Technology

"Though it’s also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated… can we not, please?"

Trump and Republicans would like nothing more than to turn this country into another Russia where your kids have to pay through the nose go abroad to get a decent education.

only the wealthy kids will be well-educated

You could argue we’re already way too far down this road. Quality of education is very dependent on location. Some of it is rich districts but also richer states. Whatever level of granularity you want, there’s always sone more willing or more able to spend money on better educating their children.

For all its faults, Department of Education was at least trying to set minimum standards for those areas unwilling to invest in a good education system and minimum investments for those unable. We desperately needed to raise this bar, not remove it

I wouldn't call it unpopular because how the education system works in America and several other countries has been a very obvious problem for decades. What we should be teaching is more barometer question

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question

The student admitted that he knew the expected “conventional” answer, but was fed up with the professor's "teaching him how to think ... rather than teaching him the structure of the subject.

Man, I am 38. When I was in highschool I was in an alternative curriculum Math program called IMP, and it is/was literally what your talking about.

Instead of memorizing equations we were instead given a hypothetical situation and learned to solve it socratically both through conversations as a class with the teacher, and in small groups to try and figure out how to solve it. It made me love math so much I almost made it my life, it was literally everything I needed as a severely ADHD teen. Everything was a puzzle to be solved, and when you solved it you gained not just knowledge, but the perspective to know where the knowledge applies.

Came here to say that. If AI has the leeway to affect things in a negative way, then we're not focusing on the right things to begin with. If kids are graded sometimes for the amount of (not necessarily coherent and sound) text they're able to spit out, this is what you get.

The corrupt cheapskates trying to nickel and dime every ISD in the country to bankruptcy absolutely fell over one another at the opportunity to fire staff and replace them with Clippy.

Twenty years ago, state officials were all fawning over the idea of turning every university in the country into a pile subscription based Udemy online courses. Ten years ago, letting Pearson hijack the lesson plan of every classroom in the country was the dream. This has been a long time coming.

Well, here's how you figure that out - think about it with your brain. Should children and young adults be given materials and assignments that require them to use thinking and develop their brains, or should they be given machines to do their thinking for them so that it's easier to complete schoolwork?

One route develops valuable brain skills that can be useful for life, and the other teaches dependency on fancy machines to accomplish the same.

In my former school district they paid a ton to some consultancy firm to "use AI to optimize the bus route". The first day of testing the new route many kids didn't get home until after 9pm. They cancelled school for the rest of the week and then immediately reverted to the old route.

What teachers?

I regularly advocate for banning phones from schools but people here in Lemmy (same on Reddit years ago) completely lose their shit with that idea, start talking how that'll leave them defenseless in an emergency, how it is torture, how they absolutely can't live without them

Not thirty years ago nobody had cellphones in school, they barely existed, and everything was fine, everyone was fine without and with cellphones I see so much shit going on. Yes, it's the Future, kids need cellphones, but they also need to learn to be without cellphone, and they need to learn responsible use.

Ngl. I bought a signal jammer for my wife to use in her classroom (after all, it said “for educational purposes only”) and the kids could never figure out why the signal sucked so bad in her classroom during class times. She never got caught using it and never had to worry about them being on their phones.

If there was an emergency, people would just call the front office and they could always reach her on the land line in the classroom.

This could be complete bullshit because im not an expert but i sometimes think that we could have a future where without testing and nurturing peoples critical thinking skills we end up with people who dont know how to create a rational argument or assess information they are given for its accuracy and authenticity, or to know when they are being deceived by malicious actors.

English writing assignments as simple as a book report require you to take different views and angles on something to understand it better and the nuances of the whole, but tell a LLM to write it for you and you are not developing that part of your own mind where you may learn to do things like see the whole story above the individual events noise, see things from others perspective/feelings and understand alternate world views. These are critical for having empathy for others and understanding the world around you.
And that is just one small example i came up with.

Lmao. I'm guessing you don't work in any of those fields. Got some bad news for ya bud. It's been that way for decades. Probably centuries.

For anyone who is also not from the US:

A blue book exam is a type of test administered at many post-secondary schools in the United States. Blue book exams typically include one or more essays or short-answer questions. Sometimes the instructor will provide students with a list of possible essay topics prior to the test itself and will then choose one or let the student choose from two or more topics that appear on the test.

EDIT, as an extra to solve the mystery:

Butler University in Indianapolis was the first to introduce exam blue books, which first appeared in the late 1920s.[1] They were given a blue color because Butler's school colors are blue and white; therefore they were named "blue books".