[simonw]

> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said.

Sounds right to me. Kids under 13 need to learn to read, write and comprehend text. Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.

They can play with AI at home, and after 13 they can learn how to use AI productively and, ideally, in a way that enhances rather than detracts from their education.

Also from the story:

> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.

A big hooray for that. Will be interesting to see what impact that has on Norway education - a quick search just now didn't turn up any detailed studies, presumably those will show up eventually.

[theptip]

> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.

I think it's more complex than this.

AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.

The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.)

On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.

[ifwinterco]

The obvious way to square this circle is to go back to how things used to be: less emphasis on coursework and more on old-fashioned tests in an examination environment with just pen and paper.

You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams. On the other hand, students who use LLMs to augment their learning will do fine

[theptip]

It’s one dimension, I agree. Though, for essay-based courses I’m a little skeptical about writing under time pressure.

My thinking here is that you might want to also introduce more “viva voce” (verbal defense) style tests. These have been expensive to administer but my hunch is that you can scale these with AI administering the first round, random human review or participation. This feels like a better endpoint than essays under time pressure (but also maybe you can elect one or the other?)

My other angle is to break completely from the past. I want to see more project work. If AI makes it easier to fake or attain any given level of knowledge, we need to ask more of students, ie ask them to demonstrate mastery by building real things. More open-ended projects are harder to grade (use AI to scale grading), but more fun and engaging for students.

This doesn’t just refer to STEM of course; why not ask students to write a play, compose a symphony, etc?

My core thesis is that most students would work harder and engage with things that interest them, and the fundamental problem with Taylorized education is that one-size-fits-all is only interesting to some.

[aerhardt]

I studied in a French Lycée in Spain. We did dissertations, brutal 3h live writing tests. There was no problem with it other than the difficulty. Kids didn’t come out screwed up or impaired.

[ifwinterco]

Exactly, “write an essay under time pressure” used to just be called… an exam.

It’s normal and was done for centuries (and still done in many countries) for a reason, it works and it’s equally hard for everyone so it’s not unfair.

(3 hours straight is brutal though)

[theptip]

I agree it’s an option. I did some essay exams at Uni too. I just don’t think we should assume that the old cost/benefit calculus still applies and this is the best way to test e.g. English Lit or Philosophy.

[azangru]

> You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams

This might sound principled, but we need to recognize that school administrators are incentivised to have as few kids as possible fail their exams; and consequently, so are the teachers. Either exams will change, or the teaching will change.

[2muchcoffeeman]

People keep bringing this up as though it’s a counter argument.

Yes, things will have to change. That’s the idea.

[IshKebab]

This is definitely what's going to happen. But there is still a problem - people (not just children) are fundamentally lazy and put things off. People always leave assignments until the last minute. I used to smoothly transition from "I've got plenty of time, no need to start" to "there's not enough time to do it, there's no point starting".

They will 100% just use AI for the whole year and then panic and fail the exam when the time comes.

So I think not only will we see more invigilated exams, but they'll become more frequent and shorter. Which I would say is a good thing anyway. I always hated learning a whole year of stuff for a 3 hour exam.

[VorpalWay]

In what countries were the exams only once a year? When I grew up in the 90s in Sweden we would have tests and exams frequently, usually at the end of each module. This continued all the way through university. I think we had 3 separate exams for the first math course (which lasted a quarter of a year, so roughly one exam per month).

(Though they didn't give formal grades for the first several years of elementary school, which I'm not sure was a good idea.)

[IshKebab]

In the UK. In high school (age ~11 to 16) the only exams that mattered were SATs at ages 7, 11 and 14 (though I just checked and apparently they've scrapped the 14 year old ones for some reason), and GCSEs at 16. After that you have A-levels for two years (age 17 and 18) where IIRC it was just one big group of exams at the end of each year, and then university where I guess maybe it varies but at least at Cambridge it was one big group of 3-hour long exams at the end of each year.

Though Cambridge does have "tutorials" which are 1:2 tutoring sessions where you probably couldn't completely rely on AI.

Your way definitely sounds better to me.

[StefanBatory]

In Poland, that's how it worked at unis. We had a lot of subjects where we had only one big exam at the end and your grade depended on it.

Before uni though, we would get a grade or two every week, be it from short tests, classwork, homework or exams.

[theptip]

It’s a good point. I could see a world where exams get cheaper to administer.

I also think we can use project work as an ongoing assessment.

[wffurr]

There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.

[tacomagick]

LLMs are able to talk for a very long while now. Have you ever used Gemini as an assistant? It can even put in related images about your query and while it can use an improvement it can spell more or less.

[rwmj]

It's far from clear that this helps you to learn anything. More likely it's a way for most people to avoid having to think or learn.

[tacomagick]

I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.

[hparadiz]

I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.

[cuvert]

I understand the first part, but I don't understand the second one. It's probably my ignorance for not having children and being out of touch with schooling. When I was in school very little grading was based on homework, mostly was grading by testing in class. For example math, I'm absolutely sure it was 100% a few grading tests every semester. You could cheat by copying the homework of your classmates, it was the same set of problems for, but with 0 understanding, you would not pass.

[BobbyTables2]

Learning is also impacted when homework/test questions are created and graded by AI.

The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map…

Why have teachers?

The AI might as well grade itself.

[tacomagick]

Hard agree. AI generated questions should be absolutely forbidden. In our university I helped a instructor set up a custom Gemini Gem to let students grade themselves in recording because we did not have time to read the final scores in time, It was a nightmare to restrict or get consistent results.

[fouc]

> take-home essay assignments

Typically there's not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7 anyways.

Homework levels between elementary school and start of junior might look something like this:

    Division I / early elementary - no formal assignments should be made, though 5–10 minutes of systematic study or reading was recommended.

    Division II / upper elementary - formal homework could be assigned at the teacher’s discretion, but generally should be reading or study-type work and not exceed about 20 minutes.

    Starting from junior high - students are expected to study one-half to one hour per school night.

[froggit]

I remember that whole "expect 30 to 60 min a night" nonsense. I always assumed that was a scare tactic or something. I mean, in high school i was awake until around 4 am playing games every night so I'd wind up using half of each school day compensating with well-timed napping. Even then, the only homework i had to actually take home was the stuff meant to be turned in a few weeks later like tests and projects. Sure, we had daily "homework" assigned; there was also more than enough time during lectures to finish it. The only students that i really ever saw complain about having tons of homework were the ones that didn't put any effort into learning stuff at school to begin with.

[johnisgood]

What do you mean there is not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7?

We had a fuckton of homework at every grade, here in Hungary.

[habagav]

It’s not complex. One must first learn HOW TO LEARN before they can use any tool to help them learn.

There’s no substitution for human connection (social media) and there’s no substitution for traditional learning (robot teachers).

Everyone who wants to “disrupt” this fundamental human quality is chasing delusion. If you want to help, pay teachers a couple billion from the hundreds-of-billions going into AI maybe?

[theptip]

I agree that the human touch is valuable.

I disagree that humans are required to bootstrap meta-learning; I think it is quite deeply wired into the human brain and there is no reason that we can’t create digital gyms that give opportunities to learn the same insights.

I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.

[habagav]

Well, what we’re seeing in society is the opposite effect. Kids with phones and AI bots are doing, on average, terrible in school compared to folks who didn’t have those growing up.

University professors will likely agree that AI makes students worse at learning overall. No need to cite this there are articles all over the place.

So whatever solution you’re talking about, even when purpose-built, should be replaced by higher paid teachers. Ultimately the AI-First model is about moving money into mega-corps and paying teachers less.

[theptip]

I agree that we are seeing the negative effects of AI-done-wrong. (The best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, as I said.)

I don’t agree that this means all potential or current uses of AI are harmful.

I also don’t agree that simply paying teachers more is a solution. This lever has always existed and as a society we fail to pull it. So for the majority of people who use public schools, improving quality at current spend levels would be a major win, and we should explore the obvious possibilities here.

I’m also pretty skeptical about your culture-war assertion that this is about wealth transfer to mega-corps. This can easily be a sovereign AI product. (I also never proposed “AI first” FWIW, I am a proponent of humans augmented by AI for this and most use-cases. Banning AI entirely operates at the margin of forbidding mostly-human use-cases from using any AI.)

[froggit]

> I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.

You seem to think you're making some kind of valid argument here by backing up your opinion about one thing by providing evidence of something unrelated aside from both things happening to involve AI. I'm guessing only reason it seems obvious to you is because it's not obvious to you that what you're disagreeing is something different than what's going on to begin with.

I haven't seen anyone say the best education would be pure-human provided. The entire point of the article is that the effect AI has had on the education of children so far has not been beneficial.

The fact that AI useful for GPs for getting relatively simple yet time consuming administrative work taken care of has nothing to do with children's education. GPs aren't doing paperwork to develop their fundamental reading and math skills. Less time dealing with the non-medical portions of running a practice means they can spend more time with their patients. Spending more time with their patients allows them to better understand their symptoms and make a better informed, more accurate diagnosis even if AI is never used in a patient-facing capacity. In no way does that indicate that AI is currently a suitable to deploy in education.

I don't know if you used AI to learn about what you were arguing with and gather information to back up your argument, but if you did then that's another example of why there's so much concern about little kids using it. Eventually it will be worked into something without such a double edged nature when applied to early learning. Everyone already knows it can be an educational boon for people who have the skills to use it properly. So far, statistics indicate students do not have those skills. The rate of failure among undergraduate students is only continuing to accelerate.

[theptip]

> I haven't seen anyone say the best education would be pure-human provided

I took GP to be saying exactly that, and the OP’s full ban on AI in schools is also enforcing pure-human.

> I don't know if you used AI to learn about what you were arguing with and gather information to back up your argument

Accusing someone of mindless AI slop is a bad faith read. It’s also against the HN community guidelines. Please don’t do this.

[jplusequalt]

>very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.

Where is the data on this?

[hyperpallium2]

Bloom's 2 sigma problem solved at last! But that's overestimating LLMs, our zeitgeist.

AI can't detect AI, not because AI undetectable, but because it lacks judgment. Its shtick is random generation; the proverbial monkey on a typewriter.

[blitzar]

I presume kids still learn to add 1 and 1, do their multiplication tables and long division before being given a calculator ?

[runarberg]

> and the best technology ever invented for learning.

This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement.

Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.

[QuesnayJr]

Dude, just use it to learn something. It's obviously true.

Everyone uses AI all the time now. People's impressions are not mediated by marketing.

[mike_hock]

> Ask a question.

> Ask two follow-up questions.

> Ask about a seeming contradiction between the original answer and the answer to the second follow-up question.

> Get congratulated for raising such a great point and get parroted back your objection as a "correction."

Useful as a learning aid if applied cautiously but maybe not the "best thing ever."

[theptip]

I thought the dichotomy would make this clear, but the claim was not that however you use AI, it’s the best thing ever. To be more explicit:

_used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities, AI is the best technology ever invented for learning. If you don’t believe this as a technical HN person at the epicenter of this technology’s capability set, I probably can’t persuade you. But you can do a lot better than your transcript.

Used in the default mode, or with a desire to take shortcuts, or a desire to minimize what is perceived (often correctly in the case of many school curriculae) as BS fake work, it is the best technology ever invented to avoid learning.

[QuesnayJr]

FWIW, I liked the way you expressed it through a dichotomy.

[jplusequalt]

>_used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities

How often do children do things the "correct way" or know how to get the most out of a thing?

[runarberg]

Useful as in “better than nothing” but lacking as in “inferior to almost anything else”.

[amelius]

It's the same old argument about knives and technology. But we don't give children knives.

[theptip]

But we do give them bicycles, so the lesson would be “give them technology that is safe to use”.

And then we are back to the discussion at hand none the wiser; what forms of AI are safe to use for kids?

[jplusequalt]

The kind that doesn't allow a child to anthropomorphize it, or rely on it for learning.

[kakacik]

This is what schools enforce, second, even more important part is what parents do/allow/pay for at home.

Every single household I've seen benevolent use of phones/tablets/tv/computer/consoles (quite often all of it), kids were unruly, had shitty grades, living empty lives without good role models and very little passions or hobbies, and overall were more depressed than happy.

I do get why - its supremely easier to just throw tech at them and let them drown in endless cheap dopamine content, triple that for already-addicted parents. The whole principle of active screen itself is so overpowering and addictive compared to good old physical toys, drawing, paint, reading etc.

As a parent of young kids, its much harder to come up, continuously, with good motivating program out there, or even indoors, ie climbing. But - I didn't get kids to have easiest possible life, coursing through our short lives deep in comfort zone is a failure IMHO, thats not life well lived, that's life avoided. I am not kind to such parents - its the biggest achievement, or failure, in one's life, biggest challenges bring biggest rewards. Rather few people put in corresponding effort continuously, compared to careers, relaxing and other aspects of adult lives.

And then folks wonder why so many old people are sour, seeing in more life-successful others all the stuff one could/should have done if not so lazy is deeply depressing, usually amounts to biggest life regrets.

[20k]

AI is a terrible teacher though. It makes stuff up all the time, and for some subjects it has a remarkably low accuracy rate

[tacomagick]

I would argue it has gotten way better. Depending on the subject it can be really helpful and some tools even have a learning mode built in now that can generate questions and tests. They are often way too easy to solve but it does not demotivate i guess.

[runarberg]

It has always gotten better, just like how self-driving cars have gotten better, and how the case for bitcoin is always getting stronger.

Many people have stopped believing this lie. Yes AI has gotten better by some metric which AI companies are pushing. It has not gotten good enough to be a qualified teacher, and it never will.

[tacomagick]

I have never claimed it to be good enough to replace a qualified educator, however for self learning it is a good tool with no hustle. You also consider how qualified some educators are...

[runarberg]

Better then what for self-learning though? Better then textbooks? Better then an online course? Better then watching youtube videos from Khan academy, or just better then nothing at all as described some metrics which the AI companies came up with them selves?

I suspect it is the last one. This is a trillion dollar industry and if the AI companies claim this, then they should be able to to show it with quality research, they however have not, and the reason is that this is a lie. AI is not better then anything for self-learning. Go to the library and check out a chess book, go to r/trumpet, join a weekly meetup to practice you Spanish, etc. etc. all of these are vastly superior then AI.

You claim self-learning via is hustle free, perhaps you are right, however I suspect that there is no such thing as hustle free learning. If you want to learn something you have to use your brain, and you have to struggle. AI will just act like you got this, flatter you for a minute, and in the worst cases, you may start to believe the AI when it lies to you about how much you’ve learned.

[hparadiz]

It's far superior in many cases. Teachers get tired, lose patience, etc.

[enraged_camel]

>> It makes stuff up all the time

There are a few reasons AI is not the best teacher, but this is not one of them because teachers are also frequently wrong. I say that as someone who comes from a family of teachers, ranging from kindergarten to PhD.

And here is the problem: unlike AI, a lot of teachers don’t like being questioned or challenged. If your teacher doesn’t know a subject well, and you realize this, your options as a student are pretty limited. This is especially true at lower grades.

I don’t believe that AI can replace teachers. But, if used well, it can supplement them. I think Norway is making the right call here with elementary schools, but I wouldn’t support this kind of policy at higher grades where levels.

[lelanthran]

> AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.

Yeah, right. Did you forget a /s

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a363b6d-92ac-83ea-a619-41b2ecd9f5...

This is a popular game, still doing sales almost 18 years after release, with dozens of wiki fansites containing all the information, and with hundreds, if not thousands, of reddit postings... and it falls apart on the first answer!

No. Kids in school should not be using AI, because:

1. They won't be using the latest models, and

2. They can't tell if the info is accurate

[alexashka]

Stupid people never have the appetite or ability to 'tackle' anything. It's their defining characteristic.

It's not more complex than stupid people in charge, stupid results follow. Smart people with integrity in charge, good things follow.

AI changes nothing.

[dosisking]

AI has existed for decades. The average person has just discovered it / had it forced upon them. And just a small-subset of AI. The average person does not use real AI. And AI is not even well-defined.

Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning. AI will be used as a tool as a way of 'shaping' the mind of young people. Similar to using standardized textbooks. AI is too much of a political tool to be useful.

AI is a tool for propaganda.

[master-lincoln]

> Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning

I am curious where you were educated to come to this conclusion. I don't think your statement holds generally true for all education as it is by definition teaching knowledge.

Sure, there might be institutions that do teaching and propaganda, but I think it shows a lack of awareness to generalize this to all education.

[scotty79]

> AI is a tool for propaganda.

In my experience so far it's less of a propaganda than basically any other medium massively consumed today. It might become it one day though, like all othe media became it.

[truncate]

Totally agree!

For anyone who still thinks kids should use AI, another argument to make is we are still figuring out AI (hence the constant debate on it, hype, uncertainty, boundaries of its capabilities etc etc). I don't think anyone with right mind can disagree with that. Keeping that mind, wouldn't it make sense to at-the-very-least tread with caution when it comes to kids.

[cornholio]

The counterargument is that kids will live in a world different from our own.

For example, in many countries children lost the ability to write cursive; that used to be a critical skill comparable to literacy itself. But in our current society, that's no longer the case and you can be very successful without it, but there are other skills, such as using technology, that became critical.

Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.

[rTX5CMRXIfFG]

But how do you know that letting kids use AI at a way earlier age is the right way to equip them for the world that they would live in? You don't even know what that world will be like, so you can't even draw the conclusion that teaching them AI today will create career success in the future.

And then there's the other solid supporting arguments:

- Humans today were able to comprehend and use AI as soon as ChatGPT became popular so kids today will be able to pick it up quickly as grown-ups.

- "Using AI" isn't really a skill because there isn't much to learn beyond typing to a chatbot and reading the output (creating agentic workflows are very much for power users).

- The form of AI tech today might not even be the same as its form in the future, so you're already teaching them something obsolete.

[cornholio]

The point is that knowing what you don't know allows you to hedge your bets on events far into the future; my child will need to become productive 20 years from now and maintain it for 40-50 years. So, it's a bit like trying to educate a kid born in the 60s for the web era, you can't and you shouldn't even try.

What you can do though, is to offer them broad exposure to things that are interesting to them and their generation; my eastern block clone of the 8bit/48KB Spectrum computer didn't really help me excel at math, reading or history, nor was it to be the future of technology, but it did change my life significantly by letting me understand and relate to people that I couldn't otherwise have business dealings decades later.

It seems imprudent to cut children off from futuristic technology just because of a moral panic that it causes brain rot. Unless we know it's soma, a drug so powerful that it subdues volition and curtails intellectual development; we don't.

[chadgpt3]

How do you know it's a moral panic and it isn't actually causing brain rot?

[ifdefdebug]

Everybody and their grandma can "use AI". Reading (and understanding what you read), writing (coherently) and calculating (in your head) are those basic skills that need to be trained and will give you an advantage no matter in what kind of world you live.

[noufalibrahim]

> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.

I don't think this is as clear as you make it out to be.

There are areas (e.g. personal care as per the impact map released by Anthropic a few months ago) where the impact of AI will be less than in the ones HN often discusses. Communicating with people is important in many of these areas so making sure that kids "should learn" how to communicate is a good investment regardless of how rapidly technology is shifting. There are different time tested ways of doing this and while you can "disrupt" these a little, throwing them out completely is, at least to me, a bad idea.

OTOH, doubling down on learning "skills for the future" which are all bold bets while sacrificing things that have served humanity through multiple moments of change is probably a bad idea.

As for cursive writing (or atleast handwriting) itself, there are several studies of learning it being associated with developing fine motor control, improving memory, improving focus. I can't find them right now but I remember reading them because of my own interest in calligraphy. Many older (especially religious) traditions place emphasis on using written (rather than digitally typeset) books for memorisation because the slight changes in the shapes of the letters act as reinforcements for the process. I know this from experience as well so I think there's definitely value there.

[lostlogin]

I went through a Steiner school from pre-school to end of high school. It’s highly opinionated and very controlling initially. When you paint, you start with one colour. Then another day you get the next (there were only primary colours, because of course).

You eat at your desk, then you’re allowed to play. This was dropped after a year or so.

You don’t learn to read until you’re 7, etc etc.

However, by the end of high school it was up to the individual how much they achieved, and there was minimal pressure. As long as you weren’t messing with other kids, you could do a little or much as you please, and consequences were minimal.

Tools and skills were introduced at a developmentally appropriate age - not sure who chose that age though.

There was a lot wrong with the school and the system, but there was a lot more that was right in my opinion.

[hgomersall]

Yeah, I we considered a Steiner school because I think that extensive play is a super critical part of a good education. The problem is you also need to be able to be part of the mainstream system at some point, and it felt like it didn't necessarily quite meet that goal.

[lostlogin]

> The problem is you also need to be able to be part of the mainstream system at some point

There is a requirement to meet certain state mandated standards and the one I went to also took state funding, leading to dilution of Steiner influence/an improved curriculum. It depended which side you were on.

[creesch]

Also worth considering is that it is part of a broader ideology of Anthroposophy which sometimes aproaches semi cult status in how people identify with it. A lot of the principles of Steiner schools are actually pretty cool, but sending your kid there, depending on the school they will also be dealing with the more esoteric bits of all of this that have very little to do with didactic or pedagogic sound principles.

Some if it includes some schools teaching some of the more racists views of Mr Steiner.

[lostlogin]

This is probably true of every school that follows a philosophy or belief system.

It needs addressing. The school was white wealthy hippies when I was there. It’s vastly more representative now.

[truncate]

>> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.

I'm not really sure what point you are making here. We can talk about stuff based on what we know now. AI definitely isn't there yet. Even adults are figuring it out, the limits of its capabilities and shortcomings. Its not even been 5 years, and we want to change everything everywhere.

So if we don't know if we should or should not, and take into account all the hype, marketing, hype, advantages and some potential disadvantages (which are quite serious) why not just go ahead when there is more confidence.

[calgoo]

My 6 year olds have been writing cursive at school all year, they have a zero policy about phones until the age ~15, and still use books for everything. Not many schools do this anymore, but there are schools that still do.

[ifwinterco]

From a UK perspective it's very weird that kids in America don't learn to write joined-up.

How can you write sufficiently fast in an English or History exam (where you have to write a whole essay in limited time) if you're writing one letter at a time like a 6 year old?

[graemep]

I agree, but its also somewhat weird that the main reason kids learn to write cursive is for exams - its not a skill most of us use in adult life, and even for kids writing outside exams is often done on computers (e.g. my daughter's A level history coursework was done on, and submitted from, a computer).

Some of the exam boards are trialling computerised exams where exams are completed on computers instead of paper. Its cheaper for them to not have to handle paper (which gets scanned anyway). Its long been possible as an accessibility arrangement but it might become the norm.

[kalleboo]

I went to school in two different countries where I was taught/required to write joined-up, but I was never actually taught to write it quickly, only "correctly". I was (and of course still am) much faster at writing in block letters, so I'd draft my essays in block writing, then re-write it in joined-up to hand it in.

[master-lincoln]

If your history exam grade hinges on your "typing speed", you had a bad teacher. It's not like you can not write sufficiently quickly using block letters.

[lotsofpulp]

> How can you write sufficiently fast in an English or History exam (where you have to write a whole essay in limited time) if you're writing one letter at a time like a 6 year old?

You use an ipad and keyboard or some other similar device. The only times in my life I have had to use cursive were in elementary school, pretty useless skill to have in this day and age.

[ifwinterco]

iPads in exams? This just gets stranger and stranger

[lotsofpulp]

Just a tool to type with, it can be locked to prevent internet access or any other app.

[mort96]

Kids won't grow up into a world where it's not beneficial to know how to read or write or think.

[analog31]

>>>> Any definitive claim to know what are the right things kids should learn in a moment of rapid technological shift is probably garbage and just a projection of our own biases.

I'd say this is the case in times of technological stability as well.

Education has always been based on heuristics: Teach A, B, and C, with the hope that people will gain X, Y, and Z. Avoid P, Q, and R. The suspicion that some forms of education are fructifying, and others are stultifying, are largely a matter of guesswork and social bias. Attempts to clear things up with "studies" tends to produce results on a par with pseudoscience. Our biases are all we've got.

The reaction to AI isn't the first time that parents have had to decide on the merits of educational technologies: Radio, TV, the early Internet, social media, etc. Even books. There was certainly a suspicion that TV and social media caused brain rot, or a related issue, moral rot.

Regarding your comment below, I was born in the 60s, and was certainly educated for the web era. I'm more adept with technology today, including AI, than most people half my age.

My children were required to learn Microsoft Office in elementary school, "for their careers."

[QuesnayJr]

Isn't that a straightforward argument for preserving the status quo as much as possible in learning? We know how to get people to learn without AI, so we should keep doing it until someone figures out how to use AI effectively.

[da_grift_shift]

You're absolutely right! Joined-up penmanship is exactly the same as our current asymmetry in absorbing reams of soullessly verbose, arrogant pablum shat out by the latest crop of "frontier" LLMs.

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[iwontberude]

Whether they should or not is a moot point. They are using it and we need to figure out how to organise society to deal with it.

[rwmj]

We're in like year 2 or 3 of LLMs being serious tools, still with many disadvantages over humans. There's plenty of time to figure things out, we don't need to experiment on children right now.

[Nux]

Return to pen and paper, particularly for testing. Extend school time for doing supervised "homework" that doesn't involve the Internet.

Like that?

[alchemism]

Yes, make the teachers on $25-35K annual salaries do /more/ work for no extra money. I'm sure that will fix education.

[em500]

Just to be accurate, median annual salary is over $62k accross the US for kindergarten and elementary school teachers, with California nearing 100k.

[1] https://www.onetonline.org/link/localwages/25-2021.00?st=CA

[qsera]

I am conflicted on this. One part of me think that they deserve a lot more compensation. But I am not really sure if that should be in the form of a salary rise.

[vasachi]

Why not?

[ben_w]

That's a straw man.

That pay range is roughly what teachers get in former-USSR/Warsaw Pact eastern Europe, and in those countries it's a comfortable income.

Also, going back to what they did a few years ago isn't "more work". May actually be less, given how often people look at AI output, roll their eyes, and say "ugh, slop".

Also also, questions of pay are obviously after society decides what it wants the role of a teacher to be and finds out how much it needs to spend to hire enough people who will do whatever that job turns out to be.

[duduijskkzz]

While a bit hyperbolic this is a major issue.

“Workload” has been a constant argument for just about any tech product we acquired at school. I’m very conflicted about this issue to be honest. I’m a member of one of those parent management boards type things, not sure what’s it called in English.

One the one hand I know how busy teachers are, on the other I also know how they never work to 5PM have twice my vacation days, while somehow never being able to meet to talk about issues. We get one ten minute session every few months at best.

If you put pressure on them they call in sick for weeks and good luck finding a replacement. I’m deeply worried that if teaching as a whole doesn’t get it together we will slowly be forced to use AI for everything because of lack of alternatives.

[qsera]

> figure out how to organise society to deal with it.

Yea, need to figure out to form society with participants who are incapable of thinking...

And to make matters worse the LLMs that is causing this cannot even really think!

[dev1ycan]

13? there is no reason a minor should use a brain rotting technology like AI, in fact, AI for pretty much most teens is way WAY more damaging than even tiktok ever was.

[tacomagick]

Care to elaborate with an example?

[intended]

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

There’s another study by MSFT on a similar topic, and yesterday there was an article from Nature shared here on HN.

[somenameforme]

I'd add to it that most of the studies showing significant negative effects of LLM usage are on adults. This stuff is going to fry kids' still rapidly developing brains in a way that will make the COVID school lockdown kids look like they had it good.

[JimsonYang]

> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.

I remember seeing an nyt article where there was mixed results on cell phone bans. While they increased socialization among students, the school didnt see better test scores.

We'll have to see if a ban on AI can improve test scores-I am bullish on the idea tho

[Jakob]

I would see that as an absolute win. Socialization is the main point I send my kids to school.

Socialization leads to discourse which leads to learning.

[graemep]

British schools are often pretty clear that kids are not there to socialise - they will say it in so many words.

It also depends what you by socialisation. in terms of school people usually mean two distinct things: have opportunities to spend time in social interactions, and learning social skills.

My experience of taking kids out of school is that the first reduces (because they spend less time with other kids each day) but the second increases (because they meet a greater variety of people in a grater variety of places).

That takes me to my greatest concern with AI. That kids will socialise (in both senses) with AI rather than people. What will that do to their social skills? There are plenty of examples of adults doing that (visible in places like /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI ), but at least they grew up developing some social skills. If AI is a big part of your interactions, what will the effects of that be?

[JimsonYang]

I agree but unfortunately the US education budget is driven by test scores.

Unless theres strong evidence that test scores will increase, Karen from the PTA insists that her child be given access to their phone

[scotty79]

Socialization goes out of fashion at a rapid pace. If I were to guess, technology deprived kids will quickly catch up with the trend when they age out of the ban.

Also use of technology anti-correlated with alcohol and drug use so there might be unwelcome side effects.

[belorn]

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20556365241270394

Looking at that meta study, the conclusions seems to be that this kind of studies on children take a lot of time and generally lack any control group, thus conclusions are going to be weak.

[cmrdporcupine]

Here in Ontario they "banned" phones in class/school and the teens just ignore it and the teachers are unable/scared to enforce it. As parents we've tried over and over with both our kids to lay down the law -- including taking phones away, consequences etc -- but the attitude is intense with both them and their peers and enforcement becomes very difficult once they're out of "child account" parental control range.

It's a shitty time to be a parent of a teen.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Canadian schools operate under the principle of in loco parentis. Your administrators are just unwilling to do their jobs. If they laid down strict policies of zero tolerance and consequences for offenders that inconvenience the parents there would be compliance. Any parent not on board with such policies can send their kids elsewhere.

[tacomagick]

How about if we target the social media apps for their predatory algorithms?

[cmrdporcupine]

That's precisely what needs to happen.

That said, my youngest just reads gaming wikis and hangs out on Discords for roguelike video games and this somehow consumes 900% of their attention span.

[tacomagick]

I'd say that's one of the best ways to spend time. It's okay to have a hobby even if it's just rougelike games. Much better than doomscrolling on Tiktok in every way.

[cmrdporcupine]

Not when it takes precedence over... doing your math homework, touching grass, communicating with a real flesh and blood friend (or parent/sibling), showering...

[chadgpt3]

Discords for xyz are as much universal hangout spaces as they are about xyz

[Moldoteck]

the next movement would be blocking LTE/5G during courses. No social media = dumb phone

[cmrdporcupine]

they don't seem to have the courage to do it. they don't even bother closing down the school wifi for a lot of stuff.

there's also parent who would boohoo about not being able to contact their kids all hours of the day

[derwiki]

“Boohoo” is fine, but I think the reality is one of a) come to the school and scream at someone b) or threaten violence or c) a lawsuit.

[guyomes]

> They can play with AI at home

Actually, in Europe, Gemini is officially not available for kids even at home [1]. In some countries like Germany, the restriction applies until 16 [2]. I find unsettling that even for supervised account, parents are forbidden to let their kids learn how to use Gemini, even between 14 and 16 yo.

Note that this restriction does not seem to appear from other AI company. So from outside, it looks like unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.

[1]: https://support.google.com/families/answer/16109150?hl=en#av...

[2]: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1350409?sjid=7871...

[master-lincoln]

lol

> unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.

They are a company offering a product and they decided not to offer it to kids. It's not like they are telling you as a parent what you need to do. Why don't you get a similar product from a different company for your kids?

[guyomes]

> They are a company offering a product and they decided not to offer it to kids. It's not like they are telling you as a parent what you need to do.

Fair enough! Indeed that would be a true issue only if the company had a monopoly.

[shusaku]

Connect the dots also banned, though there is some discussion of loosening the rules to allow interpolating up to four points.

[NDlurker]

I don't understand what the controversy is in the US about banning phones in schools. I graduated highschool in the mid 2000s and cell phones were just starting to gain adoption in my town in the last couple years I was in school. I don't recall anyone using a phone in class, but Game Boys were definitely not allowed. I was surprised when I found out that kids were regularly on their phones in class. Why was that ever allowed? Did it get too hard to enforce and they gave up on it until recently?

[simonw]

I've heard a big problem is the parents - they want to be able to communicate with their kids while they are in school, so many parents oppose phone bans.

[doctorpangloss]

a large florida school district banned cell phones in schools, and after two years, the total benefit that was measured to be likely caused by this was +0.9 percentiles on their standardized achievement test.

in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.

how do dozens if not low hundreds of hours of time you are not spending on your phone at school translate to only the same benefit as doing ONE hour of studying? well, if there is no mechanism, then yeah, that's what happens.

so why was it ever allowed? either tests are severely limited in what they measure, or the impact of cell phones on education is actually quite small. it cannot be both.

[NDlurker]

Why was it allowed in the first place because why was it treated any different than other distractions in the classroom?

[doctorpangloss]

i don't know if you've been in an american classroom lately but the typical experience is that they're not that strict.

[CraigRood]

Schooling is more than just exams, I'm sorry. There is no need for a cell phone in a classroom.

[somenameforme]

Just ignoring the flimsy SAT metric, there's something most aren't considering in these sort of data. Cell phones enable and are fairly widely used for all sorts of cheating. Banning them gets rid of that, and so if there was no positive effect from a phone ban you'd actually probably expect a slight decrease on scores because of this effect.

So the fact that basically every school region that bans phones is seeing marginal to moderate gains is just huge. And as others have mentioned, test scores are but one aspect of this. Breaks where kids are playing and interacting more regularly are a million times better than ones where everybody whips out their screen and turns into a zombie.

[doctorpangloss]

A "million times better," or 0.9 percentiles better? You have no idea.

Of course I don't want kids to be distracted in school. I just think that if things were as easy as a ban, or some other kind of coercion, education would be easy.

[somenameforme]

You don't need to quantify things like socialization and real life interaction to know it's vastly better than not, and that's not even touching on the academic side of things where you are seeing clear quantifiable differences. Ultimately, education is easy. A century+ ago this [1] was a college admittance exam, which students were expected to be able to pass, and the overwhelming majority did.

It's not like we're making incremental progress over time. Education has become a dumpster fire, and it's getting worse. The solution is simple - stop changing stuff, and just go back to classical education methods that did work, phenomenally. Tech is clearly having detrimental effects on education, so get rid of it in the classroom. Starting with phones there is a mind bogglingly obvious low bar.

[1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

[aix1]

> in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.

[citation needed]

[lukan]

"and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.

A big hooray for that."

I don't suppose they are allowed to use physical violence again, still I would like to know what exactly you are cheering here for?

[simonw]

I was cheering for the phones bit. I honestly hadn't noticed the dark undertones of "enforce discipline".

[b112]

That's not dark, that's love.

[lukan]

It can be. But some also love dark shit.

[ddp26]

You mean chatgpt style AI won't help them with those skills?

If a human parent or teacher can help with skills like reading, an AI system can too, once it's trained and designed to do so. (How good are humans at teaching reading anyway?)

[stackghost]

>How good are humans at teaching reading anyway?

Writing developed thousands of years BCE. So, considering we as a species have been successfully teaching our offspring how to read for hundreds of generations, I'd say we're probably pretty decent at it.

[bcrosby95]

It's funny how people let cultural narratives get in the way of actual analysis. I think some of it is modern convenience has made us intolerant of any imperfection then they label even minor imperfections as a catastrophe.

[raincole]

Yeah, it baffles me that the sentiment here is that AI can only hurt kids' reading ability, when AI (in the form of a chatbot) is practically a tool that forces its users to read a lot.

I still support for some sort of AI restriction for kids, though, since school is a place for kids to socializing. It's a more aspect important than reading and writing.

[simonw]

Not if they turn on voice mode, which is pretty excellent these days (at least in ChatGPT and Gemini.)

[raincole]

I do 100% support banning voice mode for school. (Again mostly for the socializing... or anti-socializing aspect.)

[chalupa-supreme]

We need to remember there are going to be human admin tasks that still need human interaction and critical thought into what you read and write. Adult users of these tools already accept AI outputs without too much thought in varying scenarios.

As a child, your willingness to question a tool that’s already better then you at most tasks probably isn’t going too high, and if you go through early education without exercising critical thinking… well we can point to cursive reading/writing as an example of a skill that completely disappears from a generation when not practiced enough.

[sillysaurusx]

Good. My 4th grade cursive writing was a waste of time. Studying anything else would have been more beneficial.

[wseqyrku]

They need those skills to be able to communicate with others, not to .. research?

[basch]

and with a structured tool, what better place to practice writing, process, iteration, revision, editing.

this happens constantly, every day. a current implementation of a technology isnt optimal so the entire class of anything related to that technology is treated as equally flawed.

the solution here is better tools, not preventing better tools from being created.

[ilovecake1984]

Sounds dystopian.

What kids need to learn to read is an adult to engage with them, listen to how they read and engage them on the contents of the book.

[ekjhgkejhgk]

LOL

[breppp]

> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.

Isn't that expected in most countries in Europe? There's an aging overall population that is shrinking and immigration is rising. So you get a progressively rising percentage of immigrants among school students, many of those coming from 3rd world countries with non-functioning education systems.

[testfrequency]

Why is this the most upvoted comment, yet when the UK repents teens form social media it’s met with “aDulTs arE bEiNg monItoRed”.

I agree with Norway here, and it’s slightly exhausting to see people attack any country that’s trying to protect kids as somehow coming for everyone’s supposed sovereignty.

I care about the youth and know they are in the midst of a culture war with adults, leave them out of it until we figure out a path forward.

edit: (crazy to see +11 on my comment, and also -1 when refreshing. Clearly my comment is divisive. This is honestly validating that adults simply cannot find common ground in this topic - especially HN)

[mattnewton]

Because banning smartphones in schools doesn’t affect adults not in those schools, whereas age verification does?

How you implement these protections matter.

[testfrequency]

The rhetoric I often see online is forcing children to identify themselves which, obviously leads to adults being required to identify themselves.

How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?

It’s all complicated, but I am exhausted from reading doom articles of how the UK wants adults to not exist online while trying to force children offline for their own existence and long term health..

It’s worth me noting that I’m extremely liberal, but I’ve admittedly been failing to see how we keep children safe online without forcing identity of adulthood. We do not allow teens to buy cigarettes or vapes based on vibes either, right?

(please correct or roast me, I really am struggling with this and am tired of reading refutes that are not productive)

[dpkirchner]

> How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?

It's pretty much impossible, so we should stop trying. It's exhausting seeing politicians et al continue to push for age verification despite it being impossible to be even remotely effective. (I hedge because technically we could demand photo ID for every HTTP request, I guess, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.)

The best we can do is ask parents to raise their children themselves and teach children to be mindful online (as we expect them to be IRL).

[somenameforme]

In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful. And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy, and the sites themselves not entirely infrequently demand ID from accounts at their own arbitrary and whimsical discretion.

[master-lincoln]

The digital world is not like the real one. When you show your ID once all it's details are saved and can be searched across. When showing your ID to the cigarette vendor they will not notice most data and will have forgotten it a while later. So we need to be more careful with the data we give out digitally.

No ID is needed, just proof that you are above a certain age. There are technological solutions to just give out that data, but politicians seem to not want to go that way. This is the real issue, not age checking. The fear that age-checking means tracking...

[dpkirchner]

In person ID requirements all rely on punishing merchants if a minor fools them with a fake ID which aligns the incentives pretty well. It's hard to imagine how that would work online. Do you go to jail/pay thousands of dollars if someone hands their phone to their kid while logged in to Facebook or Google? You would if you sold beer to a kid who was given their parent's wallet.

Without an enforcement mechanism that punishes site owners the whole system fails. And you can't reasonably expect site owners to be responsible for checking ID on every request. So, it's (practically) impossible.

> And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy

Yep, and we* lost that argument and "think of the children" hysteria won.

* I would bet the same folks opposed to ID requirements now were opposed to phone number then

[logicchains]

>In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful.

By what possible measure have they been overwhelmingly successful? Pornography and alcohol are still used regularly by a double-digit percentage of youth.

[mattnewton]

In my view, it’s very simple. There are places like schools, or parents buying phone plans, to identify children. Will some children get access outside of that? Sure. But 100% enforcement isn’t possible even if you thought it was worth destroying privacy on the internet.

[master-lincoln]

Age verification does not affect adults. But often when they say age verification they want to make you give out more data than "i am over 18"

[tacomagick]

Is Norway forcing all internet users to provide their ID to access all internet services?

[testfrequency]

So how would you know who is who?

[tacomagick]

Some other way without making all internet usage identifiable, like maybe parents start parenting? The UK laws aren't even to protect children anyway. It is just a shell to identify everyone online.

[testfrequency]

Everyone says this..it’s not working! The more kids are online, the less traditional parenting is working. It worked when I was younger, I didn’t know any better. Nowadays, a kid can go on Reddit or Roblox and be told otherwise. We had Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica..

..now kids have /r/ihatemyfamily or #fuckeverything

[tacomagick]

So your solution is to deanonymize the whole internet? Also can't teenagers ever vent? I would much rather them use websites such as Reddit or Facebook to socialize instead of Instagram or Tiktok to just scroll endlessly. We should target the social media apps for their predatory algorithms I believe.

[Jimmc414]

Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.

Plus "Generative AI" isn't one single thing. Using it to write your essay is cognitive offloading but using it as a Socratic tutor that gives immediate feedback and adapts to the student is closer to the thing education research says works.

There's an equity angle as well. A school ban doesn't ban AI at home. It bans the equalizing version. Kids in educated, rich households will get AI exposure from parents. Kids without that won't get it anywhere, because the one place where the field is leveled has opted out. If AI fluency becomes a differentiator in the labor market infrastructure which is very likely a 7 year exposure gap sorted by household class is the opposite of what public education is supposed to be for.

(edit: By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.)

[conception]

I feel like two decades of data that it doesn’t work seems the opposite of shortsighted and reactionary.

[willsmith72]

It's not just Norway. Here in Australia many modern style schools were leaning hard into the digitized classroom era in the 2010s. Now slowly they're realizing their mistake

The problem is, a lot of the parents have bought into the digital parenting age too. They were told ipads etc were part of getting the best education for their kid. Now they're fighting hard on rolling it back (not least because they can't comprehend that it's a problem, that their child can't focus 5 minutes without a device)

[Saline9515]

Every parent knows that the Ipad is awful for their kid's education, but it keeps them quiet, so they happily take it.

[jasonfarnon]

I certainly believe that, but why did school systems jump on board, especially to be such early adopters as the 2010s, when the iphone was just a few years old? We used to use TV to keep kids quiet, but schools always talked about how bad it was.

[tartoran]

For similar convenience as parents: less work on correcting homework and such

[EA-3167]

It stinks that investments are going to be unwound, but it would be worse to engage in a sunk-cost mindset and keep it digital. Since the move was made we've had research suggesting that writing by hand is superior at generating lasting recall and learning than typing.[1] There's very early evidence that skills we use AI for begin to atrophy. [2] Erring on the side of nurturing young people's minds while their ability to learn is maximized seems completely rational to me.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529... (Article is fine, but more importantly has multiple study links)

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1

[Saline9515]

Please define "AI fluency"? From what I see, it's mainly being able to write and read at a high level, and having a strong media litteracy and critical reasoning sense something you don't need AI for.

And having no TV and no smartphone at home and at school is likely the best way to acquire it.

[Jimmc414]

By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.

[simonw]

I feel like "detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify" is the key skill, but it's also extremely demanding.

You need to have a very solid understanding of things like sources, and bias, and how to evaluate if something is likely to be true, and how to get to a credible answer.

Given the number of people online who try to read arguments with screenshots of a ChatGPT conversation, this is not an obvious process at all.

[QuadmasterXLII]

All of those skills have a half life of like 8 months.

[lelanthran]

> By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.

It's AI; by definition alone, those who don't know how to use it will reach competence within minutes, mastery within days.

[jimbokun]

> Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.

Sounds like following the evidence.

[irishcoffee]

Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8. I don’t even like LLMs and I’m against this mess. Imagine having regulations rolled out when we were 8 saying “you can’t use the internet!” And I was running my own websites by 10 years old.

Let’s stop pretending this tech is as interesting as we wish it was. If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet. I don’t see the difference at this point.

[simonw]

> Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8

A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp for 2023:

> Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent.

The literacy proficiency levels section on https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp describes what Level 1 means:

> Adults at level 1 are able to locate information on a text page, find a relevant link from a website, and identify relevant text among multiple options when the relevant information is explicitly cued. They can understand the meaning of short texts, as well as the organization of lists or multiple sections within a single page.

28% of US adults are just at or below that level.

[froh]

in the intermediate oecd [piaacs report] pages 64ff (PDF page 66ff) there are bar charts indicating the percentiles of each level for each participating nation.

the report also visualizes not only inter country but also intra country outcomes correlating socio economic influences (age, parents, family migration history, ...) and level of education (school, high school, college and higher) with test outcome (literacy, numerics problem solving)

it also has 10y ago/now comparison.

a trove for the Q "how are we doing, capability wise?"

thanks for pointing to the study!!

[piaacs report] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

[Moomoomoo309]

A notable effect that skews those numbers a bit is that the test for literacy is often given in English only, meaning any people in the US who can read and write Spanish but not English are counted as illiterate. (It's slightly more complex than this, some states let you take it in Spanish, some have the option but still usually give it in English most of the time, but the effect is the same)

[simonw]

That's a really good catch. It looks like that 28% figure is specifically Level 1 or below in English literacy, which makes that number a whole lot less interesting for evaluating education levels.

I care about ability to comprehend text in someone's fluent language. The PIAAC figures don't appear to measure that.

[kubb]

Do you care about trends? Like an increase from 19% to 28% between 2017 and 2023?

[simonw]

Sure, but if that trend turns out to be an increase in non-English speakers it tells us less about the state of literacy, which is the thing I'm interested in here.

[joe_mamba]

>A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.

Yes and AI isn't to blame for that as adults predate AI. It's the governments, schools, teachers, parents, teacher's unios, who taught them(or more accurately didn't teach them) and graduated them out of school anyway regardless just so they don't look bad in statistics. Sorry but if you graduate people out of high school who can't read you should be trialed for fraud. Simple as.

People blaming AI for adults unable to read puts us back to the 90s when Doom was to blame for school shootings or back to 60s when rock music was to blame for juvenile delinquency, all of them being wrong, and they're wrong here too. People always want to blame a third party external scapegoat that isn't' the parents and isn't the government, for the problems of their kids.

[JumpCrisscross]

Nobody is blaming AI. The point is we don’t have the luxury of throwing nonsense at our kids when they’re illiterate. Particularly not nonsense where all the evidence shows it harms on average more than it helps.

[embedding-shape]

Just wanna start off by saying that with young unformed minds, it does probably harm more on average than it helps. But particularly for spelling and reading, it might maybe actually help?

To be efficient with AI and LLMs you need to be good at least two things, reading and writing. One easy way of getting better is by reading a lot, and writing a lot. Maybe if we coax the kids into understanding (believing?) that better reading and writing helps them use AI better, they'd pay more attention to it?

[wccrawford]

No, you can talk to them, and have them talk back. And it's really easy. You don't need to be good at reading or writing to use it.

[simonw]

AI hasn't had a chance to demonstrate if it helps or hurts education yet.

That's the big problem with education in general. If you introduce a new factor to children's education you can't realistically measure the effect it has had for about five years, because you need to wait for a cohort of kids to go through that system and then see how they did.

This means that if you introduce something with clear negative effects it will be five years before you spot them!

That's pretty catastrophic given that ChatGPT only emerged in late 2022 and only got good around early 2024.

[intended]

No?

https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

This also links back up to the Ironies of Automation, which came out decades ago.

The reports from teachers for the past few years have been pretty stark, with kids completely obviating homework.

Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.

[joe_mamba]

>Homework is exercise. If you bring a forklift to gym you end up moving weights but not building muscles.

In countries like Finland kids don't get any homework. Though their society and school system optimizes more for child happiness, not winning international math Olympiads where you need to cram to get ahead.

[coryrc]

That's not true, it absolutely depends on effect size. I'll give you an obvious example: large lead acetate infusions. You'll notice pretty fast.

[varjag]

OK so you can consider it was noticed.

[simonw]

Right, AI isn't to blame for that, but cell phones might be? The bad number increased from 19 to 28 percent between 2017 and 2023.

[zemvpferreira]

From what I can tell the average school at best can aspire to teach kids how to work and how to socialize. That's it. I'd personally be very happy with computers mostly going away from school too. Most actual learning and exploring will hopefully happen at home.

[watwut]

This is really not true. Kids do actually learn a lot in school - includong weak students. And you actually see huge difference between places with and without schools.

[paytonjjones]

> and you actually see huge difference

Correlation, causation, and all that

[varenc]

Those are important skills schools teach, but I'm skeptical that most learning happens at home. I strongly suspect most adults learned to read and write because of the education they received in school, not home. Especially when it comes to the high school level and learning things like how to structure an essay or more advanced math. I doubt many parents are having their 16 year olds write essays and do trigonometry problems on the weekend.

[bebe83939]

Many kids in Norwegian schools do not speak Norwegian or English. Kids need "computers" just to translate what other kid is saying.

[throwaway2037]

This is true for many children of non-English speaking immigrant parents anywhere in the developed world. Schools will use language immersion and extra help to get these kids up to speed very quickly. Computers are sometimes used for educational games and activities, but these can be done just as well without.

Can I guess that you are (native/ethnic) Norwegian and upset by the recent waves of immigration to Norway? Your comment is very specific, plus you used a new throwaway account.

[varjag]

It's very unlikely he's Norwegian because he has no clue how education works here.

[galkk]

No, they don’t. Especially in elementary school.

My living example - my kiddo didn’t speak a word in English until 4.5 years, when she went into preschool. Russian speaking home and daycare do that for you.

After 9 months in American preschool, she completely switched to English language as her primary. 2 years later, and she speaks Russian with strong accent.

[stackghost]

Do you have a source for this?

[assimpleaspossi]

I didn't have the internet when I was in school. Neither did my kids till they got to college. We've all gone pretty far. For myself, that's in the technology world as a software engineer.

[pertymcpert]

Yes, there's also a push to ban all computers in classrooms because data is showing that it's of no benefit and if anything is a negative effect on education.

[throwaway2037]

There is also a push to ban certain childhood vaccines amoungst crazy people in the US. What is being said here, really?

Example: what if Internet access was removed, but the computer remained? It would still be very useful.

[pertymcpert]

Yeah but one is supported by science and the other isn't. It's nothing to do with internet access. The fact is that computers/ipads in classrooms are negative regardless of whether they're connected to the internet.

[cryo32]

At eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills. They need a lot longer to develop those in tandem.

And also you may be above average there.

[stackghost]

>At eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills.

I have two kids and can confidently say eight year olds generally have good language skills, are capable of expressing themselves just fine, and have good comprehension of the parts of the world that they've been exposed to.

[cryo32]

So they can conduct a nuanced debate then?

Mine couldn’t until they were much older. And I have more so perhaps that’s more statistically valid?

[stackghost]

>So they can conduct a nuanced debate then?

Oh, can I move the goalposts too?

[boomlinde]

The original claim was that "at eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills" and that they can't conduct debate is a relevant example of that.

[cryo32]

Nope. Language is more complicated than you think it is.

[orwin]

Can they identify easy stylistic device, like an extended metaphor or an anaphora?

Because until they do, I will consider their comprehension skills limited.

[mh-]

I guess you can consider mine limited too.

[beejiu]

When I was 8, I could use the Internet at school but every website was whitelisted.

[ilovecake1984]

8 years olds shouldn’t be using the internet.

[sumeno]

> If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet.

Now we're talkin'

I'm all for it, let's teach kids the fundamentals of the world without relying on computers before we introduce them

[slashdev]

They can use it at home.

Using it school is likely undermining their learning.

[xboxnolifes]

If you think an 8 year old can comprehend text at the same level of a 13 year old (or an 18 year old for that matter), I don't know what to tell you. Reading comprehension doesn't peak at 8.

[yard2010]

AI is not the internet, it's a stochastic parrot that lays golden eggs for its shareholders.