Isn't that expected in most countries in Europe? There's an aging overall population that is shrinking and immigration is rising. So you get a progressively rising percentage of immigrants among school students, many of those coming from 3rd world countries with non-functioning education systems.

Isn't this a good thing, employing more educators, building more schools?

Any sane society will always invest more into its future well being and incentivize investments into education.

So, it's no surprise they're going to opt out of a system that's investing trillions to make education useless.

Even if the people building this world are wrong -- not all students are equipped to call some of the wealthiest people in the world complete bullshitters. Not all adults are ready to call them out as bullshitters, for that matter.

I think it's more complex than this.

AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.

The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.)

On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.

For anyone who still thinks kids should use AI, another argument to make is we are still figuring out AI (hence the constant debate on it, hype, uncertainty, boundaries of its capabilities etc etc). I don't think anyone with right mind can disagree with that. Keeping that mind, wouldn't it make sense to at-the-very-least tread with caution when it comes to kids.

I remember seeing an nyt article where there was mixed results on cell phone bans. While they increased socialization among students, the school didnt see better test scores.

We'll have to see if a ban on AI can improve test scores-I am bullish on the idea tho

Actually, in Europe, Gemini is officially not available for kids even at home [1]. In some countries like Germany, the restriction applies until 16 [2]. I find unsettling that even for supervised account, parents are forbidden to let their kids learn how to use Gemini, even between 14 and 16 yo.

Note that this restriction does not seem to appear from other AI company. So from outside, it looks like unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.

[1]: https://support.google.com/families/answer/16109150?hl=en#av...

[2]: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1350409?sjid=7871...

We’re banning cell phones in school after seeing the evidence, albeit along a class gradient. We’ll probably see something similar with AI. Poor kids get AI in school (and unmonitored at home). Rich kids do not.

Essentially the entire value proposition for AI, particularly as it advances, is that you don't need to learn how to do things anymore.

this tech is unsustainable by design

I learned it as: 1 Knowing what it is. 2 Knowing how it works. 3 Knowing what it can become.

In middle school I remember being assigned a book report that would include the author's biography. I'd just finished a book (The Gammage Cup) and of course my local library did not have any information about the author. So in that situation it was assumed that you would learn traditional research methods, but also that you would just pick a classic book where the information was readily available.

And we have a little bot that does your thinking for you, so that we will become a society of dumb fat morons who just fill online spaces with whayever hate speech our future fascist dictators tell the AI to be the correct opinion.

This is worse than 1984.

The general question here is risks vs rewards and with any new technology both are unknown making caution perfectly reasonable be that internet searches or anything else.

So sure in 30 years the policy will look different, but that doesn’t mean they are making the wrong decision.

If there are no guidance teachers and schools can do what they want and some teachers would probably go to far to early

They have also been explicitly told by the department of education to NOT do this, but it hasn't stopped lazy teachers all over. Apparently not doing your job, in direct contradiction to your given rules, is ok because "it's the future".

private school money with homeschool paperwork and an app doing the teaching.

https://www.wired.com/story/alpha-schools-new-york-city-camp...

Do we really need to force technology into everything or are we just used to doing it so see it as necessary?

Whatever AI looks like in 20 years is going to be so different from what it is today as to make distracting from basic skill-building an almost-certainly net negative educational effort.

There's not so much to learn they can't put it into a high school course. Adults currently in the workforce haven't been using AI since they were in elementary school, and they're adjusting fine.

These are elementary school kids...if they start using AI in 6th grade, they have 6 years to learn AI before graduating high school.

Learning is a conspiracy by Big Knowing, it's all a myth. Let's just ask an LLM to all our thinking, no need to be a functional human.

What, in your professional opinion as an educator, should schools do about AI in schools?

The ban is for elementary school. I don't know about you, but when I was 11, what motivated me to go to school definitely wasn't the idea that I could monetize my intelligence later on.

What makes you think school students are being told that? I've heard that they are told everyone will be using AI to help them write.

You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams. On the other hand, students who use LLMs to augment their learning will do fine

Why?

I tell me 6yo "That's for adults only, children are not allowed to use it" and not have to worry.

Sure, he'll push boundaries here and there, but with some things he knows "No means no" and doesn't push those boundaries.

I have literally tested this: left a cookie on the table (that he wants) and told him "You can eat that cookie after you finish the thing you are reading" and left the room.

Teaching kids to not succumb to their instant-gratification instincts is part of being a parent.

Kid spent no time doing homework and learned nothing

Or imagine a reading log(typing out what you read) to encourage a kid to read, you have AI that can copy and paste your homework for you

My children has at least not yet received any tasks or homework using AI for coding. They teach less coding in school now compared to when I was at the same age, at least at my elementary school.

This ruins “search and topic and write about it”

This is happening at schools nationwide. It is unstoppable at this point. It's a bizarre charade.

Just one example - it's very common to see ChatGPT and the like respond with "you're absolutely correct! Great insight" to something that is a complete misunderstanding.

Best AI is still your own brain, trained on paying attention in class and reading the assigned content.

I’m open to the idea! Show me the evidence. Then we can roll it out to our kids.

The end goal is to dismantle public education and route public money to religious and private schools.

This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement.

Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.

a) what’s the actual percentage of professionals who actively use AI? It’s much smaller than we think in tech.

b) what percentage of those people understand the very basics of how LLMs work (e.g. token prediction, context windows, etc)

c) what percentage of those people understand AI Agents (or any of their ingredients (APIs, credentials, etc.)

You quickly arrive at a tiny fraction that has a real clue about what they’re doing.

I only have two feet, so if I am to get there, I must use a vehicle.

Should we ban programming as well? You know, kid could program multiplication and cheat this way! I can not believe I am reading opinions like this on "hacker" news!

They’ve always been metering AI access (whether this is meaningfully intelligence is a separate question), but that doesn’t prove that there isn’t some time in the future where it won’t be worth metering, only that if there will be, it isn’t here yet.

OTOH, it is still worth noting that from a a consumer-of-the-service perspective, the trend is for more metering, not less (even if that is due at least in part to the rollback off unsustainable subsidies and not to the fundamnetal shifting what is sustainable farther from unmetered access.)

It’s tiresome.

then "give'm a computer ASAP" is the wrong answer.

I think that if anything, it’s really good I learned how to operate a computer and the Internet BEFORE what the Internet became.

I pity the generation who don’t understand a computer’s folder structure because they grew up with smartphones and TikTok.

AI is indeed dangerous. It gives super abilities when in the right hands. Some people don't like it as it creates competition for their mere existence. They start gaslighting campaigns - "AI is bad, dangerous, does not work, consumes too much energy etc". This is luddism of our century, but also a form of psychopathy. When everybody is being gaslit, some of the very same players who spreads false narratives use AI to their own benefit.

I... are you an LLM? The distance doesn't matter - you probably don't want to walk to the car wash.

AI could help with that.

The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map…

Why have teachers?

The AI might as well grade itself.

For example, in many countries children lost the ability to write cursive; that used to be a critical skill comparable to literacy itself. But in our current society, that's no longer the case and you can be very successful without it, but there are other skills, such as using technology, that became critical.

Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.

Socialization leads to discourse which leads to learning.

It's a shitty time to be a parent of a teen.

Acknowledging this divide exists would come down to individual parenting and assessment of a student's use of the tools, rather than a blanket ban of AI tools which punish the "good" students

Every single household I've seen benevolent use of phones/tablets/tv/computer/consoles (quite often all of it), kids were unruly, had shitty grades, living empty lives without good role models and very little passions or hobbies, and overall were more depressed than happy.

I do get why - its supremely easier to just throw tech at them and let them drown in endless cheap dopamine content, triple that for already-addicted parents. The whole principle of active screen itself is so overpowering and addictive compared to good old physical toys, drawing, paint, reading etc.

As a parent of young kids, its much harder to come up, continuously, with good motivating program out there, or even indoors, ie climbing. But - I didn't get kids to have easiest possible life, coursing through our short lives deep in comfort zone is a failure IMHO, thats not life well lived, that's life avoided. I am not kind to such parents - its the biggest achievement, or failure, in one's life, biggest challenges bring biggest rewards. Rather few people put in corresponding effort continuously, compared to careers, relaxing and other aspects of adult lives.

And then folks wonder why so many old people are sour, seeing in more life-successful others all the stuff one could/should have done if not so lazy is deeply depressing, usually amounts to biggest life regrets.

Looking at that meta study, the conclusions seems to be that this kind of studies on children take a lot of time and generally lack any control group, thus conclusions are going to be weak.

The anti-AI stance seems like a fashionable contrarianism, not sure what will end up changing it

What's really interesting to me is seeing people who are pro-technology but anti-AI, like... if you're anti-tech, you become something like the Amish. If you're pro-tech, AI is the logical next development along that path of technology - whatever tech you preciously enjoyed, was part of the package deal of building this AI that we now see.

So I guess I am curious to see if more anti-AI people become something like the Amish or if they come to terms with their championing of technology being equivalent to embracing AI.

in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.

how do dozens if not low hundreds of hours of time you are not spending on your phone at school translate to only the same benefit as doing ONE hour of studying? well, if there is no mechanism, then yeah, that's what happens.

so why was it ever allowed? either tests are severely limited in what they measure, or the impact of cell phones on education is actually quite small. it cannot be both.

Let’s stop pretending this tech is as interesting as we wish it was. If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet. I don’t see the difference at this point.

Should have started with that. No, your experience doesn't easily translate into some general good advice, you are probably way-above-average bright. I for example went through old school education with tons of home work and benefited greatly from having enough time to comprehend harder topics more deeply, without rush. Memorizing is another aspect, my mind is slow in that so I took my time, trying to remember everything at class' pace would not bring results.

Having some homework ain't something horrible, it became daily habit as part of education and I certainly don't see it negatively in hindsight. It also teaches things like a bit of self-discipline, a trait thats very rare in young these days, and probably the most important personality trait in overall long term life success. It doesn't come on its own, but can be taught/self-taught quite a bit over time. Again, in hindsight, those similarly mentally equipped but lacking it, after few decades, performed in life worse to much worse (I don't mean just money but overall life situation and happiness/fulfillment)

Typically there's not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7 anyways.

Homework levels between elementary school and start of junior might look something like this:

    Division I / early elementary - no formal assignments should be made, though 5–10 minutes of systematic study or reading was recommended.

    Division II / upper elementary - formal homework could be assigned at the teacher’s discretion, but generally should be reading or study-type work and not exceed about 20 minutes.

    Starting from junior high - students are expected to study one-half to one hour per school night.

There’s no substitution for human connection (social media) and there’s no substitution for traditional learning (robot teachers).

Everyone who wants to “disrupt” this fundamental human quality is chasing delusion. If you want to help, pay teachers a couple billion from the hundreds-of-billions going into AI maybe?

You eat at your desk, then you’re allowed to play. This was dropped after a year or so.

You don’t learn to read until you’re 7, etc etc.

However, by the end of high school it was up to the individual how much they achieved, and there was minimal pressure. As long as you weren’t messing with other kids, you could do a little or much as you please, and consequences were minimal.

Tools and skills were introduced at a developmentally appropriate age - not sure who chose that age though.

There was a lot wrong with the school and the system, but there was a lot more that was right in my opinion.

How can you write sufficiently fast in an English or History exam (where you have to write a whole essay in limited time) if you're writing one letter at a time like a 6 year old?

It also depends what you by socialisation. in terms of school people usually mean two distinct things: have opportunities to spend time in social interactions, and learning social skills.

My experience of taking kids out of school is that the first reduces (because they spend less time with other kids each day) but the second increases (because they meet a greater variety of people in a grater variety of places).

That takes me to my greatest concern with AI. That kids will socialise (in both senses) with AI rather than people. What will that do to their social skills? There are plenty of examples of adults doing that (visible in places like /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI ), but at least they grew up developing some social skills. If AI is a big part of your interactions, what will the effects of that be?

Everybody can be taught some degree of behavior even if it may require different amount / type of effort, I refuse to believe it ain't true apart from most extreme cases.

Teachers should be paid and respected as much as doctors are, all levels, all age. But they should be skilled up too, every single one of them needs to be very good ad child psychology, no exception there even effin' gym teacher. If would arrange itself easily if they would be having doctor's salaries. They should be themselves role models, its #2 after parents usually.

US is not a modern country also in this aspect, its everybody for themselves, fuck the poor they didn't try hard enough and thats it. Wealth-based class society at best. Somebody has to clean pools and houses of rich folks anyway, it ain't gonna be their work colleagues.

It’s a fully centrally controlled technology that reduces your ability and makes you dependent on it to perform all daily and business functions with a huge environmental and economic impact. The economic impact is both the risks imposed by it failing and the risks imposed by it being successful.

It’s not Ludditism, it’s a good attitude to risk.

If not, perhaps accept that the people who have more than absolutely zero experience have more informed opinions.

Clearly not, given that you seem to believe this despite it being incorrect. Every single bit of evidence gathered so far indicates LLMs are worse teachers than humans or every self-directed learning.

Granted, an 11-year old who doesn't want to go to school is already symptomatic of many years of failure of parenting, but 11 is such a young age and there's certainly plenty of room to stimulate their curiosity. What kind of an adult would deliberately raise their children to know so little of this world?

Forget it. Not gonna happen, on a story about kid's development, in a thread about lack of impulse control.

Sure, there could be physiological reasons for a given child to have a lack of impulse control, but in practice most of a child's characteristics are going to be from the environment.

This might sound principled, but we need to recognize that school administrators are incentivised to have as few kids as possible fail their exams; and consequently, so are the teachers. Either exams will change, or the teaching will change.

They will 100% just use AI for the whole year and then panic and fail the exam when the time comes.

So I think not only will we see more invigilated exams, but they'll become more frequent and shorter. Which I would say is a good thing anyway. I always hated learning a whole year of stuff for a 3 hour exam.

> unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.

They are a company offering a product and they decided not to offer it to kids. It's not like they are telling you as a parent what you need to do. Why don't you get a similar product from a different company for your kids?

Yes. Emphatically yes. In elementary school? The kids who were online in elementary school—literally in school—who got like how-to-use-AOL lessons?

They almost certainly underperform those who learned about the Internet at home or later in life. This is like those stupid keyboarding classes in the 2000s. It was obviously a waste of time compared with developing basic cognition.

No AI CEO or chief engineer today grew up with AI. The idea that everyone in a ball sack or ovary is currently incurably fucked when it comes to the future is naive beyond silliness.

To be clear, I’m not presently arguing against early technology exposure. I’m arguing against the systematized exposure of nascent technologies to young children.

It is almost all political (and outraged) commentary, and you tend to dominate posts like this with many comments, without adding nuance, substance, or listening to the other side.

It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.

FYI: all Norwegians learn at least one foreign language in school. It is mandatory. That means you have to, in case that’s a big word for you.

If you so prefer you will have the option to learn one or two more in middle school and one or two more in high school.

By the time I was 15 I spoke three languages. Everyone at that age would know at least two. Some would know four.

Is it so much to ask that you at least consult the AI tools you speak so fondly of as tools of education before babbling about something you so obviously are deeply ignorant of? If nothing else then at least in lieu of growing a brain?

Seems like there's no benefit even if it's used "correctly"?

And it's not just for math. Try it with learning to light a fire without matches. I watched the survival experts on "Alone" fail at that, and fail at building a fireplace, and fail at building bear proof food storage, fail at archery, fail at fishing, and so on. (I'm not claiming to be a survival expert, I wouldn't last a week on that show.)

No work equals no learn.

So the fact that basically every school region that bans phones is seeing marginal to moderate gains is just huge. And as others have mentioned, test scores are but one aspect of this. Breaks where kids are playing and interacting more regularly are a million times better than ones where everybody whips out their screen and turns into a zombie.

[citation needed]

Would hate to dissect this just off a paragraph.

Bald faced lies from you, nothing surprising here. I could take the time in explaining how state and federal responsibilities are divided, I could go through the history of the Department of Education and how funding for schools works in the US. I could point to dozens of examples of you being wrong from any decade in the last century, from de-segregation to "no child left behind".

But there's no point, since you're just a troll and not here for a real discussion. No one interested in a sincere exchange of ideas would start from such a stupid premise. So you can go ahead and look through my comment history all you want, and respond all you want, but it'll just make you mad and get you flagged.

You would be better served by finding a large rock to kick.

I.e. you need to answer the questions, which means work through them yourself, rather than just watching the video.

AI helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter which kind-of-but-not-quite explains the concept I am hunting for.

One avoids nuance for clicks or to propagate a narrative, sew division, distract, etc.

Again. As I said in both my comments, I'm not criticizing the ban, I'm criticizing the absence of any communication regarding a plan for researching potentially constructive uses. As a reader, I can't tell if the Norwegian leaders have no plan, or if they didn't communicate a plan, or if they did and Reuters chose not to include it in the article.

Not everything has to be a culture war. When we are talking about our children's future it would be cool to do so pragmatically.

There’s another study by MSFT on a similar topic, and yesterday there was an article from Nature shared here on HN.

Everyone uses AI all the time now. People's impressions are not mediated by marketing.

Now we're talkin'

I'm all for it, let's teach kids the fundamentals of the world without relying on computers before we introduce them

Using it school is likely undermining their learning.

But what you said about homework IS motivation, self-discipline IS motivation. I had zero issues digging into whatever I can find to improve at programming and grasp concepts far beyond what I would be learning at my age. I started programming at the age of 12 which I believe also manifested in the ability to do much better in school.

It feels like a good tutor. If you aren’t externally benchmarking your comprehension, you really can’t say.

> helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter

Have you considered that learning to phrase your questions is part of indexing and thus learning a subject?

I’m not saying AI can’t help with that search process. But we have no evidence it helps and lots of evidence it hurts, and everyone with anecdotes to the contrary seems to be going off vibes around how much they learned without any external reference.

This is glorified look-up. AI is great at this! Learning through look-up doesn’t work.

Elsewhere in this thread is someone arguing they learned linear algebra through AI. I’d love to be surprised by their acing an exam. I’m thoroughly doubtful they could get through one. AI is trained to be a sycophant, not to teach. Maybe one day we will solve this. I have seen zero evidence we have that today.

Yes, things will have to change. That’s the idea.

I also think we can use project work as an ongoing assessment.

Fair enough! Indeed that would be a true issue only if the company had a monopoly.

We had a fuckton of homework at every grade, here in Hungary.

Some of the exam boards are trialling computerised exams where exams are completed on computers instead of paper. Its cheaper for them to not have to handle paper (which gets scanned anyway). Its long been possible as an accessibility arrangement but it might become the norm.

That said, my youngest just reads gaming wikis and hangs out on Discords for roguelike video games and this somehow consumes 900% of their attention span.

This is probably the big problem, or at least one of them.. If you use less time on learning, it will probably be harder to remember what you learned also. We need to spend some time to make it stick

The biggest issue is a child has to want to do that, since they also could just ask the AI for the answer and then go back to playing video games. End of the day past age 13 or so I just don't see legislation making any difference, they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting.

A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp for 2023:

> Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent.

The literacy proficiency levels section on https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp describes what Level 1 means:

> Adults at level 1 are able to locate information on a text page, find a relevant link from a website, and identify relevant text among multiple options when the relevant information is explicitly cued. They can understand the meaning of short texts, as well as the organization of lists or multiple sections within a single page.

28% of US adults are just at or below that level.

And also you may be above average there.

And then we are back to the discussion at hand none the wiser; what forms of AI are safe to use for kids?

(Though they didn't give formal grades for the first several years of elementary school, which I'm not sure was a good idea.)

I disagree that humans are required to bootstrap meta-learning; I think it is quite deeply wired into the human brain and there is no reason that we can’t create digital gyms that give opportunities to learn the same insights.

I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.

You use an ipad and keyboard or some other similar device. The only times in my life I have had to use cursive were in elementary school, pretty useless skill to have in this day and age.

What you can do though, is to offer them broad exposure to things that are interesting to them and their generation; my eastern block clone of the 8bit/48KB Spectrum computer didn't really help me excel at math, reading or history, nor was it to be the future of technology, but it did change my life significantly by letting me understand and relate to people that I couldn't otherwise have business dealings decades later.

It seems imprudent to cut children off from futuristic technology just because of a moral panic that it causes brain rot. Unless we know it's soma, a drug so powerful that it subdues volition and curtails intellectual development; we don't.

It’s hard to parse the tone in comments like this, and I’m sorry if am off the mark here, but a little more compassion and consideration makes life and everyone better.

there's also parent who would boohoo about not being able to contact their kids all hours of the day

There is a requirement to meet certain state mandated standards and the one I went to also took state funding, leading to dilution of Steiner influence/an improved curriculum. It depended which side you were on.

[1] https://www.onetonline.org/link/localwages/25-2021.00?st=CA

“Workload” has been a constant argument for just about any tech product we acquired at school. I’m very conflicted about this issue to be honest. I’m a member of one of those parent management boards type things, not sure what’s it called in English.

One the one hand I know how busy teachers are, on the other I also know how they never work to 5PM have twice my vacation days, while somehow never being able to meet to talk about issues. We get one ten minute session every few months at best.

If you put pressure on them they call in sick for weeks and good luck finding a replacement. I’m deeply worried that if teaching as a whole doesn’t get it together we will slowly be forced to use AI for everything because of lack of alternatives.

I will say though, for someone so convinced that "political/ideological commentors" are harshing the vibe here on Hacker News, you sure seem eager to start and encourage political debates.

Why don't you try being the change you want to see

<3 Happy Pride Month

Some if it includes some schools teaching some of the more racists views of Mr Steiner.

    > Most students lack intrinsic motivation

I think so too. But we haven’t demonstrated we’ve found how, in kids or in adults.

> biggest issue is

We genuinely don’t know what the biggest issue is. We just know it doesn’t work. There is zero quality evidence for AI helping with learning or cognition in kids or adults. (Happy to be proven wrong. This is a fast-moving and big field.)

> they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting

And community. Rich towns restrict devices in school, monitor use at home and thus will have less of an issue with AI exposure.

This tempts users to approach problems by first feeding them into the LLM and then simply following the route the LLM lays out, which does improve task completion time for tasks that the LLM can simply regurgitate, but it stops the user from developing the actual critical thinking skills that school is supposed to teach.

I'm just an old man shaking fist at clouds.

I'm sitting on a mountain of evidence (n=44,000) that used in a very specific way and context AI accelerates and improves lasting learning outcomes. Th3 data is new, but the science that explains it actually goes back decades, predating AI - it's based on pedagogy from texts such as How People Learn (NRC).

My data also shows that students using AI the wrong way perform way worse - the performance gap is widening between students who want to learn and struggle (and use AI to optimize struggle) and students who want instant gratification and use AI for shortcuts.

So I know that if they truly slammed the door on this potential then they threw the baby out with the bath water.

But I don't know the truth because Reuters doesn't report the truth, and that's what tips me from concerned to frustrated. But I guess by complaining about modern journalism standards in a thread about banning AI I'm breaking HN guidelines. Time for me to log off...

> Ask two follow-up questions.

> Ask about a seeming contradiction between the original answer and the answer to the second follow-up question.

> Get congratulated for raising such a great point and get parroted back your objection as a "correction."

Useful as a learning aid if applied cautiously but maybe not the "best thing ever."

That pay range is roughly what teachers get in former-USSR/Warsaw Pact eastern Europe, and in those countries it's a comfortable income.

Also, going back to what they did a few years ago isn't "more work". May actually be less, given how often people look at AI output, roll their eyes, and say "ugh, slop".

Also also, questions of pay are obviously after society decides what it wants the role of a teacher to be and finds out how much it needs to spend to hire enough people who will do whatever that job turns out to be.

the report also visualizes not only inter country but also intra country outcomes correlating socio economic influences (age, parents, family migration history, ...) and level of education (school, high school, college and higher) with test outcome (literacy, numerics problem solving)

it also has 10y ago/now comparison.

a trove for the Q "how are we doing, capability wise?"

thanks for pointing to the study!!

[piaacs report] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

It needs addressing. The school was white wealthy hippies when I was there. It’s vastly more representative now.

I am not sure. It would be like sending a kid to a beautiful garden with full of life and stuff, and then micromanaging what they can do there!

The beauty of the books is that the books talk to you, and you cannot talk back. You have to talk to yourselves, go down some wrong path, and course correct on your own at some point, and that is where true learning happens..

This basically models how the intellectual work is going to be overwhelmingly done in the future.

The net outcome there is going to be highly negative.

Can you point to it?

Before uni though, we would get a grade or two every week, be it from short tests, classwork, homework or exams.

Though Cambridge does have "tutorials" which are 1:2 tutoring sessions where you probably couldn't completely rely on AI.

Your way definitely sounds better to me.

Where is the data on this?

People from EU already have residency in Norway, and some are not planning to stay there permanently.

One reason to avoid native language (outside of waste of time), is to avoid Barnevernet. It is much harder to take child away from parents, into permament Norwegian foster care, if it does not even speak local language.

Yes and AI isn't to blame for that as adults predate AI. It's the governments, schools, teachers, parents, teacher's unios, who taught them(or more accurately didn't teach them) and graduated them out of school anyway regardless just so they don't look bad in statistics. Sorry but if you graduate people out of high school who can't read you should be trialed for fraud. Simple as.

People blaming AI for adults unable to read puts us back to the 90s when Doom was to blame for school shootings or back to 60s when rock music was to blame for juvenile delinquency, all of them being wrong, and they're wrong here too. People always want to blame a third party external scapegoat that isn't' the parents and isn't the government, for the problems of their kids.

I have two kids and can confidently say eight year olds generally have good language skills, are capable of expressing themselves just fine, and have good comprehension of the parts of the world that they've been exposed to.

Example: what if Internet access was removed, but the computer remained? It would still be very useful.

The description of the paper also said:

AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.

This was a surprise too me. I would have thought otherwise.

Would love to see some evidence about if more or less people fall behind and have worse results. In my head the AI should be able to get the weakest students a bit highere.

Ask chatgpt or claude, on their highest model (probably unnecessary but I'm sensing a vibe) to explain a simple linear algebra problem, and if you don't understand it, ask about what part you don't understand.

And if you truly believe it made something up, prove it.

This is seriously the easiest thing to prove out there, you can see for yourself in the next 5 minutes.

University professors will likely agree that AI makes students worse at learning overall. No need to cite this there are articles all over the place.

So whatever solution you’re talking about, even when purpose-built, should be replaced by higher paid teachers. Ultimately the AI-First model is about moving money into mega-corps and paying teachers less.

You seem to be assuming that the issue is around factual correctness, and that may be the case but the evidence we have so far doesn't support jumping to such a narrow cause.

Is the poor performance because the LLMs are frequently wrong? Unknown.

Is it because the LLMs are sycophantic? Unknown.

Is it because the chat interface is a poor one for learning? Unknown.

What we do know is that students who rely on LLMs learn less and perform worse in the long term. And that alone is enough evidence to support a ban. If better tools come along in the future and are shown to aid learning, then the ban can be re-evaluated.

I think the evidence so far is all students lose learning and cognition, but the brighter students lose less.

The goal is not to understand a linear algebra problem. The goal is to learn how to solve it using lessons and techniques taught beforehand. Aka not to get a fish, but learning how to fish.

Again, the research points almost exclusively in one direction when it comes to learning and cognition around AI. You’ll solve more problems more quickly but wind up learning and thinking less.

_used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities, AI is the best technology ever invented for learning. If you don’t believe this as a technical HN person at the epicenter of this technology’s capability set, I probably can’t persuade you. But you can do a lot better than your transcript.

Used in the default mode, or with a desire to take shortcuts, or a desire to minimize what is perceived (often correctly in the case of many school curriculae) as BS fake work, it is the best technology ever invented to avoid learning.

My living example - my kiddo didn’t speak a word in English until 4.5 years, when she went into preschool. Russian speaking home and daycare do that for you.

After 9 months in American preschool, she completely switched to English language as her primary. 2 years later, and she speaks Russian with strong accent.

From https://cepr.org/publications/dp21577 :

The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys.

No mention of the weakest student. Which probably means they did not have a significant worse or better score

Correlation, causation, and all that

I don’t agree that this means all potential or current uses of AI are harmful.

I also don’t agree that simply paying teachers more is a solution. This lever has always existed and as a society we fail to pull it. So for the majority of people who use public schools, improving quality at current spend levels would be a major win, and we should explore the obvious possibilities here.

I’m also pretty skeptical about your culture-war assertion that this is about wealth transfer to mega-corps. This can easily be a sovereign AI product. (I also never proposed “AI first” FWIW, I am a proponent of humans augmented by AI for this and most use-cases. Banning AI entirely operates at the margin of forbidding mostly-human use-cases from using any AI.)

It isn’t so much that you and I disagree. It is more that you disagree with reality. To the extent you are aware of reality.

Can I guess that you are (native/ethnic) Norwegian and upset by the recent waves of immigration to Norway? Your comment is very specific, plus you used a new throwaway account.

Type in "Explain how to solve a simple linear algebra problem" into the AI of your choice instead.

By contrast LLMs constantly get things wrong and once they get something wrong will begin weaving that into everything create entirely fake realities of the sort that is more akin to a schizophrenic than somebody being mistaken on this fact or that.

My leaving out the word solve seems to have led some of you astray, I apologize.

Again the problem is you have the option to solve your problem and move on without understanding it. That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it.

I live in fear that instead of learning how to use the tool, some might just vote to ban the tool.

That's the big problem with education in general. If you introduce a new factor to children's education you can't realistically measure the effect it has had for about five years, because you need to wait for a cohort of kids to go through that system and then see how they did.

This means that if you introduce something with clear negative effects it will be five years before you spot them!

That's pretty catastrophic given that ChatGPT only emerged in late 2022 and only got good around early 2024.

Mine couldn’t until they were much older. And I have more so perhaps that’s more statistically valid?

I care about ability to comprehend text in someone's fluent language. The PIAAC figures don't appear to measure that.

Because until they do, I will consider their comprehension skills limited.

Literacy is a worldwide problem.

I’m more interested in seeing how someone who teaches themselves with this approach scores on a standardized exam of linear-algebra competence.

I’ve seen this particular philosophy in college where the student focus exclusively on passing exams. They would memorize notes and past exercises. The focus is on solving a particular set of exercises instead of understanding the concepts. Change things slightly and they’re lost.

That may not matter in college where you can focus on a few disciplines and half-ass the rest. But everything in lower stages is truly foundational.

I don’t know! It’s an interesting question. All we know is it does.

> That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it

It doesn’t. But we have no evidence it can.

We have lots of evidence of people thinking they’ve learned something, taking a benchmarking test, and being found wholly deficient compared to folks who worked through a textbook, went to a class or even solved problems off YouTube videos or instructional websites.

If you can’t figure out what the value add of a human teacher is then.. fkin lmao. It’s well beyond simply transmission of information.

The best teachers have passion - that passion is infectious. I was lucky enough to experience that and it grew my curiosity.

LLM’s provide no such equivalent.

Not everyone has the “best teachers.” And passion is undefined. This is not a real argument.

How often do children do things the "correct way" or know how to get the most out of a thing?

I never said english, just Norwegian. Many people are fine with english only education, but goverment will still demand Norwegian lessons.

> we need AI in Norwegian schools so immigrants don’t have to learn

No, you need AI so kids who do not speak Norwegian, can learn to read and write. It is more important than forcing them into Norwegian first.

AI also comes to spotlight with homeschooling.

> else child protective services will take away their children

Yes!? I admit my informations are precovid, perhaps it is different now (at least the economy in Poland is much stronger, and there is less incentive to work in Norway). But Barnevernet has horrible reputation in Poland.

Common legal advice (when one of the parents works in Norway) is to avoid ties to Norway when it comes to kids, not to establish long term residency for kids (rotate kids every second semester and holidays back to Poland), avoid norwegian language...

It is much harder for Barnevernet to pull their stunt, if you do not give up Polish residency!

To be efficient with AI and LLMs you need to be good at least two things, reading and writing. One easy way of getting better is by reading a lot, and writing a lot. Maybe if we coax the kids into understanding (believing?) that better reading and writing helps them use AI better, they'd pay more attention to it?

Oh, can I move the goalposts too?

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

This also links back up to the Ironies of Automation, which came out decades ago.

The reports from teachers for the past few years have been pretty stark, with kids completely obviating homework.

Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.

We don't need people stressing and struggling financially for the privilege of teaching our youth. That leaves those without a better option or have a working spouse.

Teaching isn’t just about delivering a monologue. Even at university level. It is about connecting and interacting with people. Or else people would derive no more benefit from education than simply reading a list of curriculum books and hand in papers.

How do you envision that this plays out, right now, with AI, when teaching at a K-12 and high school level? Which is much more demanding because you are doing far more than just throwing knowledge and facts at people.

You don’t know what you are talking about which makes you invent fantasies that have no contact with concrete, observable reality. But rather than realize that you are talking nonsense and perhaps educate yourself and think things through, you just carry on.

Again, look at what the original post was about, and what corner you have painted yourself into. Did you, at any point, ask yourself if you had gone off the rails somewhere?

In countries like Finland kids don't get any homework. Though their society and school system optimizes more for child happiness, not winning international math Olympiads where you need to cram to get ahead.

(Just mixing my Randy Newman metaphors for fun. I could have also thrown in a few words in defense of our country)

Jingoistic deflection doesn't change that.

For example, if you were able to get free education for your children as part of your payment, wouldn't that have made your life a lot easier?

Some sort of teacher avatar. Works great for teaching english in china. And we had this during covid. I can write one in a weekend, easy.

> between students happening?

How about playing football or other physical activities?

> Which is much more demanding because you are doing far more than just throwing knowledge and facts at people

It is demanding only because single teacher has to manage 20 kids. With individual tutor, kids can teach much faster, and have more for socializing.

> how AI will magically remove the language barrier

I dated a girl via google translate, worked pretty well.

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-37716005

Finns appear to have a school system that works in a manner that suits their nation, and was reformed decades ago.

It didn't control for why they were doing the homework. I'd bet if you did a study comparing two cohorts of students with identical social-economic status and IQ, you wouldn't see a significant difference.