alt Hacker NewsAs a parent I agree with you, but watching other kids get a leg up because their parents continue to jump in and save them. And your own get the double harsh reality of learning failure and then being punished for it through loss of placement and status. It's tragedy of the commons since everyone must pass no one can fail.
> Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.
The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
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I assume they weren't advocating for using AI to just blindly give answers to the students...
You can argue the same about humans. Growing up, I definitely did encounter people who charged money for tutoring and never taught anything - they just gave the answers. Wasted money.
As for dealing with kids whose classmates' parents help them a bit too much... I honestly don't have a solution. From my experience growing up, beyond a certain amount of help, you definitely are hampering the kid if you overhelp them. I guess I was just fortunate that none of my peers' parents cared to, so I could still be near the top of the class.
Oh, and our final scores were heavily weighted on in-class tests/exams, so even if some kid's parents did overhelp, they wouldn't do well overall.
It might look like those kids are having a leg up, but really they aren't learning to stand on their two feet and the wheels start coming off when they aren't under the wing anymore.
> but watching other kids get a leg up because their parents continue to jump in and save them
Can you give us an example to what his looks like in your context (not necessarily you and your kids)?
> The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results
Laptops, tablets, and AI are just tools. If the folks wielding these tools (or ostensibly teaching others to wield these tools) are not using a tool effectively, then we shouldn’t be surprised when the outcomes are unimpressive.
Simple example — put a hammer in the hands of a skilled builder, and you can get a deck or a house frame. Put the same hammer in my hands, and you will get nothing more than bent nails and sore thumbs.
All that said, just like I feel confident that I could learn how to use a hammer well if I took the time to learn and practice, I think students and teachers can learn to use their tools (laptops, tablets, AI, etc.) well if they take the time to learn and practice (ideally with some good scaffolding).
And now we have junior programmers that don't understand the code being generated and submit pull requests with garbage code.
> The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
I remember growing up being told similar things about the internet and how you can't trust anything written on it. There was some truth to that, of course, but how many people will say that of search engines, despite them being filled with utter crap?
> Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
This is a real question though. One I've been asking since the early 00s. Learning means something different than it did in decades previous. Merely remembering easy to look up facts is not the slam dunk it used to be.