[mattlutze]

Technology is a tool to expand the possible ways to educate, but isn't necessary for education to happen.

i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks.

Education itself isn't primarily a technology problem. Treating it as such is an administrative failure, as is pursuing a technological solution in many scenarios that are first social in nature.

[groby_b]

> i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks.

And we've been doing a pretty crappy job educating people without written texts. The written word led to a tremendous acceleration of knowledge transmission. The printing press enabled that transmission at a larger, but unified, scale.

Anything we even remotely recognize as science has only ever been practiced by literate cultures.

Discarding technology for education because it's not a panacea is an absolute failure as educator.

[squigz]

> i.e. we've been educating people for 1,000s of years even without textbooks.

By using the tools available at the time we did, certainly. That involves physical tools like writing, but also non-physical tools like better ways of conveying and disseminating information, better ways of testing the efficacy of various approaches, etc, etc.

Education has to evolve, as it always has. While I'm not sure TFA is it, I do think LLMs will have a role to play in making learning more accessible and enjoyable for everyone, not just kids.

[lo_zamoyski]

FWIW, I find the classic texts of certain fields much more intelligible than the intellectually shoddy 56th iteration of some overpriced glossy Pearson textbook. Compare a typical chemistry textbook with something like Pauling's "General Chemistry" which you can get from Dover, modulo any dated information. You will walk away with a far more solid grasp of the basic principles.

A lot of the failure of learning is a failure of teaching. Incompetent teachers throw disconnected information at you instead of trying to explain or lead you to an understanding of what something is about. I attribute part of this to a loss of solid philosophical coursework where you are taught to think from first principles, taught within a larger integral context, and taught to reason clearly. It used to be the case that everyone with a college degree had at least some basic philosophy under their belts (compare a Heisenberg to a Feynman to a Krauss; the progression is clear). And don't forget the success of the trivium and quadrivium or some variation of them that was often presupposed and prepared students for intellectual work.

[squigz]

I don't disagree with anything you're saying, really; education has been broken by things like too strong an emphasis on test scores, credentials, etc. This not only produces students who don't know how to learn properly, but those students then go on to become teachers who can't learn how to teach properly.

That said, teaching is hard. I don't fully blame teachers who cannot effectively convey subjects to 30 kids, especially these days. Even in an ideal situation, there's so much variance in how people learn best, that it would be hard to blame it on incompetence if a teacher cannot reach every one of their students.

Considering how hard it's going to be to fix the bigger problems with society* - obsession with credentials, lack of funding, better paying, less stressful jobs means less teachers, etc, etc - shouldn't we embrace tools that help kids learn things in a more accessible way to them? As I said, I don't think TFA is it, and we should obviously be aware of the issues, but surely people on HN of all places can see the value in tailoring subjects and lessons to a student's preferred method of learning?

* This is not to say we shouldn't also try to solve those problems

[mattlutze]

> By using the tools available at the time we did, certainly.

Yes, tools which help. But the point is that education occurs with any collection of tools, or even the simplest of all, if we want to go so broad as to call speech technology.

Technology is an augmenter of education, but not the fundamental problem of education.

> I do think

I'm not sure whether they should have a role, or what that roll should be, as such a feeling would be moralizing to some degree. But I agree that we will _make_ LLMs have a role, because the capitalism that drives our societies wants them to have a role.

[SgtBastard]

Nitpick: Language is technology, it’s not something we’re genetically born with and is critical for education to happen.