple of hours in the computer lab a week doing creative open-ended projects. Today the local school teaches how to use an iPad with OneNote and Kahoot in 1st-4th, and performing predefined recipies for MicroBit or BlueBot in 5th-6th grade. Not sure how that is an improvement.
So in conclusion, I support the policy to restrict the use of tech in school. The tools should support the higher goals, and sometimes doing hard work is actually required.
Aren't those things critical thinking? We do we want to prevent the acquisition of critical thinking skills.
Reviewing your own work requires critical thinking, almost by definition!
Brain-storming likewise requires some elements of critical thinking.
Writing entire speeches and presentations is almost all critical thinking, as it covers the gamut from planning all the way to implementation and execution.
The teachers that have instructed using AI for assistance in our school seems focused on teaching how to technically use specifically ChatGPT (that particular product, not AI in general), and on the courage to speak in front of people. Learning how to speak in front of people is a noble goal, but I believe any person would be better prepared for speaking if they had done the hard work of writing in the first place.
Kid spent no time doing homework and learned nothing
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
This ruins “search and topic and write about it”
[*] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/13/youtubes-ceo-is-latest-tech-...
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.
Young kids don’t need to learn programming. They need to learn math, reading, spatial reasoning and social skills. (Among other things.)
The kids who were being taught Java in elementary school ten years ago aren’t particularly better off for it.
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”.
And now I need to either disable everything or figure out how to turn that off for her.
Why?
I tell me 6yo "That's for adults only, children are not allowed to use it" and not have to worry.
Sure, he'll push boundaries here and there, but with some things he knows "No means no" and doesn't push those boundaries.
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.
Teaching kids to not succumb to their instant-gratification instincts is part of being a parent.
Everybody can be taught some degree of behavior even if it may require different amount / type of effort, I refuse to believe it ain't true apart from most extreme cases.
Sure it happens, but it's unlikely.
It's why kids from certain cultures achieve better academic success on average than kids from other cultures, on average: the environment matters a lot.
So I suggest to keep unasked parental advices or expectations how other kids should behave to yourself.
Forget it. Not gonna happen, on a story about kid's development, in a thread about lack of impulse control.
Sure, there could be 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.
It’s hard to parse the tone in comments like this, and I’m sorry if am off the mark here, but a little more compassion and consideration makes life and everyone better.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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%.
https://arrowtsx.dev/bigger-models/
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".
---
So, just to drive the point home, Codex has an 86.9% hallucination rate on the AA-omniscience score in this index https://benchlm.ai/models/gpt-5-3-codex - 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.
While you might think it is happy to correct you when you are wrong, you don't know that for sure since you don't know when you're wrong. Codex may have been happily agreeing with you about things you had completely backwards.
Yes I am certain that it feels that way. However empirical testing holds a lot more weight than anecdotes.
> The answer for hallucinations is fairly simple: give it facts and tools to ground itself.
The entire danger here is that it hallucinates when you don’t know the ground facts. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know.
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.
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.
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".
> Most students lack intrinsic motivation
Best AI is still your own brain, trained on paying attention in class and reading the assigned content.
I’m open to the idea! Show me the evidence. Then we can roll it out to our kids.
Yup. Short-term metrics juice. Actual comprehension and cognition falls. This seems to be the case across the board, including with adults.
I’m genuinely optimistic that there is a way to make AI helpful in education. I just don’t think we’ve found it yet. (We certainly haven’t demonstrated it.)
This is probably the big problem, or at least one of them.. If you use less time on learning, it will probably be harder to remember what you learned also. We need to spend some time to make it stick
This tempts users to approach problems by first feeding them into the LLM and then simply following the route the LLM lays out, which does improve task completion time for tasks that the LLM can simply regurgitate, but it stops the user from developing the actual critical thinking skills that school is supposed to teach.
The description of the paper also said:
AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.
This was a surprise too me. I would have thought otherwise.
Would love to see some evidence about if more or less people fall behind and have worse results. In my head the AI should be able to get the weakest students a bit highere.
I think the evidence so far is all students lose learning and cognition, but the brighter students lose less.
From https://cepr.org/publications/dp21577 :
The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys.
No mention of the weakest student. Which probably means they did not have a significant worse or better score
This basically models how the intellectual work is going to be overwhelmingly done in the future.
The biggest issue is a child has to want to do that, since they also could just ask the AI for the answer and then go back to playing video games. End of the day past age 13 or so I just don't see legislation making any difference, they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting.
I think so too. But we haven’t demonstrated we’ve found how, in kids or in adults.
> biggest issue is
We genuinely don’t know what the biggest issue is. We just know it doesn’t work. There is zero quality evidence for AI helping with learning or cognition in kids or adults. (Happy to be proven wrong. This is a fast-moving and big field.)
> they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting
And community. Rich towns restrict devices in school, monitor use at home and thus will have less of an issue with AI exposure.
Ask chatgpt or claude, on their highest model (probably unnecessary but I'm sensing a vibe) to explain a simple linear algebra problem, and if you don't understand it, ask about what part you don't understand.
And if you truly believe it made something up, prove it.
This is seriously the easiest thing to prove out there, you can see for yourself in the next 5 minutes.
You seem to be assuming that the issue is around factual correctness, and that may be the case but the evidence we have so far doesn't support jumping to such a narrow cause.
Is the poor performance because the LLMs are frequently wrong? Unknown.
Is it because the LLMs are sycophantic? Unknown.
Is it because the chat interface is a poor one for learning? Unknown.
What we do know is that students who rely on LLMs learn less and perform worse in the long term. And that alone is enough evidence to support a ban. If better tools come along in the future and are shown to aid learning, then the ban can be re-evaluated.
Again, the research points almost exclusively in one direction when it comes to learning and cognition around AI. You’ll solve more problems more quickly but wind up learning and thinking less.
My leaving out the word solve seems to have led some of you astray, I apologize.
Again the problem is you have the option to solve your problem and move on without understanding it. That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it.
I live in fear that instead of learning how to use the tool, some might just vote to ban the tool.
I don’t know! It’s an interesting question. All we know is it does.
> That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it
It doesn’t. But we have no evidence it can.
We have lots of evidence of people thinking they’ve learned something, taking a benchmarking test, and being found wholly deficient compared to folks who worked through a textbook, went to a class or even solved problems off YouTube videos or instructional websites.
If you can’t figure out what the value add of a human teacher is then.. fkin lmao. It’s well beyond simply transmission of information.
The best teachers have passion - that passion is infectious. I was lucky enough to experience that and it grew my curiosity.
LLM’s provide no such equivalent.
Not everyone has the “best teachers.” And passion is undefined. This is not a real argument.
My physics teacher had a 2.2.
But even still, these teachers have 20+ students. If you struggle with a topic it can pay dividends to have it explained for you.
The goal is not to understand a linear algebra problem. The goal is to learn how to solve it using lessons and techniques taught beforehand. Aka not to get a fish, but learning how to fish.
Type in "Explain how to solve a simple linear algebra problem" into the AI of your choice instead.
I’ve seen this particular philosophy in college where the student focus exclusively on passing exams. They would memorize notes and past exercises. The focus is on solving a particular set of exercises instead of understanding the concepts. Change things slightly and they’re lost.
That may not matter in college where you can focus on a few disciplines and half-ass the rest. But everything in lower stages is truly foundational.
I’m more interested in seeing how someone who teaches themselves with this approach scores on a standardized exam of linear-algebra competence.
Seems like there's no benefit even if it's used "correctly"?
Would hate to dissect this just off a paragraph.
private school money with homeschool paperwork and an app doing the teaching.
https://www.wired.com/story/alpha-schools-new-york-city-camp...
It’s tiresome.
Every time I see LLM enjoyers yapping on like this, it just reminds me of people trying to read tea leaves. There's all these goofy little rules about how to structure the prompt and how mean or nice to be to get it to work optimally, but I think it's obvious that most of these users are just seeing incidental successful outcomes in a largely random system and extrapolating from there because it makes them feel in control.
It is, quite literally, superstition.
The end goal is to dismantle public education and route public money to religious and private schools.
Bald faced lies from you, nothing surprising here. I could take the time in explaining how state and federal responsibilities are divided, I could go through the history of the Department of Education and how funding for schools works in the US. I could point to dozens of examples of you being wrong from any decade in the last century, from de-segregation to "no child left behind".
But there's no point, since you're just a troll and not here for a real discussion. No one interested in a sincere exchange of ideas would start from such a stupid premise. So you can go ahead and look through my comment history all you want, and respond all you want, but it'll just make you mad and get you flagged.
You would be better served by finding a large rock to kick.
I will say though, for someone so convinced that "political/ideological commentors" are harshing the vibe here on Hacker News, you sure seem eager to start and encourage political debates.
Why don't you try being the change you want to see
<3 Happy Pride Month
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Should have started with that. No, your experience doesn't easily translate into some general good advice, you are probably way-above-average bright. I for example went through old school education with tons of home work and benefited greatly from having enough time to comprehend harder topics more deeply, without rush. Memorizing is another aspect, my mind is slow in that so I took my time, trying to remember everything at class' pace would not bring results.
Having some homework ain't something horrible, it became daily habit as part of education and I certainly don't see it negatively in hindsight. It also teaches things like a bit of self-discipline, a trait thats very rare in young these days, and probably the most important personality trait in overall long term life success. It doesn't come on its own, but can be taught/self-taught quite a bit over time. Again, in hindsight, those similarly mentally equipped but lacking it, after few decades, performed in life worse to much worse (I don't mean just money but overall life situation and happiness/fulfillment)
But what you said about homework IS motivation, self-discipline IS motivation. I had zero issues digging into whatever I can find to improve at programming and grasp concepts far beyond what I would be learning at my age. I started programming at the age of 12 which I believe also manifested in the ability to do much better in school.
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.
What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.
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.
https://www.holdenluntz.com/artists/keystone-press-agency/al...
Nothing is perfect.
Challenge: learn some math from AI. Sleep on it. Duplicate it on paper the next day.
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.
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.)
No work equals no learn.
AI, used well, isn't just 'teach me this' its 'teach me this and answer all my dumb questions until I understand it'.
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
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 https://fuglede.codeberg.page/broeklegeplads/ to make it more hands-on.
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.
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.
I.e. you need to answer the questions, which means work through them yourself, rather than just watching the video.
You've prohibited technology and then listed four technologies. "Technology" needs a more concrete definition. Calculators? Computers? TVs? Overhead projectors? Musical instruments?
And sure, kids 6-13 don't need calculators, basic stuff, like multiplication tables is memorized.
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).
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.
> all the technology added since has resulted in no discernible improvement in educational results.
I would say it's because it's used stupidly (also I'd take a Millenial's education over a Boomer's any day). One of the best things about technology is that my kids can carry one lightweight tablet instead of 50lbs of back-breaking books. They can look up reference materials immediately instead of spending an hour looking at World Books that end up having little to know information (insert essay about being assigned a report about the golden lion tamarin in elementary school and all libraries in my town put together had one paragraph.)
Yesterday while driving my kids from camp to a celebration lunch, they asked a question about science and I was able to talk to my car's AI (apparently this is a thing in new cars!) and model how one goes about getting an overview of a topic through curious inquiry.
But plopping a kid in front of a computer isn't a panacea. I just think it's the pedagogist's fault, not the tech's.
Are you joking? I carried one or two books from the locker to class, if that.
> instead of spending an hour looking at World Books
I had a set of World Books. Looking things up in it usually meant encountering a number of other interesting entries in it. I never ever spent an hour looking up something. It is alphabetized, after all.
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.
Do we really need to force technology into everything or are we just used to doing it so see it as necessary?
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 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.
It’s not Ludditism, it’s a good attitude to risk.
And we have a little bot that does your thinking for you, so that we will become a society of dumb fat morons who just fill online spaces with whayever hate speech our future fascist dictators tell the AI to be the correct opinion.
This is worse than 1984.
Indeed, seemingly they done so by age/educational progression:
> 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.
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.
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.
It may be possible at intermediate phases to prime some models to help with this process.
LLMs add the most utility to people who understand process and what a good result looks and feels like. To a novice they can't stunt the learning of this.
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?
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?
The article doesn't explain any of this directly...
It's frustrating to me when bold statements are directed at "AI" holistically and vaguely, completely ignoring any nuance.
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.
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?
We have mounting evidence AI hurts learning and cognition in many circumstances. I have not yet seen similar-quality evidence for it helping.
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.
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.
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".
It’s balancing the irrationally exuberant narrative of the tech bros and AI pushers. You have to stop the bleeding before you can dress the wound to promote healing.
One avoids nuance for clicks or to propagate a narrative, sew division, distract, etc.
Again. As I said in both my comments, I'm not criticizing the ban, I'm criticizing the absence of any communication regarding a plan for researching potentially constructive uses. As a reader, I can't tell if the Norwegian leaders have no plan, or if they didn't communicate a plan, or if they did and Reuters chose not to include it in the article.
Not everything has to be a culture war. When we are talking about our children's future it would be cool to do so pragmatically.
I'm just an old man shaking fist at clouds.
I'm sitting on a mountain of evidence (n=44,000) that used in a very specific way and context AI accelerates and improves lasting learning outcomes. Th3 data is new, but the science that explains it actually goes back decades, predating AI - it's based on pedagogy from texts such as How People Learn (NRC).
My data also shows that students using AI the wrong way perform way worse - the performance gap is widening between students who want to learn and struggle (and use AI to optimize struggle) and students who want instant gratification and use AI for shortcuts.
So I know that if they truly slammed the door on this potential then they threw the baby out with the bath water.
But I don't know the truth because Reuters doesn't report the truth, and that's what tips me from concerned to frustrated. But I guess by complaining about modern journalism standards in a thread about banning AI I'm breaking HN guidelines. Time for me to log off...
Can you point to it?
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.
This is glorified look-up. AI is great at this! Learning through look-up doesn’t work.
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.
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.
It feels like a good tutor. If you aren’t externally benchmarking your comprehension, you really can’t say.
> helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter
Have you considered that learning to phrase your questions is part of indexing and thus learning a subject?
I’m not saying AI can’t help with that search process. But we have no evidence it helps and lots 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.
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."
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.
I think that is what is at risk.
For policy decisions around something like education standards, something for which we have an established status quo (which works in Norway)? Yes. I don’t think waiting for evidence to act is imprudent in that situation.
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
So... ask kids themselves, see what they do and what they say, it's fascinating.
then "give'm a computer ASAP" is the wrong answer.
Just NOT doing that work by having AI simulate it is not good for anyone’s cognitive development.
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.
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.
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 think that if anything, it’s really good I learned how to operate a computer and the Internet BEFORE what the Internet became.
I pity the generation who don’t understand a computer’s folder structure because they grew up with smartphones and TikTok.
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?
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
a) what’s the actual percentage of professionals who actively use AI? It’s much smaller than we think in tech.
b) what percentage of those people understand the very basics of how LLMs work (e.g. token prediction, context windows, etc)
c) what percentage of those people understand AI Agents (or any of their ingredients (APIs, credentials, etc.)
You quickly arrive at a tiny fraction that has a real clue about what they’re doing.
These are elementary school kids...if they start using AI in 6th grade, they have 6 years to learn AI before graduating high school.
Essentially the entire value proposition for AI, particularly as it advances, is that you don't need to learn how to do things anymore.
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.
Clearly not, given that you seem to believe this despite it being incorrect. Every single bit of evidence gathered so far indicates LLMs are worse teachers than humans or every self-directed learning.
If not, perhaps accept that the people who have more than absolutely zero experience have more informed opinions.
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?
yes YES YASSSSSSSSSSSS
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... are you an LLM? The distance doesn't matter - you probably don't want to walk to the car wash.
It is almost all political (and outraged) commentary, and you tend to dominate posts like this with many comments, without adding nuance, substance, or listening to the other side.
It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.
Facts don't care about your feelings, bud. And neither do I.
> It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.
Yes I'm certain you will be happier if you ignore everything that challenges you.
I only have two feet, so if I am to get there, I must use a vehicle.
this tech is unsustainable by design
I can't remember ever seeing this many reasonable posts being downvoted to the point of greying out.
The anti-AI stance seems like a fashionable contrarianism, not sure what will end up changing it
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.
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.
In the future we should be getting rid of nearly the entire teaching position and instead be going with a model where human teachers are more like guidance counselors that can offer some extra experience and anecdotes from how things will be in real life, something that AI will inherently have less ability to do. All these restrictions are just made by adults who literally don't care to think about how life is for children and have long forgotten. They just want to give orders from the top without having to think about it. Is there a danger that children will abuse it? Of course, it's a massive danger. Without AI there is also a massive danger that children will never learn something properly because nobody has time to teach them. Does anyone care about that danger? Does anyone care that a child will waste years of its life in schooling that is boring? No because that damage is invisible to people who do not care, the children will become intellectually stunted and stop caring about learning or doing productive things. Life is full of dangers, the goal should be to use all the tools we have in their optimal way and if that includes teaching children how to use AI, when to use it and the value of understanding things then the time for that is as soon as possible. I have a feeling that all these complaints about AI come from people who themselves never learned the value of independent thinking and stopped thinking at some point. They went through schooling but with rote memorization and repetition and little to no curiosity or drive to do anything other than the exact homework that the teacher gave them.
This is especially ridiculous: "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.". So when you are already an adult and went through over a decade of schooling you can finally use AI? When you are 14 there are children these days that are already making videogames, there is no reason whatsoever to hold children back. Stop treating children like their time is worthless. This is their life time, you don't get to take it away from them however you like as if they are dumb pets that just need to be taught how to behave.
1. Wisdom through dogma. 2. Wisdom through reasoning. 3. Wisdom through experience.
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 learned it as: 1 Knowing what it is. 2 Knowing how it works. 3 Knowing what it can become.
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.
AI is amazing tool for learning, if Norway can not harness it, there is something deeply wrong with the educational system. Perhaps teachers unions?
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!
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!
What, in your professional opinion as an educator, should schools do about AI in schools?
AI could help with that.
FYI: all Norwegians learn at least one foreign language in school. It is mandatory. That means you have to, in case that’s a big word for you.
If you so prefer you will have the option to learn one or two more in middle school and one or two more in high school.
By the time I was 15 I spoke three languages. Everyone at that age would know at least two. Some would know four.
Is it so much to ask that you at least consult the AI tools you speak so fondly of as tools of education before babbling about something you so obviously are deeply ignorant of? If nothing else then at least in lieu of growing a brain?
But this is not about Norwegian kids. And many imigrants have no use for Norwegian (obscure) language. I have polish and ukrainian friends in Norway.
And keep in mind, if you move to a country you kind of have to accept that they won’t be able to offer you education in every possible language. In fact, learning the language is often a prerequisite for permanent residency.
I am not going to ask you how you envision that AI somehow magically solves this, since we have already established that education isn’t something you appear to know much about. The last thing we need is more speculation, fantasy or anecdote.
Have the courtesy of at least researching things online for more than 2 minutes before you expect to be taken seriously.
People from EU already have residency in Norway, and some are not planning to stay there permanently.
One reason to avoid native language (outside of waste of time), is to avoid Barnevernet. It is much harder to take child away from parents, into permament Norwegian foster care, if it does not even speak local language.
It isn’t so much that you and I disagree. It is more that you disagree with reality. To the extent you are aware of reality.
I never said english, just Norwegian. Many people are fine with english only education, but goverment will still demand Norwegian lessons.
> we need AI in Norwegian schools so immigrants don’t have to learn
No, you need AI so kids who do not speak Norwegian, can learn to read and write. It is more important than forcing them into Norwegian first.
AI also comes to spotlight with homeschooling.
> else child protective services will take away their children
Yes!? I admit my informations are precovid, perhaps it is different now (at least the economy in Poland is much stronger, and there is less incentive to work in Norway). But Barnevernet has horrible reputation in Poland.
Common legal advice (when one of the parents works in Norway) is to avoid ties to Norway when it comes to kids, not to establish long term residency for kids (rotate kids every second semester and holidays back to Poland), avoid norwegian language...
It is much harder for Barnevernet to pull their stunt, if you do not give up Polish residency!
Teaching isn’t just about delivering a monologue. Even at university level. It is about connecting and interacting with people. Or else people would derive no more benefit from education than simply reading a list of curriculum books and hand in papers.
How do you envision that this plays out, right now, with AI, when teaching at a K-12 and high school level? Which is much more demanding because you are doing far more than just throwing knowledge and facts at people.
You don’t know what you are talking about which makes you invent fantasies that have no contact with concrete, observable reality. But rather than realize that you are talking nonsense and perhaps educate yourself and think things through, you just carry on.
Again, look at what the original post was about, and what corner you have painted yourself into. Did you, at any point, ask yourself if you had gone off the rails somewhere?
Some sort of teacher avatar. Works great for teaching english in china. And we had this during covid. I can write one in a weekend, easy.
> between students happening?
How about playing football or other physical activities?
> Which is much more demanding because you are doing far more than just throwing knowledge and facts at people
It is demanding only because single teacher has to manage 20 kids. With individual tutor, kids can teach much faster, and have more for socializing.
> how AI will magically remove the language barrier
I dated a girl via google translate, worked pretty well.
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.
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.
So sure in 30 years the policy will look different, but that doesn’t mean they are making the wrong decision.
Childhood is the age when you constantly ask “why” until you get to the bottom of the problem. It is the age of enormous curiosity. But schools, teachers, and parents do not have enough time or knowledge to answer every single “why.”
AI is here to stay, and I believe the future of AI is education.
But that also means we need to change how we test students. We should bring back more oral exams and in-person writing exams. But to learn things please use AI.