There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.

Whether they should or not is a moot point. They are using it and we need to figure out how to organise society to deal with it.

> Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8

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.

I didn't have the internet when I was in school. Neither did my kids till they got to college. We've all gone pretty far. For myself, that's in the technology world as a software engineer.

> If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet.

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

From what I can tell the average school at best can aspire to teach kids how to work and how to socialize. That's it. I'd personally be very happy with computers mostly going away from school too. Most actual learning and exploring will hopefully happen at home.

They can use it at home.

Using it school is likely undermining their learning.

At eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills. They need a lot longer to develop those in tandem.

And also you may be above average there.

8 years olds shouldn’t be using the internet.

When I was 8, I could use the Internet at school but every website was whitelisted.

If you think an 8 year old can comprehend text at the same level of a 13 year old (or an 18 year old for that matter), I don't know what to tell you. Reading comprehension doesn't peak at 8.

Yes, there's also a push to ban all computers in classrooms because data is showing that it's of no benefit and if anything is a negative effect on education.

I was cheering for the phones bit. I honestly hadn't noticed the dark undertones of "enforce discipline".

Yeah, it baffles me that the sentiment here is that AI can only hurt kids' reading ability, when AI (in the form of a chatbot) is practically a tool that forces its users to read a lot.

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.

>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.

They need those skills to be able to communicate with others, not to .. research?

LOL

Sounds dystopian.

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.

I feel like two decades of data that it doesn’t work seems the opposite of shortsighted and reactionary.

It's not just Norway. Here in Australia many modern style schools were leaning hard into the digitized classroom era in the 2010s. Now slowly they're realizing their mistake

The problem is, a lot of the parents have bought into the digital parenting age too. They were told ipads etc were part of getting the best education for their kid. Now they're fighting hard on rolling it back (not least because they can't comprehend that it's a problem, that their child can't focus 5 minutes without a device)

Please define "AI fluency"? From what I see, it's mainly being able to write and read at a high level, and having a strong media litteracy and critical reasoning sense something you don't need AI for.

And having no TV and no smartphone at home and at school is likely the best way to acquire it.

> Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.

Sounds like following the evidence.

It stinks that investments are going to be unwound, but it would be worse to engage in a sunk-cost mindset and keep it digital. Since the move was made we've had research suggesting that writing by hand is superior at generating lasting recall and learning than typing.[1] There's very early evidence that skills we use AI for begin to atrophy. [2] Erring on the side of nurturing young people's minds while their ability to learn is maximized seems completely rational to me.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529... (Article is fine, but more importantly has multiple study links)

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1