alt Hacker News> What evidence or product behavior would you need to trust something like this with a student?
I would need the product to not exist. I don't want this anywhere near a child. I want humans instructing humans, teaching empathy, connection, and - most importantly - learning to learn.
Anything short of that is just building Brave New World. Electroshock the kids if they reach for forbidden knowledge.
I'm sorry to be so negative since I'm sure you worked hard on this but I find all products in this category to be 100% reprehensible.
"Computer-assisted learning. What an insult, to have the computer teach the human."
- Russ Ackoff
Replies
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.
Just because it's computer-assisted doesn't mean the computer is doing the teaching (any more than saying a gun killed someone). The people behind it are the teachers, and the computer-assisting is a way to amplify that teacher's reach (like a YouTube video).
This position is so extreme, you'd have to have called Reader Rabbit "electroshocking kids" as well.
LLM assisted education =/=> no empathy is taught human-to-human
So you are against a child learning by himself with a book?
This problem has been around a long time. Like many other HN users, years ago in primary school I became a problem for my teachers because the curriculum was too easy for me.
The school dealt with it by sitting me in front of a big box of color-coded dossiers called the SRA Reading Laboratory [1, 2] and telling me "read these at your own pace". The boxes looked just like this: https://sites.google.com/view/objects-of-school-days-past/sr... and may well have been kicking around since the 1960s.
The trouble was that "at your own pace" was code for leaving me alone in front of a box. I don't recall the reading being either interesting or hard, but it solved the problem for my teachers, since I wasn't the type to act out in class. The real lessons I got out of it were lessons in isolation and drudgery.
Looking back, I badly needed contact with an adult who could teach me things. That didn't happen—not then, and not much in later school years either. Was it the schools' fault? They simply didn't have the resources to give me the human instruction I needed.
Surely all agree that children need human contact, empathy, connection, meaningful teaching. But it doesn't help children if we hold to those principles without facing how resource-constrained this problem is. If we do that, then many children end up with nothing, or next to nothing, as happened to me long ago.
Years later, when I read a little history, older novels, and the like, I learned how the nobility had educated their children: not just with dedicated personal tutors but different ones for different subjects. That's what one would do if one could afford entirely human, entirely interactive instruction, and of course it was only available to the 0.0001%. When I read those passages I felt envy and shame at not having what I would (to this day) call a real education, and those feelings have never entirely gone away.
My point with this anecdote is: I don't think I would have been worse off if they had sat me in front of a computer instead of a box of boring readings produced by education researchers. And if the computer had had software that could adapt to me and my interests, so much the better. At least I would have learned things, even though I still would have suffered from lack of human connection that, at that age, I was unaware how much I needed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Research_Associates
[2] https://hackeducation.com/2015/03/19/sra