The School That Replaces Teachers With AI (joincolossus.com) 124
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: CBS News has a TL;DR video report, but Jeremy Stern's earlier epic Class Dismissed [at Collosus.com] offers a deep dive into Alpha School, "the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day.
Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to "mastery-level" (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in 'workshops,' learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone."
Founder MacKenzie Larson's dream that "kids must love school so much they don't want to go on vacation" drew the attention of — and investments of money and time from — mysterious tech billionaire Joe Liemandt, who sent his own kids to Larson's school and now aims to bring the experience to rest of the world. "When GenAI hit in 2022," Liemandt said, "I took a billion dollars out of my software company. I said, 'Okay, we're going to be able to take MacKenzie's 2x in 2 hours groundwork and get it out to a billion kids.' It's going to cost more than that, but I could start to figure it out. It's going to happen. There's going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day and they're going to love it.
"I really do think we can transform education for everybody in the world. So that's my next 20 years. I literally wake up now and I'm like, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this. The greatest 20 years of my life are right ahead of me. I don't think I'm going to lose. We're going to win."
Of course, Stern writes at Collosus.com, there will be questions about this model of schooling, but asks: "Suppose that from kindergarten through 12th grade, your child's teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines. Suppose those machines unlocked more of your child's academic potential than you knew was possible, and made them love school. Suppose the schooling they loved involved vision monitoring and personal data capture. Suppose that surveillance architecture enabled them to outperform your wildest expectations on standardized tests, and in turn gave them self-confidence and self-esteem, and made their own innate potential seem limitless.... Suppose poor kids had a reason to believe and a way to show they're just as academically capable as rich kids, and that every student on Earth could test in what we now consider the top 10%. Suppose it allowed them to spend two-thirds of their school day on their own interests and passions. Suppose your child's deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires.
"If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?"
Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to "mastery-level" (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in 'workshops,' learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone."
Founder MacKenzie Larson's dream that "kids must love school so much they don't want to go on vacation" drew the attention of — and investments of money and time from — mysterious tech billionaire Joe Liemandt, who sent his own kids to Larson's school and now aims to bring the experience to rest of the world. "When GenAI hit in 2022," Liemandt said, "I took a billion dollars out of my software company. I said, 'Okay, we're going to be able to take MacKenzie's 2x in 2 hours groundwork and get it out to a billion kids.' It's going to cost more than that, but I could start to figure it out. It's going to happen. There's going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day and they're going to love it.
"I really do think we can transform education for everybody in the world. So that's my next 20 years. I literally wake up now and I'm like, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this. The greatest 20 years of my life are right ahead of me. I don't think I'm going to lose. We're going to win."
Of course, Stern writes at Collosus.com, there will be questions about this model of schooling, but asks: "Suppose that from kindergarten through 12th grade, your child's teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines. Suppose those machines unlocked more of your child's academic potential than you knew was possible, and made them love school. Suppose the schooling they loved involved vision monitoring and personal data capture. Suppose that surveillance architecture enabled them to outperform your wildest expectations on standardized tests, and in turn gave them self-confidence and self-esteem, and made their own innate potential seem limitless.... Suppose poor kids had a reason to believe and a way to show they're just as academically capable as rich kids, and that every student on Earth could test in what we now consider the top 10%. Suppose it allowed them to spend two-thirds of their school day on their own interests and passions. Suppose your child's deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires.
"If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?"
Good luck, (Score:4, Insightful)
sounds like bullshit.
Re: (Score:3)
I want to believe. (Score:3)
I got nothing out of school past learning how to read, i hated the entire experience and I'm bitter about the wasted time
I would love this to be true, and I've long said we underestimate what kids can do.
I hope I'm wrong but something smells fishy as hell.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember school as BORING!!!
Absolutely! My schooling dramatically held back my education. My mom was a far more effective teacher than my school teachers. I would have been far more educated being home schooled than I was after finishing public school. The latter was largely a waste of time and potential.
Re: (Score:2)
FYI: We already did this partially with
Re: (Score:3)
There's a lot of room for improvement in schools, and all it will take is a lot more money and a tremendous amount of political will to make it happen: smaller class sizes, better trained and higher caliber teachers, better facilities, better food, better learning materials, better leadership.
I would argue that a large part of the issue with current schools is because people, on the whole, have been unwilling to adequately fund it. So teachers are forced into attempting a "one size fits all" approach that just doesn't work for a significant number of students. And that lack of funding has led to many of the people who could become "higher caliber teachers" deciding to do something else with their lives.
Re: (Score:2)
With what teachers make to start it means you end up with people who can't do anything else.
Some places it gets better later in your career but that still doesn't attract the best and brightest additionally there is a whole ecosystem of diploma mills that cater to teachers all the way to a doctorate.
Half of being a bigshot in k12 is just getting access to the kind of funding to whip through these programs as fast as possible. People with rich parents or who marry to better salaries. Most starting salarie
Re: (Score:2)
Moving up in the district office is much more about being a cunt and having no or distorted values than about being educated or competent.
Re: Good luck, (Score:2)
I used to be a teacher and that assessment is spot on and well known by all the non-cunt teachers.
We all agreed that the main problem is that there aren't enough admin slots to hold all the "cunts", so the rest of us have to deal with them spending their days sharpening their skills by practicing on the rest of us, and worse yet, the students.
Their intermediate goal seems to be get acknowledged some day as a "real asshole", but they're too ineffectual to get that far.
Other readers can get points for ignoran
Re: Good luck, (Score:3)
I read the Collosus article ( ok, most of). Alpha school is way cool, but it's not the AI that makes it work so well.
This sort of school has popped up from time to time with amazing successes even before AI. Their models vary (all were better than standard public schools), but what they all had in common were charismatic leadership and staff. I taught at one, designed for kids with specific learning disabilities, for a year back in the 1990's. I was amazed at how well it worked.
None of these were scalable w
Re: (Score:3)
As a person who used to teach in public school, knowing I would not make a lot of money there, there are many problems with public and private schools, and you touched on some of them. I am much wealthier for having left public schools.
Re: (Score:2)
It's just a scam (Score:2, Troll)
The Texas government is happy to do this because the goal is to destroy public education by any means necessary.
Ultimately the goal is re-segregation. At least of these psychopaths pushing this nonsense. It's to be able to have privatize education for the profit of a handful of psychos and to be able to segregate schools by race again.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:It's just a scam (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what the answer is but other places seem to be able to educate their kids.
Re:It's just a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you even American? (Score:2)
Really? Is that why most adults here read at a grade school level?
There is no way you live here and went to public school and you believe this.
https://www.barbarabush.org/wp... [barbarabush.org]
https://www.snopes.com/news/20... [snopes.com]
There's barbarabush.org if you need to hear it from the right team in order to believe it.
People are so dumb here that I used to think people pretended to be dumb to act cool and the teachers i had in grade school were so stupid I thought there must be some 2nd sort of correct until I was about 8. I
Re: (Score:3)
Ultimately the goal is re-segregation. At least of these psychopaths pushing this nonsense. It's to be able to have privatize education for the profit of a handful of psychos and to be able to segregate schools by race again.
I think somewhere under all that froth you mean something like "parents would prefer their children be in actual schools instead of violent hellholes".
But it seems to be you who doesn't think that that is possible with racially integrated schools.
Re: (Score:2)
Lol he doesn't say that anywhere, it's totally you projecting.
This post is like something you'd see in an example and roll your eyes because of course nobody could ever be this pathological.
Look I get it you're not American (Score:3)
There's a thing we call a segregation academy. It is a private school specifically set up to keep black kids out.
Public schools undermine segregation academies because it's very very very obvious when you are excluding black kids from a public school.
Segregation academies are currently unconstitutional. However our corrupt supreme Court will eventually get around to undoing that ruling.
In the meantime you can do them for all practical pur
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Segregation based on your parents' income is no less of a segregation.
Re: (Score:2)
Ultimately the goal is re-segregation.
Along with re-establishment of rigid class barriers that will prevent most people from moving above their assigned station in life no matter how smart, talented, and hard-working they might be.
First thought - recipe for raising antisocial kids (Score:5, Insightful)
It's true that schools exist to teach children useful skills - but those aren't all along the lines of "how to run a food truck". It's just as important to teach how to get along / cooperate in both formal (learning) and informal (playing) settings.
But, again, this is Texas...
Re: (Score:3)
In theory, "teach how to get along / cooperate in both formal (learning) and informal (playing) settings" is a good thing
In practice, for people like me with Aspergers and no social skills, it's like being thrown into hell
I learned that everybody hated me and the only way I was ever going to succeed is to do it on my own
I perfected the skill of solving problems alone and went on to a very successful 50 year career in engineering
You can't force people to become social
Re: (Score:3)
I have been diagnosed with Aspergers, and I think exposure to social situations is still helpful. In fact, it may be even moreso, since with that syndrome you're not likely to learn those things without making a point to expose yourself. It doesn't mean you're going to start going to start clubbing in your free time or something.
Also, for the other 95% of students who aren't on the autism spectrum, they need a school as well. A properly-funded and organized school system would have a separate place for kids
Re: (Score:2)
I have been diagnosed with Aspergers, and I think exposure to social situations is still helpful. In fact, it may be even moreso, since with that syndrome you're not likely to learn those things without making a point to expose yourself. It doesn't mean you're going to start going to start clubbing in your free time or something.
+1.
Re:First thought - recipe for raising antisocial k (Score:5, Interesting)
Well they fail miserably at doing that! My life got infinitely better when I graduated high school. Working and going to college, you are significantly more likely to be around people that have made the active choice to be exactly where they are. They have a choice.
High school on the other hand, is more like prison. You are forced to go. The guards (teachers) are discouraged from any kind of relationship with their prisoners (students). On the learning front, less then half of any class actually even cares or wants to be in the room. For the small amount of students that enjoyed learning, we had to compete with all the idiots that didn't.
Don't even get me started on how the school distributed money between the departments. Sports (aka ENTERTAINMENT!!!) seems to get so much more money then real academics. So instead of school being there to educate, it's more like a prison/daycare situation for the kids so parents can go to work.
I can't imagine any of this has improved since I've left high school 24 years ago. Given the Gen Z stare and their inability to really communicate without a telephone, it doesn't seem that it is.
P.S. I like the idea of the AI teaching. Sounds like one of my math classes. It was self paced, done with scantrons and on demand grading. About 4 or 5 of us were way ahead of the average in the class. In other formats, we'd of been bored. If this AI teaching platform works anything like that, it would be a big improvement.
Re: (Score:2)
Hey cutie, I don't have any mod points to give you but I wanted to let you know i love your post ;)
Re: (Score:2)
Texans care about their kids too. It's Texas because Texas is deeply under Republican control and makes it easy to run cons like this.
"It's just as important to teach how to get along / cooperate in both formal (learning) and informal (playing) settings."
Yes it is, and that's why home schooling is such a disaster.
Re: (Score:3)
AI can is both better and worse than some teachers (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
That is a _really_ bad idea (Score:2)
Some (few) people can learn self-directed. But even they benefit a lot from teachers that help them find their own approaches (which is exceptionally critical) and being self-motivated is not a given even for these people.
The whole thing sounds like an utopian experiment by an asshole that does not care that he harms children.
Re: (Score:2)
The whole thing sounds like an utopian experiment by an asshole that does not care that he harms children.
I'd be slightly more concerned about that if the current alternative wasn't "Fallacy Of The False Alternative Urban Hellhole Public High".
Re: (Score:2)
So you think because kids get mistreated, it is OK to mistreat them in alternate innovative ways?
Okay, it's not really "teacherless" (Score:3)
I just took a look at Alpha's web page. They've basically just re-branded "teachers" as "guides". From TFA:
TL;DR what the billionaire claims is happening doesn't really appear to be what's happening at the schools.
Re: (Score:2)
I just took a look at Alpha's web page. They've basically just re-branded "teachers" as "guides".
Which is hardly new.
It can work, with inwardly (self) motivated students ...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They have a "guide" to student ratio of 1:5.
If you look at their recruitment ad for "guides", they pay $100k annually and want prior experience in teaching.
So rather than improving the efficiency of education with AI, it almost seems like they've done the exact opposite. Even excluding facility costs, each student is paying $25-30k annually just for the "guide".
This is good to see (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though early experiments often fail, it's good to see experiments
Traditional school is more about showing up on time, sitting quietly and following rules
It's training students to be compliant worker bees or soldiers, not brilliant, independent thinkers
We need a new approach that helps students identify their talents and perfect them to the highest level
In a typical classroom, filled with students of varying talent, the smart ones get bored, the less talented get lost and the ones in the middle endure it
We need to make learning the most exciting thing a student can do, and present the material at the pace that matches the student's talent
Re: (Score:2)
This is so stupid. Even those in R&D do 5% R and 95% D. Sitting down and working to the rules are huge parts of getting most things done in life. I don't want the guy at the Snickers plant getting creative and dropping LSD into my candy, and I don't want my physician getting creative and dropping LSD into my vaccine.
Re: (Score:3)
Even though early experiments often fail, it's good to see experiments
You know, when I want to do an anonymous (no names are preserved) survey of security professionals, I have to go through multi-week or even multi-month IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval, explaining how I protect the data I collected and the subjects, etc. IRB members often have opinions on my survey questions and also on whether I am sufficiently clear about how and where the data is stored in the survey header.
And that's when I don't keep the names of my subjects nor do I collect anything persona
Re: (Score:3)
Move fast and break... kids.
Re: (Score:2)
"Traditional school is more about showing up on time, sitting quietly and following rules
It's training students to be compliant worker bees or soldiers, not brilliant, independent thinkers"
A false choice. Schools teach students many things, including following rules. That doesn't mean students can't be "brilliant, independent thinkers". Thinking otherwise is a sign of a small mind.
"We need a new approach that helps students identify their talents and perfect them to the highest level"
What is your evidenc
Re:This is good to see (Score:4, Insightful)
Thinking otherwise is a sign of a small mind.
I couldn't disagree more. Thinking otherwise is a sign of someone who has gone through the public school system. AI learning can't possibly be any worse than the public school system. I would have LOVED to have been educated this way. I would have gotten WAY more out of school than the gulags of the 70s and 80s.
Re: (Score:2)
If the knowledge is metered out so slowly that you can not possibly pay attention, then AI would be just as good as normal schools, which are designed to accommodate idiots and ruin anyone with any sort of genuine thirst for knowledge.
Re: (Score:3)
It's good to experiment even when this is not how it will eventually look like. You can almost forget giving homework in the age of ChatGPT. So if pupils are going to use AI anyway, help them to use AI in a way that helps them learn.
If you don't they will use AI just to cheat. The outside school use is outside your control, but inside school you can show them how to use AI to learn at their own pace. You have a stupid question? The AI explains it. Again. And Again. And you don't grasp the basic concept in t
Re: (Score:2)
And do you already know how to teach people who have a device in their pocket that helps them to get the answer without even reading the assignment? You take a photo and ask chatgpt for the solution and in case of schoolwork you can be sure it is 100% right. Update the teaching concepts now or be cheated.
Re: This is good to see (Score:2)
I learned maths by methods used in the olden days, 1965-1985. Algebra, quadratic equations, matrices, probability, functions & relations, calculus haven't changed. Somehow I learned it, supposedly even with ancient pedagogy. Is there really a new or better way to teach it? IMHO, you learn by doing. So once you know the concepts, practice and repetition is
Re: (Score:2)
There are a few points to improve teaching with AI, but they still have rough edges and there is no silver bullet yet. But the important point is: We need to acknowledge pupils and students WILL use AI. And while AI can be a great teacher, it can be even greater to not only produce the correct result without doing math, but a complete solution including a plausible way to the solution, without thinking about the problem at all.
Of course you can try to punish students, force them to solve the problems under
Re: (Score:2)
I think the core of the problem is the motivation part. Kids are wondering why they should bother learning anything, given AI, and the state of the job market. You're not learning skills that are in demand. You don't even know what skills are needed, or where the demand is.
Re: (Score:2)
I think we're touching many points here:
- How to teach
- How to teach thinking
- How to motivate
- How to improve teaching/learning with AI
- Will careers change? Will they change after one has finished half of the education toward a dying job?
Teaching has the new challenge of way easier cheating.
I usually do not agree on the "But now it's faster to do bad things" talking points.
I see more the point that you can now not just copy results but also the complete thinking around them. ChatGPT accepts photos, you ca
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think I need to start with some clarification: I am absolutely against relying on cloud services. OpenAI provides a limited paid and ToS restricted API for their model and a even more moderated application (ChatGPT) and both are subject to change at any time. The usual privacy problems of cloud services apply as well.
So when I am talking about using LLM for something, I am either talking about independently hosted models or the abstract concept, not about trusting the next silicon valley giant. I think we
Re: (Score:2)
So, "the box", is a shell game, there is always games within games. That is not really new in humanity, but it's amplified by the pseudo monopolies of the Digital Giants. I'm just saying to you, that the factors like surveillance and the ability to pump uniform propaganda out to everyone, is the limiting factor. All the best intentions in the world, die as soon as you realize you're never going to have a fair system. The Big Tech Co's pretty much own you, us,
Re: (Score:2)
Math hasn't changed. So why do we need new ways to teach it?
Well, math actually has changed. There are countless advancements. We proved Fermat's Last Theorem for example. But even ignoring the new content, we have improved ways of teaching kids as a result of decades of more experience.
But that's still small potatoes, the big change is what knowledge will be useful. We still have history classes that spend most of their time getting kids to memorize important names and dates in history. Is that really a good use of time? I looked up a middle school test question an
Re: (Score:2)
To put it another way: No-one is going to hire a "prompt engineer" when they can simply do themselves and save the costs of dealing with an unpaid intern / entry level employee. That's just basic economics. Sorry, but if you want to make enough money to live on you're not going to be fully dependent on a machine handing out answers for you. Get used to it.
Re: (Score:2)
How do you take the phone away for homework? You don't have the absolute control to prevent the use of such tools. Neither you have the moral authority, pupils will have the idea that it isn't that wrong to use it (they can still learn later, can't they ...) and circumvent measures to prevent them from doing so.
Anyone wanting to secure systems against students has a lot of work to do. They are fighting against a group with a lot of motivation, a lot of free time on hand that collaborates on their goal and s
SRA Cards: 1960's Self-Directed Learning (Score:3)
Reminds me a bit of the instruction a Canadian co-worker described he received back in the 1960's at a school in a remote area. After successfully completing their self-paced, self-directed learning assignments (e.g., SRA Cards: A History of Programmed Instruction and Personalization [hackeducation.com]), kids were free to leave the school building on their own and play hockey at a nearby pond or explore the surrounding area with classmates.
Public School is not about advanced learning... (Score:2)
I sent my kids to public school so they would have to learn how to socialize. Growing past the typical societal road blocks by seeing and recognizing them, under our parental guidance, was our modus operandi. IM(not so)HO: Public school is a minimal baseline of education, it is a parents job to push kids above that baseline.
Will these AI tools make growing above a base-line education better? Dunno, depends heavily on the LLM training criteria - the current slop engagement training criteria of public facing
$40k a year and no open enrollment is there? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The textbooks you give to students matters, whether they are self-directed or not. You can't wring blood out of a stone and all that (*)
(*) AIs will happily tell you it's possible and show you pictures.
An odd mix... (Score:2)
Of sinister sounding dystopian stuff and naive optimisim.
I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this.
I suppose he will be giving '110%' all the while? Will be interesting to see someone give up sleep, food, bathroom, and everything else for 20 years.
your child's teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines.
And this is supposed to ingratiate the concept with the audience?
Suppose that surveillance architecture
Again, "surveillance architecture" is a pitch for some education we are supposed to want?
Suppose your child's deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires.
Seems like the fallacy that if everyone just had a billion dollars, everyone would live like billionaires do today...
Charter School Grift (Score:2)
100% - this is about stealing public funds for (Score:2)
private pockets. It's the same as private prisons.
Re: (Score:3)
"And yet NYC charters cost less per student
What does that mean? Do they receive less per pupil from the city?
are EXTREMELY popular among minorities
Which simply confirms that they aren't actually educating the same population as public schools.
“the vast majority of students in charters are Black and Latino”
Only 15% of the students in New York public schools are white. The only way a charter school would not have a vast majority of students of color would be if it deliberately discriminated against them.
Re: (Score:3)
Most NYC charters teach to essentially the exact same demographics as their public school counterparts, without selective admissions
Students are randomly assigned to the charter schools? The answer is no. Its the same misleading bs that is being used to strip profitable students out of the public schools system.
Since the demographics are identical what is the significance of this quoted this above
- “the vast majority of students in charters are Black and Latino”
Significantly less, as is common throughout the country. In NYC, as of 2024-2025 it’s around 19k per student this year of city money per year going to charters - in comparison to about 40k spent in public schools.
You are comparing apples and oranges. But the real issue is different. How much is that charter school saving the public school system compared to the money it is receiving.
My favorite charter school story is Duluth MN where the school boar
Re: (Score:2)
most (all?) of NYC’s Success Academies are lottery based and required to admit any student, just like a public school.
A lottery among applicants is not the same as randomly assigning students. You know the difference. Parents have to choose for their children to attend a charter school. So charter schools market themselves to get a select group of students whose parents respond to their marketing pitch.
You asked me to compare charter to public costs. I did
No, I didn't. I asked whether they were getting the same amount per pupil and you answered with the total cost for one and the per pupil allocation for the other. If you looked at only the spending tied to the number of stud
If you're a kid from a poor family (Score:3)
Or live in a poor school district, you ain't gonna be gettin no $1000 tablet
Re: (Score:3)
Neither you will be in a school that costs 40k.
Welcome my son (Score:2)
Welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It's all right, we told you what to dream
Slow clap (Score:3)
(Addressing the author of the article here, not that I'm under any illusion that they're reading this.)
Kudos for the rhetorical trick of framing opposition to your plan as stubbornness or unreasonableness on the part of the questioner. It's clever, but it's kind of a shame that that's not how burden of proof works. It's not up to us to prove your way is wrong, it's up to you to prove that your way is better than what we already have.
You give us a full paragraph of rosy-sounding suppositions. Yeah, if they're all true this method sounds wonderful. IF. Are they? Suppose you give us some evidence to support them? Frankly, the whole thing sounds like a mash-up of The Diamond Age and 1984. I don't think either book describes a society I'd like to live in.
Finally, I know it's just the name of the magazine in which the article is published, but having just re-watched a certain 1970 movie I have a deep distrust of any AI project even tangentially associated with that name.
Re: (Score:2)
Frankly, the whole thing sounds like a mash-up of The Diamond Age and 1984. I don't think either book describes a society I'd like to live in.
What could possibly go wrong?
AI? (Score:2)
This has been going on a while, longer than the current AI push, so since the claim is some radical new approach to learning, by the AI name-dropping. It stinks of a con.
Yep I would love for my kids (Score:2)
To become part of the Borg, in essence. What makes you think a kid that is devoid of human interaction will be able to connect with people in the work place?
I do know one thing, if I invested 1billlion I would definitely talk up my product whether it worked or not it is good for society or individuals.
Another thing is imagine what this tech could do if people actually bought into it, full control of your kids by elites, and the equivalent of a social nuclear bomb. It would be like social media 100x.
No way
Could be a partial answer for education (Score:2)
Of course, if you are able to shrink the field of students to those whose parents can pay $50k for tuition, you'll immediately reduce the risk of bad academic results. So take the academic outcomes with a grain of salt... However, this could absolutely give us a path to a sustainable public education future that solves some of the biggest problems facing us. Just from the segment on their website, I got a few things:
The adults in the rooms aren't teachers and aren't allowed to teach. Almost every K-12 e
Gaslighting and Narrative Matching (Score:3)
The problem with these debates is people don't say, oh look these people are doing well, let's replicate this to other schools. Instead you have people who just either gaslight saying that this all isn't really happening, or try to come up with some confabulated narrative that promotes the status quo like they're all going to be psychopaths.
See educational robots in Voyage from Yesteryear (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"The story opens early in the 21st century, as an automated space probe is being prepared for a mission to explore habitable exoplanets in the Alpha Centauri system. However, Earth appears destined for a global war which the probe designers fear that humanity may not survive. It appears that the only chance for the human species is to reestablish itself far away from the conflict but there is no time left for a crewed expedition to escape Earth. The team, led by Henry B. Con
If there is one place to be conservative.... (Score:2)
If there is one place to be conservative, it should be education. Okay, and nuclear weapons. And firearms. Education, nuclear weapons, and firearms....
OK, back to seriousness, we should be careful with education. We've seen some bad results following the trend of the decade and rolling it out to schools. How about we do more empirical studies. Try the new ideas out for a bit (On your kids, not mine.), before rolling them out nationwide. Common Core hasn't done well in my local school system. They used it as
This asshole Joe Liemandt.... (Score:2)
Made his money buying up software companies and startups, laying off the programmers, and out-sourcing the work to India, China, and elsewhere as $15/hr contractors. "The world is going to a cloud wage." Fuck that guy. You think H1-Bs are evil? This is the shit that is truly fucking over the American tech worker. Tech companies have been driving down the percentage of income devoted to salaries for the last 30 years. This guy recognized the trend and infused it with steroids.
Re: This asshole Joe Liemandt.... (Score:3)
WTF? Are you of the opinion that software companies exist offer good-paying jobs to programmers? If a programmer in the U.S. can be replaced by one (or more) cheaper programmers, lowering the cost of producing the software, I think the programmers that were displaced either were over-paid or under-skilled.
I'm sorry for your situation, but perhaps, dear Brutus, the fault lies not in the stars but in thineself? Just a thought...
Re: (Score:2)
If a programmer in the U.S. can be replaced by one (or more) cheaper programmers, lowering the cost of producing the software, I think the programmers that were displaced either were over-paid or under-skilled.
Well, for one, I'm not a programmer. Was in a former life, but decided I preferred IT. Furthermore, I've never been replaced by an outsourcing company, but I have seen the results. If you think it is economically viable to pay workers based upon another geographical location's economy, then you need to repeat ECON101. I think you need to spend some more time thinking about and researching the issue.
My issue is with our society's constant drive to the bottom, while sharing less and less of the fruits of the
Dehumanizing Way to Try to Learn (Score:2)
Imagine how much better they could be... (Score:2)
Imagine how much better the students could be if they had a Union Teacher, with her official state teaching certificate and an undergraduate degree in, uhm, teaching!
It would be fantastic! In fact, I fully expect the teachers union to demand all K-12 public schools adopt this autonomous self-guided instruction - of course, with certified Union teachers and teachers sides in the classroom... /smh
It kinda does make sense (Score:2)
I'm not exactly one to sing the praises of AI, and I'm quick to feed it some pretty scathing insults when it clearly makes up nonsense. BUT. One thing in our household that quickly became apparent is the time our kids spend in school is not at all productive. The reality of how far we've (USA) fallen down the ranks when tested against our peers is undeniable. We pulled our kids out of the public school system and educate them at home. We picked a curriculum that is still tied to the cadence and standards of
Key is rich kids go to K-12 private schools (Score:2)
Can AI simulate school shootings? (Score:2)
Will this new kind of school be prone to lunatics running around shooting the students?
which principle? This one is easy (Score:2)
Since when is 'minting billionaires' any kind of goal for anything? Why is that even remotely close to the top of a list of benefits for any change in education? Do these people really not understand that being a billionaire is utterly valueless? By definition, if being a billionaire has value, it implies that the vast majority are not billionaires. If there are lots of billionaires, then all you have is inflation. What we need are technical advancements that reduce/eliminate inequality, not to continu
Competition (Score:2)
So what are the reasons for getting educated? Social, financial? Sure, some like to quote Shakespeare as it makes us sound smart but, we need to be competitive to get a job.
This just sounds like the 'Computers will make our lives easier and give us lots of free time' argument. That didn't happen. We all just do more.
So to compete with others we will just have to learn more. Kids will likely be spending the same amount of time being educated. They might just know more at the end.
been there (Score:2)
I read the Collosus article ( ok, most of it) and Alpha school is way cool, but it's not the AI that makes it work so well. It's the guides and leadership.
This sort of school has popped up from time to time with amazing successes for all kinds of students even before AI. Their models vary (all were better than standard public schools), but what they all had in common were charismatic leadership and staff. I taught at one, designed for kids with specific learning disabilities, for a year back in the 1990's.
Re: (Score:2)
I strongly disagree. I just finished a degree after a 20 year gap. Half of the classes were online only and almost all the learning was done via reading a book or engaging with a platform. My tech classes and a Math class was entirely done with a platform and the teacher didn't really have to do much of anything. More like a proctor. Sociology (DEI requirement for California) did have a recorded lecture but by and large, you read the book, you take the tests and you finish a capstone project but all of it i
Re: (Score:2)
""...but it would work equally well ..."
That's not an endorsement.
Re:Your next generation of [humanbots] (Score:3)
Interesting seed of conversation for FP, but I disagree with your premise. Any evidence why this approach will produce psychopaths? Or care to explain the attempted joke that didn't work?
I think the larger risk is that they will become mentally crippled. People are too ready to learn to think like machines and these kids will mostly learn to ask questions that the machines are good at answering. Unfortunately, those are the same kinds of questions that are easily tested, thereby producing test results that
Re: (Score:2)
All of the people going into AI-induced psychosis, perhaps?
Re: (Score:3)
There's a lot of fuzzy use of "psychopath" and "sociopath". My own feelings remains mixed. I think psychology and even psychiatry are fuzzy fields with lots of shysters, but the applied psychologists have made great progress in learning how to manipulate people into buying soap, widgets, and political shysters.
So now I'm curious about the "psychological justification" for this new school... Even Montessori can produce problems. You know the most famous alumni?
Re: (Score:2)
Even Montessori can produce problems. You know the most famous alumni?
Is this a rhetorical question, or is there a famous Montessori graduate we should know about?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you could try websearch?
Re: (Score:2)
By banning guns, or ideas?
Re: (Score:2)
Or are you trying to reference one of the rare cases of a right winger actually getting shot instead of doing the shooting?