[quacked]

Something that I think many students, indeed many people, struggle with is the question "why should I know anything?"

For most of us--myself included--once you graduate from college, the answer is: "enough to not get fired". This is far less than most curriculums ask you to know, and every year, "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar. With LLMs, it's practically on the floor for 90% of full-time jobs.

That is why I propose exactly the opposite regimen from this course, although I admire the writer's free thinking. Return to tradition, with a twist. Closed-book exams, no note sheets, all handwritten. Add a verbal examination, even though it massively increases examination time. No homework assignments, which encourage "completionist mindset", where the turning-in of the assignment feels more real than understanding the assignment. Publish problem sets thousands of problems large with worked-out-solutions to remove the incentive to cheat.

"Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity" -- paraphrase of an HN comment about a fondly remembered physics professor who made the students memorize every equation in the class. In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.

[themafia]

> once you graduate from college, the answer is: "enough to not get fired"

I thought the point was to continue in the same vein and contribute to the sum total of all human knowledge. I suppose this is why people criticize colleges as having lost their core principles and simply responded to market forces to produce the types of graduates that corporate America currently wants.

> "enough to not get fired" is a lower and lower bar.

Usually people get fired for their actions and not their knowledge or lack thereof. It may be that David Graebers core thesis was correct. Most jobs are actually "bullshit jobs," and in the era of the Internet, they don't actually require any formal education to perform.

[quacked]

I agree with both of your assertions. Most jobs are indeed bullshit jobs in the age of abundance, and while the "point" of knowledge and wisdom is, in a grander sense, to continue in the same vein and contribute to the sum total of all human knowledge (I prefer the slightly less abstract phrase "build and inhabit a greater civilization"), there's very little about the current education system or the economic modality of the modern West that incentivizes that goal.

[qsort]

> Closed-book exams, no note sheets, all handwritten. Add a verbal examination

You are describing how school worked for me (in Italy, but much of Europe is the same I think?) from middle school through university. The idea of graded homework has always struck me as incredibly weird.

> In the age of the LLM, I suspect this is triply true.

They do change what is worth learning though? I completely agree that "oh no the grades" is a ridiculous reaction, but adapting curricula is not an insane idea.

[SamuelAdams]

Something often left out is the dependence on LLM’s. Students today assume LLM’s will always be available, at a price they (or their companies) can afford.

What happens if LLM’s suddenly change their cost to be 1000 USD per user per month? What if it is 1000 USD per request? Will new students and new professionals still be able to complete their jobs?

[FloorEgg]

I swear teachers said something extremely similar about calculators when I was in grade school. "What are you going to do when you don't have access to a calculator? You won't ways have one with you!"

Calculators have never been more accessible/available. (And yet I personally still do most basic calculations in my head)

So I agree students should learn to do this stuff without LLMs, but not because the LLMs are going to get less accessible. There's another better reason I'm just not sure how to articulate it yet. Something to do with integrated information and how thinking works.

[SamuelAdams]

Calculators are widely available for a low cost. The logic behind most calculators is able to be consistently duplicated across a variety of manufacturers, thereby lowering the cost to produce these to the masses.

LLM’s are not consistent. For example, having a new company make a functional duplicate of ChatGPT is nearly impossible.

Furthermore, the cost of LLM’s can change at any time for any reason. Access can be changed by new government regulations, and private organizations can chose to suspend or revoke access to their LLM due to changes in local laws.

All of this makes dependence on an LLM a risk for any professionals. The only way these would be mitigated is by an open source, freely available LLM that creates consistent results that students can learn how to use.

[mrfumier]

The comparison with calculators overlooks several key developments.

LLMs are becoming increasingly efficient. Through techniques such as distillation, quantization, and optimized architectures, it is already possible to run capable models offline, including on personal computers and even smartphones. This trend reduces reliance on constant access to centralized providers and enables local, self-contained usage.

Rather than avoiding LLMs, the rational response is to build local, portable, and open alternatives in parallel. The natural trajectory of LLMs points toward smaller, more efficient, and locally executable models, mirroring the path that calculators themselves once followed.

[FloorEgg]

My intuition is that the costs involved to train and run LLMs will keep dropping. They will become more and more accessible, so long as our economies keep chugging along.

I could be wrong, time will tell. I just wouldn't base my argument for why students should learn to think for themselves on accessibility of LLMs. I think there's something far more fundamental and important, I just don't know how to say it yet.

[spikej]

Bang on! This is definitely coming and very few talk about it.

[dns_snek]

> Add a verbal examination, even though it massively increases examination time. No homework assignments, which encourage "completionist mindset"

To the horror of anyone struggling with anxiety, ADHD, or any other source of memory-recall issues under examination pressure. This further optimizes everything for students who can memorize and recall information on the spot under artificial pressure, and who don't suffer any from any of the problems I mentioned.

In grade school you could put me on the spot and I would blank on questions about subjects that I understood rather well and that I could answer 5 minutes before the exam and 5 minutes after the exam, but not during the exam. The best way for me to display my understanding and knowledge is through project assignments where that knowledge is put to practical use, or worked "homework" examples that you want to remove.

Do you have any ideas for accommodating people who process information differently and find it easier to demonstrate their knowledge and understanding in different ways?

[ecshafer]

Maybe those people just wont get as good of grades, and that's acceptable. It is strange that the educational system determined it wasn't acceptable. If I go to a university and try to walk onto the NCAA Division 1 Basketball team, its fine for them to tell me that I am too short, too slow, too weak, can't shoot, or my performance anxiety means I mess up every game and I am off the team. If I try and go for Art but my art is bad I am rejected. If I try and go for music but my performance anxiety messes up my performances, then I am rejected.

Why aught there be an exception for academics? Do you want your lawyer or surgeon to have performance anxiety? This seems like a perfectly acceptable thing to filter out on.

[dns_snek]

> Why aught there be an exception for academics?

I didn't ask for an "exception" in terms of knowledge, I pointed out a bias in favor of one specific type of assessment. I didn't do great on verbal exams but I could run circles around other people when it came to more hands-on assessments that required a deeper understanding of the material and applying it in practice.

A surgeon is a perfect example. Before you trust your life to someone, would you rather find out their grades on verbal assessments in med school or do you prefer to see their patient outcome statistics?

When hiring a software developer would you rather verbally quiz them on theoretical knowledge of SOLID and TDD or would you rather see their code and work history?

> Do you want your lawyer or surgeon to have performance anxiety? This seems like a perfectly acceptable thing to filter out on.

As a client you can do whatever you want, but that's not the goal of educational institutions. It's antithetical to their goals unless you subscribe to the cynical belief that schools only exist to produce easily replaceable, obedient, compliant workers.

[And reading your other comment, this indeed seems to be your view.]

[srdjanr]

Why would performance anxiety be disqualifying for knowledge workers?

[ecshafer]

Everything involves performing and actually proving what you know. If this is such an issue, then its something you need to fix. I have never actually met anyone who has this “perfomance anxiety” where they are so brilliant but do poorly on tests because of it. I think its a myth to attack rigor of academics. For knowledge workers everntually you have to go into court, or perform surgery, or do the taxes or give the presentation, or have the high pressure meeting. If anxiety is truly debilitating to the person all of these situations theyll be doomed so filter them out.

[TheOtherHobbes]

The question is no longer "How do we educate people?" but "What are work and competence even for?"

The culture has moved from competence to performance. Where universities used to be a gateway to a middle class life, now they're a source of debt. And social performances of all kind are far more valuable than the ability to work competently.

Competence used to be central, now it's more and more peripheral. AI mirrors and amplifies that.

[quacked]

I completely agree with you. Do you have any ideas about what might stem this tide on a grander scale? I live in the country and will homeschool my kids--I think the risk of under-socialization is worth the reward of competency-based education and the higher likelihood of my own principles taking hold--but I would vastly prefer to send them to a normal school with other kids, albeit one in a superior society to that which we currently inhabit.

[csa]

> Do you have any ideas about what might stem this tide on a grander scale?

The best way to move from the working class to the middle class these days is the military with a federal government job after retirement (even with what the current admin is doing). That said, a person doing this needs to realize that they will need to unlearn and learn a lot of social habits and learn some new ones.

The bonus is that higher ed will be free, and ambitious folks can ladder up into officer roles, which can be even more of a social climb.

> I think the risk of under-socialization is worth the reward of competency-based education and the higher likelihood of my own principles taking hold

I think you are very wrong on this point.

A highly-socialized person with the minimum viable amount of competency will go much farther in life than a highly-competent person with limited social skills.

If your kids are in a good school system, there will be a culture of competence in the students and their families.

> but I would vastly prefer to send them to a normal school with other kids, albeit one in a superior society to that which we currently inhabit

You just need to find the right pocket of people.

I personally recommend good Montessori schools over home schooling for K-8. It doesn’t work for everyone, but it works well when it’s a good fit. The community around the school is usually fairly healthy as well.

For 9-12, a high-quality private school, a magnet school, a combo high school / JC, or an independent study high school (often with home school “classes”) are all good options for curious and ambitious students, imho.

[mnky9800n]

I had an electrodynamics professor say that there was no reason to memorize the equations, you would never remember them anyways, the goal was to understand how the relationships were formed in the first place. Then you would understand what the relationships are that each equation represents. That I think is the basis for this statement. Memorization of the equations gives you a basis to understand the relationships. So I guess the hope is that is enough. I would argue it isn't enough since physics isn't really about math or equations its about the structure and dynamics of how systems evolve over time. And equations give one representation of the evolution of those systems. But it's not the only representation.

[6LLvveMx2koXfwn]

This is all very well if the goal was to sift the wheat from the chaff - but modern western education is about passing as many fee paying students as possible, preferably with a passably enjoyable experience for the institutional kudos.

[sersi]

I think that really depends on countries. I went to an engineering school only 15% of applicants out of high school were admitted and of those who were admitted only around 75% graduated.

Western education passing as many fee paying students as possible seems to be very much a UK/US phenomenon but doesn't seem to be the case of European countries where the best schools are public and fees are very low (In France, private engineering schools rank lower)

[josephg]

I wonder if education will bifurcate back out as a result of AI. Small, bespoke institutions which insist on knowledge and difficult tests. And degree factories. It seems like students want the degree factory experience with the prestige of an elite institution. But - obviously - that can’t last long. Colleges and universities should decide what they are and commit accordingly.

[graemep]

I think the UK has been heading this way for a while -- before AI. Its not been the size of the institutions that has changed, but the "elite" universities tend to give students more individual attention. A number of them (not just Oxford and Cambridge) have tutorial systems where a lot of learning is done in a small group (usually two or three students). They have always done this.

At the other extreme are universities offering low quality courses that are definitely degree factories. They tend to have a strong vocational focus but nonetheless they are not effective in improving employability. In the last few decades we have expanded the university system and there are far more of these.

There is no clear cutoff and a lot of variation in between so its not a bifurcation but the quality vs factory difference is there.

[Ekaros]

On other side in western systems funded by taxes the incentive is still to give out as many degrees as possible as schools get funding based on produced degrees.

Mostly done to get more degree holders which are seen as "more productive". Or at least higher paid...

[casualscience]

Honestly, I feel like I have to know more and more these days, as the ais have unlocked significantly more domains that I can impact. Everyone is contributing to every part of the stack in the tech world all of a sudden, and "I am not an expert on that piece of the system" no longer is a reasonable position.

This is in tech now, were the first adopters, but soon it will come to other fields.

To your broader question

> Something that I think many students, indeed many people, struggle with is the question "why should I know anything?"

You should know things because these AIs are wrong all the time, because if you want any control in your life you need to be able to make an educated guess at what is true and what isn't.

As to how to teach students. I think we're in an age of experimentation here. I like the idea of letting students use all tools available for the job. But I also agree that if you do give exams and hw, you better make them hand written/oral only.

Overall, I think education needs to focus more on building portfolios for students, and focus less giving them grades.

[monsieurbanana]

> and "I am not an expert on that piece of the system" no longer is a reasonable position

Gosh that sounds horrifying. I am not an expert on that piece of system, no I do not want to take responsibility for whatever the LLMs have produced for that piece of system, I am not an expert and cannot verify it.

[dyauspitr]

This is like the Indian education system and presumably other Asian ones. Homework counts for very little towards your grade. 90% of your grade comes from the midterms and the finals. All hand written, no notes, no calculators.

[raincole]

You didn't answer why the student should memorize anything, except the hand-waving "Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity".

Students had very good reason to question the education system when they were asked to memorize things that were safe to forget once they graduated from school. And when most functional adults admitted they forgot what they had learned in school. It was an issue before LLM, and triply so now.

By the way, I now am 100% agree with "Memorization is a prerequisite for creativity." However, if you asked me to try to convince the 16-year-old me I would throw my hands up.

[quacked]

I completely agree with you, and now that I am far away from being a student (and at the time, I vehemently hated any system that demanded memorization), I regretfully say that sometimes you just have to force young people to do things they don't want to do, for their own good.

[keybored]

That’s a terrible indictment of society if true. People are so far from self-realization, so estranged from their natural curiosity, that there is no motivation to learn anything beyond what will get you fed and housed. How can anyone be okay with that? Because even most chronically alienated people have had glimpses of self-actualization, of curiosity, of intrinsic motivation; most have had times when they were inspired to use the intellectual and bodily gifts that nature has endowed them with.

But the response to that will be further beatings until morale improves.

What about technology professionals? From my biased reading of this site alone: both further beatings and pain relievers in the form of even more dulling and pacifying technology. Follow by misanhtropic, thought-terminating cliches: well people are inherently dumb/unmotivated/unworthy so topic is not really worth our genuine attention; furthermore, now with LMMs, we are seeing just how easy it is to mimic these lumps of meat—in fact they can act both better and more pathetic than human meat bags, just have to adjust the prompts...

[nemomarx]

People who aren't fed and employed generally struggle to be self actualized, right? First you need to work for your supper, then you can focus on learning for its own sake.

As more jobs started requiring degrees, the motivation has to change. If people can get food and housing without a degree again to a comfortable extent than the type of person getting a degree will change again too.

If you let them, they'll alienate you until you have no free time and no space for rest or hobbies or learning. Labour movements had to work hard to prevent the 60 hour workweek, but we're creeping back away from 40, right?

[keybored]

I know about Materialism.

[jllyhill]

But "enough to not get fired" is not an answer to a question "why should I know anything?". To be honest, it's not clear if the rest of your post tries to answer the initial question of why you should know anything or the implied question of how much should I really know.

[quacked]

The answer to "why should I know anything" is a value judgement that, if advertised in my top-level post, provides a great deal more rhetorical surface to disagree with or criticize. My main point is that regardless of why anyone wants to know anything, in the age of AI, if you want to produce students who actually know things, I recommend dropping the tech and returning to a more rigorous, in-person curriculum with a foundation of memorization.

Here, though, is my answer: an excellent long-term goal for any band of humans is to create, inhabit, and enjoy the greatest civilization possible, and the more each individual human knows about their reality, the easier it is to do that.

[SwtCyber]

What I like about the approach in the article is that it confronts the "why should I know this?" question directly. By making students accountable for reasoning (even when tools are available) it exposes the difference between having access to information and having a mental model

[avgDev]

You had me until, "no homework assignments". I am a lazy dev man. I like programming so I don't have to repeat tasks.

I would not survive without homework. I needed that extra push in school. Otherwise, I would have been doing something else.

[rationalist]

I was lazy. I had perfect scores on all of the exams in one class, but never did the homework, so even though I knew the material, I got a "C".

F homework.

[causalscience]

> why should I know anything

The obvious answer is "Because it's interesting."

But suppose you think strictly in utilitarian terms: what effort should I invest for what $$$ return. I have two things to say to you:

First: what a meaningless life you're living.

Second: you realize that if you don't learn anything because you have LLMs, and I learn everything because it's interesting, when you and I are competing, I'll have LLMs as well...? We'll be using the same tools, but I'll be able to reason and you won't.

I think the people who struggle with the question "Why should I know anything?" aren't going to learn anything anyway. You need curiosity to learn, or at least to learn a lot and well, and if you have curiosity you're not asking why you should learn anything.

[ryandrake]

To play devil's advocate: In the future, "knowing things" might not really be a prerequisite for living a decent life. If you could just instantly look anything up that you need to know, then why would you need to know anything? I don't think it's a ridiculous question. As long as I can maintain basic literacy and an ability to form questions for an LLM, why really do I kneed knowledge? Maybe I don't find any intrinsic "life meaning" from knowledge. Maybe I don't care if it's interesting. Pragmatically why should I be educated?

Why would I need to be able to lift 100kg? I'm never going to need to lift 100kg, and if I do need to, I'd just find a tool that will do it. My life isn't any less rich because I can't lift 100kg, and I can maintain basic body health without being able to lift weight from the ground.

[bsoles]

Exactly. In the long term, I would argue that "interest" is always a bigger determining factor of professional success than innate "capability" in a field. An interested person can grow their competence over time, whereas a disinterested, yet capable person will mostly remain at a fixed level of competence.