I appreciate your honesty! I agree that having a talented human teacher for every student would be ideal.

Many of our schools just don't have the teacher headcount to deliver meaningful instruction to their students. Some schools (one non-profit in Africa, for instance) have to choose between having no teacher or having Bloomy.

Are you putting forward that you'd prefer the former? No judgment if so, just trying to understand your framework here.

>Some schools have to choose between having no teacher or having Bloomy.

Right. I remember in high school, when I learned about Anki, being amazed by it. I remember thinking, well, we could replace most of the time I'm spending here, so inefficiently, with a few minutes of Anki per day. Wouldn't that be nice!

Took me a while to realize, well, learning isn't exactly the main point of school. If it were, they might invest a little more effort into making sure people actually remember what they learn! (Ebbinghaus isn't exactly cutting edge stuff.)

So I remember thinking, rather cynically, well what we're doing here could be replaced with an app! (For context this was in the 2000s.) Not that I thought education should be just an app, obviously, but rather, my complaint was that what I was getting was strictly inferior to one.

I had hoped that the advent of AI would open up fully personalized learning tracks, but instead what we seem to have gotten is technology being used to surveil children all day (a bit of an unpleasant thing to train them for, no?), and to ensure they are conforming even more tightly to someone else's ideas about how they ought to be spending their time.

To clarify, I think that someone else telling me what I'm supposed to be interested in[0] (with threat of punishment no less) is deeply offensive to the basic fact of being an organism, but how inefficiently it's being done is a second insult on top of the first one.

That being said, I welcome innovation in this space.

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[0] I later discovered Education On The Dalton Plan in my school library, being apparently the first person in the school's existence to borrow it. The main idea of the book being that if the child directs his/her own learning, they're liable to actually learn something.

My school was a Dalton school, at least ostensibly, but most of the ideas in the book were illegal in my country. (And new laws passed while I was there squeezed it even further!) Turns out what I was after had been tried, over a century ago, but the government decided it was simply too offensive that the average person should be allowed to decide how they're going to spend their time -- at such an early age, no less!

If there is really no teacher around, the premise is 7 year old kids will show up to teacher-less classrooms and then hop on a computer for a few hours (a whole day?) and willingly sit through hours of tutoring? Rather than just leaving and having recess all day?

As ai replaces more and more jobs, there should be plenty of humans available to teach. Even if the teachers are ai assisted themselves.

I would want to solve the problem way upstream. Obviously I want children to receive education.

I would also say that looking at the problem like it's teacher headcount that's the issue is assuming a specific education model. If there is only 1 teacher and 300 students, you can't meaningfully do a lecture-style one-way transmission of information. That's outdated anyway and not what the students need.