Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by werdnapk 146 days ago
From the summary of video:

"40% of fourth graders can't read. Kids are asking their teachers why they need to learn to read when AI can do it for them. Social media has destroyed their attention spans and now teachers aren't teaching, instead they're managing withdrawal symptoms."

Why are fourth graders on social media and using AI already? My fourth grade kid has no social media presence and definitely isn't familiar with AI tools. This sounds like a parent problem.

6 comments

Some kids (parents, really) are beyond helping. They drag everyone in the classroom down and there's nothing a teacher can do about it. The kids are ruined because their parents ruined them. These kids need to be held back, separated, and/or expelled to give the rest of them a chance at a real education. This will require a change to incentives and laws, the first step of which is this growing awareness and dread of the situation.
This is one of the biggest issues. We allow children who do not want to and will not learn to destroy the education of those who do. We used to understand this and expel the disruptive students to allow the good students to actually learn.
Not all parents on this planet are investing in their offspring. Some parents also miss the required knowledge. Getting the required knowledge could be a society problem.
This is incredibly true, and has been a growing problem from before LLMs came around. Even wealthy families who presumably have plenty of resources they could use to better their children's fates are failing their kids. My sister is a teacher in a well-off school district and has to buy food out of her own pocket (on a teacher's salary) to give to her students because so many haven't even had anything to eat before they show up.

I mean, these are bare minimum things, people.

A lot of people want to have kids but don't want to be parents. There are a lot of kids who spend hours on tablets watching TikTok and so on before they even reached first grade.
Couple of years ago I was taking the tram home, and there was a toddler in a stroller. The toddler was young enough she couldn't speak properly. She got frustrated about something and started crying.

Without hesitation the parent whipped up the iPhone and handed it to her. The kid navigated the menu with ease, launched a game and started playing. After about 15 seconds, she exited the game, navigated a few pages with purpose to another game and ended up playing that instead.

Meanwhile I was standing there gobsmacked...

As part of the "in-between" generation which skipped lead poisoning and the extreme social media/smartphone dependency, I kinda feel worried.
How do they expect to understand what the AI is doing if they can’t read the output? Seems like critical thinking skills are also not entirely there.
No need to read text, AI can talk in a voice of your choosing.
The very last clip in the video says that it is kids in affluent families taking that direction.
Shocked to hear that some children are on social media in grade 4!