| ▲ | poody 6 hours ago |
| One industry example.. We have been giving students computing devices for years with the cost of educating students going up year after year.. Yet scores keep dropping.. No productivity gains here.. I do not think these results are unique to the education sector.. There are probably alot of businesses where nothing much will change except slight efficiencies.. not enough to move the needle.. |
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| ▲ | torben-friis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| This is one area where we've proved to be fully unable to rise to the occasion. The internet age opened a million of possibilities to improve education: improved visual explanations, scalable access to the world's best educators, lowered friction to access students to work with, replayable lessons... We mostly just kept the old model and placed an addictive device in front of children. |
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| ▲ | datsci_est_2015 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Maybe it’s possible in theory to leverage our newest technologies as educational tools. But maybe it’s also incredibly challenging because it’s so easy to fuck up: a lonely peak of optimal outcomes surrounded by a vast space of net negative outcomes. You mention the addictiveness of the devices, this probably plays a big role in shaping the outcome space. | | |
| ▲ | ChadNauseam 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Let's take math education as an example. If you look at the actual result, all math education past y=mx+b is a waste of time for most students. By and large, math students are taught by people who have memorized the quadratic equation, or certain operations with logarithms or imaginary numbers, etc. but don't understand it on any kind of deeper level. (Imagine asking a high-school math teacher to compute i^i. Almost none will be able to.) So it's presented as a set of random rules you have to follow to get the correct answer, with no underlying logic or justification. Most normal people understandably hate this, and even if they suffer through it to get a good grade they will not retain it and come away permanently hating math. It's just sad. I sometimes help kids with math, and it's amazing how screwed they are. Like, smart kids with good grades who are totally unable to do basic manipulations with fractions. I mean questions like "write 25% as a fraction". They are getting absolutely nothing from math classes. How could they? Even the best teacher in the world can't pause class for everyone when they realize that one of their students is missing some foundational concepts. That student is just going to get left farther and farther behind, and they will never catch up. It happens to almost every student at some point. They'll get sick for a week or just have their mind on other things, miss some important concept, and then be left behind forever. I honestly have a hard time imagining how we would possibly make the situation any worse with technology honestly. But if you just took Math Academy and made students use that instead of their math classes, I bet 99% would have better understanding and fluency with math than they do now. |
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| ▲ | supaflybanzai 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And people still think AI era will bring prosperity for all and we will to have to work and just enjoy ourselves |
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| ▲ | Zigurd 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is what irks, and saddens me most about applications of AI not improving outcomes. I suppose I should take some comfort that even Salman Khan couldn't crack this nut. The idea of an AI tutor that could step-by-step customize an education plan to each student and patiently apply every approach to getting the students to understand each lesson, is such an attractive vision. Both of my kids chafed under lock step pacing of lessons, even in a school where disruptive or unmotivated students were pretty much nonexistent. |
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| ▲ | agumonkey 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I just found a book about abandoned teenagers from the 70s (think juvenile held in post-offense rehabilitation centers) and they speech level is above the average educated adult today. There's many breadcrumbs like these, of a change in culture globally. 50s social expectations about expression and characters were way deeper. And it gradually fades away as life becomes comfy and entertainment based (80s+) I'd say. |
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| ▲ | mr_toad 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The education industry has been lowering the bar for admission to higher learning for half a century or more, while dumbing down the content of high school and even primary school education. All because we can’t have children feeling bad. It’s terribly ironic that things like calculus, linear algebra and matrix manipulation were being weeded out of the curriculum, right before machine learning took off. |
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| ▲ | autoexec 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > while dumbing down the content of high school and even primary school education. All because we can’t have children feeling bad. I suspect that it's a lot less about making children feel better and more about keeping the general population stupid and unable to think critically so that the ruling class can exploit them easier. The children of the ruling class are still given the opportunity to be well educated by private institutions that are overpriced to keep out the poors. | |
| ▲ | aDyslecticCrow 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What you're talking about are specific local policy changes at specific school and equating random trends to some sort of ... "kids these days" message. If we're talking about the US; then it's simply the very healthy and functional economic inventive of students taking out lifetime loans to pay school tuition for schools that have not actually risen in quality or format in 40 years. The more students; the more money to the school board! Lower those bar riiight down! Lazy kids these days amiright! | | |
| ▲ | datsci_est_2015 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I would echo that it’s local. I often poke fun at my SO and her sister for their absolutely trash tier quality education supplied by the Indiana public school system. I’m often flabbergasted by what they didn’t learn in primary and secondary schooling. They were able to go to decent universities, though, but it really opened my eyes to how terrible red states run their public school systems. It’s not even a flyover state thing, if you just look at Wisconsin and Minnesota. It’s uniquely red state. Also Indiana department of transportation is terrible as well. |
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| ▲ | lapcat 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is an important observation. We've had 50 years of personal computing, but is there any evidence that computers in any form ever improved the academic performance of students? AI certainly seems to be making students much less competent. |
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| ▲ | bemtevi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't see why it would. It might make education more efficient like a factory in some ways, but I simply don't see why it would aid in learning. At least, from my experience as a student, here are some observations: 1. Computers have allowed me to gather more information, access more journals, more results from around the world, but what really seems to matter in learning is just sitting down with a tiny bit of material like one book and REALLY understanding it. 2. Computers make things more distracting because while they make typing up reports, proofs, and assignments more efficient, there's actually just too much information. What really seems to help is having LESS information so there's some space to just think and work things out. The fact is, what computers do is help you keep up with other people in the field, so they might accelerate progress at the research level, but what they don't do is help you become a rigorous, independent thinker. Academia in fact has always been an uneasy tension between the two: building capable individuals and getting results and money for progress. Computers help with the latter - they certainly impede the former. | |
| ▲ | 4b11b4 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | No, we know that when technology (particularly: Internet connected laptops) is introduced into classrooms competency declines. This has been shown to be true internationally | | |
| ▲ | aDyslecticCrow 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's... complicated and a bit disputed. The trends match but the attempts at proper comparison study is not quite as conclusive (good social studies are difficult to make). It's certainly true that the trend is negative rather than positive. |
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| ▲ | 1718627440 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why would a technology that makes the mind work less, have benefits for a process, that works by making the mind work hard? You still need to calculate calculus yourself long after you could buy books where the result is written in. That supposed "paradoxon" is not even specific to electronic tools. It's just that the point of education has never been to get results, but to exercise in as much as side paths as possible and memorable while following the path to the results. The result mostly get thrown away immediately. | |
| ▲ | Zigurd 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I gave my son CRPGs for his GBA that required reading what the characters were saying. His reaction to finding out his three and four year old friends didn't read was interesting. |
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| ▲ | cpursley 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > Yet scores keep dropping Not everyone on hn is American or part of the Anglosphere. |
