US Teachers' Union Urges Schools To Curb AI Chatbots and Screen Time (axios.com) 44
Axios reports:
The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers' union in the U.S., released a 10-point plan to introduce AI and screen-time guardrails in classrooms. The plan would limit AI use and ban screens for students in prekindergarten through second grade "unless there is a compelling reason," such as supporting students with special needs.
The teacher union's president Randi Weingarten warned that young students "are drowning in tech," according to the New York Times, which reports the union president also "called on schools on Wednesday to stop giving digital devices like iPads to children in prekindergarten through second grade." In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, Weingarten also urged elementary schools to avoid using artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Khan Academy's Khanmigo with children [and] called for new national privacy and safety standards for A.I. tools in all schools... "The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without A.I."
The union's effort reflects a backlash among parents and educators against heavy use of school-issued laptops and apps. Some parents and nonprofit children's groups are also pushing back against campaigns by tech giants like Google and OpenAI to spread their A.I. products in schools... Weingarten said that the union was negotiating safety and privacy standards for A.I. use in schools with "our partners in the A.I. academy," and that Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic had agreed in principle to those standards.
Weingarten "laid out a plan for reorienting public schooling toward human abilities and student well-being," according to the article, calling it "a devices down, eyes up, hands-on strategy."
And meanwhile school cellphone bans are expanding into broader efforts to establish guardrails around AI in education and limit screen use, reports Axios. "At least 16 states — both red and blue — have introduced bills to limit classroom technology." Schools Beyond Screens formed with fewer than a dozen parents in Los Angeles Unified School District last year, but the nonprofit has grown to include thousands of parents and educators nationwide, SBS policy director Kate Brody tells Axios... McPherson Middle School principal Inge Esping told Axios that the suspension rate at her Kansas school fell 70% after cellphones were banned in 2022. Students also started speaking more with one another and with teachers.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.
The teacher union's president Randi Weingarten warned that young students "are drowning in tech," according to the New York Times, which reports the union president also "called on schools on Wednesday to stop giving digital devices like iPads to children in prekindergarten through second grade." In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, Weingarten also urged elementary schools to avoid using artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Khan Academy's Khanmigo with children [and] called for new national privacy and safety standards for A.I. tools in all schools... "The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without A.I."
The union's effort reflects a backlash among parents and educators against heavy use of school-issued laptops and apps. Some parents and nonprofit children's groups are also pushing back against campaigns by tech giants like Google and OpenAI to spread their A.I. products in schools... Weingarten said that the union was negotiating safety and privacy standards for A.I. use in schools with "our partners in the A.I. academy," and that Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic had agreed in principle to those standards.
Weingarten "laid out a plan for reorienting public schooling toward human abilities and student well-being," according to the article, calling it "a devices down, eyes up, hands-on strategy."
And meanwhile school cellphone bans are expanding into broader efforts to establish guardrails around AI in education and limit screen use, reports Axios. "At least 16 states — both red and blue — have introduced bills to limit classroom technology." Schools Beyond Screens formed with fewer than a dozen parents in Los Angeles Unified School District last year, but the nonprofit has grown to include thousands of parents and educators nationwide, SBS policy director Kate Brody tells Axios... McPherson Middle School principal Inge Esping told Axios that the suspension rate at her Kansas school fell 70% after cellphones were banned in 2022. Students also started speaking more with one another and with teachers.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.
Fuck AI and fuck Ads (Score:2)
I'll tolerate the mongoloidDB bullshit, but fucked if I'm going to sit silently and look at an ad for Gemini on a website where a majority think that LLMs, as they are currently being foisted, are pure cancer.
uBlock Origin
Tampermonkey
Do it.
Re: (Score:2)
This comments looks like it was written by an AI. It is one long line with a single period, is not quite a full understandable sentence, and has 3 lines after the main part of text that is not connected to anything.
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I guess my writing style has been tapped by LLM training models more than I thought. Hush now you filthy NPC.
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This comments looks like it was written by an AI. It is one long line with a single period, is not quite a full understandable sentence, and has 3 lines after the main part of text that is not connected to anything.
Nope, human. My experience has been that LLMs write better than that. Much better. And LLMs tend not to add gratuitous curses and mockery-inspired names for things.
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I can only assume MongoDB is kicking a bit to /. to keep the lights on.
Sorry to tell you, LLMs/AI (their stuff) anything is (as far as they are concerned, are), in fact, cancer.
You're not going to get away from it, it's going to work it's way into your life... you toaster and fridge will need replacing someday, what do you think you'll find?
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Funny you mention. It always pissed me off that toasters often cook one side of the toast more than the other. The last one I bought (a cheap piece of crap from a big box store) did the same thing. So I gutted it, threw an ATmega16 with some power handling electronics at it, and I can now individually over/undercook each of the 4 bays of toast as I see fit. Oh, and I can toggle presets because my children are cowards who like warm bread as opposed to delicious charcoal. Just like I did with my last toaster.
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Or... a new compressor (not fun to sweat-solder and refill it) and a new temp sensor... and the fridge works again (maybe a new lightbulb and door switch)!
Do you really need WiFi and an app on your normal fridge or washer/dryer... last I checked, I can get up and check the laundry, and I can tell if the fridge is working fine by listening for the compressor and seeing if stuff is cold... y'know, common sense.
Sure, there's tech ways to disable the AI crap... or, you can just get an older/used washer/dryer or
You can bet (Score:4, Insightful)
That big tech will send the lobbying hounds after this one, how else will the indoctrinate kids at an early age? This is billions in revenue we are talking about.
Re: You can bet (Score:1)
I remember being a kid in the 90s and watching scare stories on the TV about other kids in the 90s who were so addicted to the computers they were writing software and making their own websites! As kids!
I wasn't one of those kids. I didn't LearnToCode until college. But I was good friends with one of those kids while in college. He's worth at least 10 or 20 times more than me now.
And the other millenial parents on my street are grabbing up spots at after school coding classes for their elementary school age
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But 1st and 2nd grades???
Sorry, but that sounds like a REALLY bad idea. More than half of what those grades should be about is learning to operate well in groups.
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But 1st and 2nd grades???
Sorry, but that sounds like a REALLY bad idea. More than half of what those grades should be about is learning to operate well in groups.
We never had regular "coding" classes when I was at school in the 1980s. But I do remember a hip young substitute teacher who taught us some Logo on a BBC32 one afternoon. The class drew pretty pictures, learned some simple geometry and learned that once you have written a subroutine into a computer you can reuse it over and over. It was a very powerful lesson.
A couple of years later our class got a couple on BBC32s right in our classroom. We spent most lunch breaks laboriously typing in games in Basic out
Re: You can bet (Score:4, Insightful)
But I was good friends with one of those kids while in college. He's worth at least 10 or 20 times more than me now.
My group of friends would futz around with computers quite a bit back in the late 90s. I still mostly keep in touch with all of them to varying degrees. One joined the military, was honorably discharged due to an injury, and now drives a long-haul truck. Another started as a low-paid IT support jockey and never really settled into anything you could call a career. The friend I keep in closest contact with, works a senior support position with a software company (not one of the major industry players, though) and makes somewhere around $100k/yr. Granted, that's a decent-ish living, but that kind of money doesn't go as far these days as it used to. I went into HVAC, which everybody and their brother seems to be doing in Florida, so there's a huge race to the bottom in this trade.
Success is a fuckin' crapshoot when you don't have wealthy parents.
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I remember being a kid in the 90s and watching scare stories on the TV about other kids in the 90s who were so addicted to the computers they were writing software and making their own websites! As kids!
Since at least the 1960s, there has been an interest in teaching children to program. Consider, for example, the Logo Programming Language. [wikipedia.org] Yeah, a school district would have needed a PDP-1 to run it, but the point is that people were thinking of teaching kids to code even back then.
Unless your kid is significantly smarter than your average bear, coding won't stick until high school at the earliest.
There's no harm in starting early. We often start teaching children how to play musical instruments from an early age. Who knows where the next coding-version of Mozart might be, unless you give him/herself a chance to be reveal
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Ditto, here!
I designed my website in Frontpage and edited it in Notepad to add Javascript and stuff, hosted it off a dumpster-dive computer (200MHz Packard Bell) that worked.
In the 90's, I was watching Alien and Aliens at like 6-7 years old, stuff like that.
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Re: You can bet (Score:2)
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The teachers are being told to use tech as much as possible. Research shows that this is bad for students.
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Twenty years, you say?
We didn't have smartphones yet...
I distinctly remember owning one of these [wikipedia.org] about 20 years ago. Granted, back then smartphones were for business users and tech enthusiasts, they really hadn't caught on with the normies yet.
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I distinctly remember owning one of these [wikipedia.org] about 20 years ago. Granted, back then smartphones were for business users and tech enthusiasts, they really hadn't caught on with the normies yet.
That thing is cool! I'm looking at a modern DIY equivalent right now: https://github.com/amarullz/pi... [github.com]
Re:You can bet (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not so cynical as that. I think the teachers (and their union) don't want AI as a dominant source of information in the classroom until later, when it's more age-appropriate. Until then, students need to follow lessons to develop basic reading, arithmetic, science, music, art, phys ed, and socialization. AI can become a tool for research later on, but until then it can be a distraction in the classroom.
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There's no need to indoctrinate those who may have no jobs or disposable income in the future.
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Oh yeah there is, you can't serve them up ads if they don't subscribe to your service. FB makes ~70$ per user per year (in the US, Europe its ~20$) via ads, the more users, the more revenue.
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You can serve up ads to anyone. No need for extensive brainwashing. People already put up with that shit.
Re:Are teachers really needed with AI? (Score:4, Insightful)
Teachers are absolutely really needed.
When you grow up, you don't remember the specific questions and answers that were on your final exams. But you DO remember and appreciate the teachers who were people of character, who poured their lives into the students they taught. This should tell us something about what part of a teacher's job is actually important. AI can't replace that.
AI might have a place too. But just as with programming, AI augments, but doesn't replace excellent professionals.
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But you DO remember and appreciate the teachers who were people of character, who poured their lives into the students they taught.
*laughs in public school*
What I do remember most was one of my teachers who clearly was phoning it in every day. He'd read the classifieds looking for motorcycle parts at his desk while the class was doing some boring assignment from the textbooks. Every once in awhile he'd complain about how miserable the pay was, and how if you didn't like his minimal-effort approach to learning, you were welcome to stand in the hall for the duration of the period.
Fun times.
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The *really* smart kids might find school trivially easy. But if they're actually smart, they realize that school isn't just about learning facts, it's about learning how to navigate life. Good teachers are everywhere, and unfortunately, many have to put up with ungrateful students and parents. They have a thankless job, they but they do it anyway. It certainly isn't for the money!
Re:Are teachers really needed with AI? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no doubt we all had one or two bad teachers, like the one you described. But they were the minority, and generally didn't last in the profession.
Almost all of the teachers I had enjoyed seeing the light of understanding turn on in their students' minds. I went on to do some teaching when I was in grad school and as a post-doc. I enjoyed seeing that light turn on also. It's very rewarding.
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Almost all of the teachers I had enjoyed seeing the light of understanding turn on in their students' minds.
This really depends on where you went to school. In the southern US, public school teachers that aren't jaded and/or burned out were (at least back when I was in school) the exception rather than the rule. I got the impression that they'd all rather be doing something else, but some of them were just better than others at putting their best game face on and facing the day.
I truly never did experience any teachers who were there for anything other than the meager paycheck. My middle school guidance counse
Re:Are teachers really needed with AI? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are bad teachers and lazy teachers, yes. I had some too. But very many, maybe even most (in public and private schools), do genuinely care about their students and do their best to educate them and help them grow up to be good citizens. Pay is not a great motivator for teachers, because pay is generally low. If they didn't love their work, there would be little reason to be there.
Re:Are teachers really needed with AI? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thinking starts with foundational knowledge taught in schools, expands to the generic principles (Eg. base-n counting) and comparative knowledge (Eg. Judaism/Christianity/Islam vs. Roman/Greek/Egyptian polytheism) that are usually taught in university. Schools are doing the job they were designed to do, 200 years ago. As machines got more complex, that changed a little but the basic knowledge of science and humanities didn't. The task of making self-centred children concentrate on boring facts, didn't. That's why teachers are needed. Plus, the good teachers, contrary to the rules, offer a little perspective born of real world experience.
Thinking, like a trade or a language, is an experience. It requires a toolkit and a need to answer the question "What don't I know?" That's very difficult to develop in children and protected-from-the-adult-world teens. Most people weren't factory workers because the Industrial Age needed factory workers: It was because, that was the skill level we could easily develop in teens. As technology moved from making machine parts to making data, schools have struggled to advance the average skill level, to turn industrial-age children into knowledge-age children. Most states in the USA are reducing the quality of education (Christianity in schools: See Texas and Oklahoma).
Then, appears a statistical engine that can find answers for us: No need for children to learn basic knowledge, or how to filter the drek of web-pages until a nugget of truth appears, or calculate an answer. Everyone can rejoice because the need for spending more on education, for making knowledge-age employees, has ended. The rich can build a machine instead.
The danger of dumb AI doesn't stop there. There's no need for employers to fight over the few employees who can learn and think as they work, for employers to spend money training recruits in their quirky business processes: A knowledge engine can be taught once and copied 100 times. Wages now become saleable assets and profits. The knowledge-age is turning back into the late industrial-age, where humans must feed the rapacious factories. But it's not shoveling sand or screwing-on nuts, now: It's writing questions that an AI can understand and obey.
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Teachers as they are today obsolete.
I can tell you have no teaching experience. The facts of the matter are that only something like 20% of all people can learn self-directed and with no human teacher. The rest can simply not focus on the material if it is not presented by a human with a clue. Yes, not 100% of all teaching for these people needs to be done by a human, mut the majority must be. Otherwise it simply does not work. Ad anybody doing teaching finds out.
Also, your arrogance and your disregard for others is showing rather strongly.
How about balance (Score:3, Insightful)
The unions don't want AI, not because AI is useless, but because they fear AI will replace teacher jobs. Is our goal the best possible education for children? Or is it preserving teacher jobs?
With that said, I don't see AI replacing teachers. As with programming, I think AI can augment what teachers do. For example, a properly trained AI could help students study at home, focusing on the areas where the student is weak. AI could act as a personalized tutor, for students who can't afford a human tutor. AI could help grade student tests or other time-consuming work that teachers struggle to get done. From experience, I can also say that AI can help teachers do their own preparation for teaching, helping them put together materials and presentations.
I don't think we should ban AI in schools, nor do I think we should think AI can replace teachers. As with most things in life, balance is key.
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The teachers don't want to eliminate AI. They just want it curtailed until after 2nd grade. I think the teachers have many of the same opinions you have about AI. They may just differ with you on timing.
And I think it's a false dichotomy to frame the issue as achieving optimal education vs. preserving teacher-jobs, pick only one. Arguably you can and should do both. Humans will always need to learn from other humans in order to function in human society. No doubt AI can help though.
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That's fair.
Sounds familiar (Score:2)
The same thing happened when people could use written logarithm tables instead of learning them by heart.
Or using a slide-ruler.
Then calculators came and the same complaints.
Ditto for Matlab.
Ditto for Visicalc. Wolfram Mathematica, Maple...
It's called PROGRESS, people!