alt Hacker NewsI wondered how he didn't see this coming from a mile away, but in looking up more about Sal Khan himself, the surprising thing is that he never had any 'normal' teaching experience, and that explains everything. In a normal classroom, good kids don't need teachers. You could give them a book (or some Khan Academy videos, or a reliable LLM) and they'd learn the material far faster than you can teach it. Now let's talk about the other 95% of kids...
Those other 95% are going to generally have either a lack of motivation or a lack of intelligence. And for these kids a good teacher can do a lot, but actually teaching the material itself is a relatively small part of it. It's about giving them that motivation, or adjusting the material for slower students. And most importantly, it's about doing all of this without making it apparent that you're doing this, since keeping it feeling 'natural' is an important part of making it feel interesting and also helping to build a better rapport with the kids. That rapport/connection building is critical, and completely outside the domain of LLMs.
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A lot of academically successful people recieve everything but a "normal" education. They are the ones who have developed the ability to self study from a young age and have the drive. As cliche as it is, a lot of the academically successful students I see are the ones who are passionately curious. While many of the Asian kids are obviously more inclined to be more motivated (due to their parents), this motivation makes them passionate at the very least. Some other students simply love the thrill of being better than their classmates. From my observation, a lot of those kids love going to schools where they are challenged and all their peers are equally if not better than them. This cycle is ONE of the MANY reasons why they are so successful.
If I could rephrase this, I wonder if you're also saying in a way that 5% of people are naturally self-driven but for 95% of people, the relationship matters more than what they're doing. If they have a connection with the teacher, then they'll learn.
Have there been cases where kids in the 95% did end up being self-driven about a particular topic that they had an interest in? Or did they always need to be given motivation?