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Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml

AI Is Destroying a Generation of Students

futurism.com

AI Is Destroying a Generation of Students
5 comments

  • The last paragraph is especially good:

    "ChatGPT isn't its own, unique problem. It's a symptom of a totalizing cultural paradigm in which passive consumption and regurgitation of content becomes the status quo," Nathan Schmidt, a university lecturer and managing editor at Gamers With Glasses, told 404.

    (Likewise, I've always found it unfair how children are blamed or sneered upon for the effects of the inability of their parent generation to regulate intrusive technologies.)

  • Translation: Traditional education—that was designed to mass educate the lowest common intelligence level in order to reduce the training burden on capitalists who want cheap labor—isn't working very well when students have access to tools that reduce the amount of time they spend doing busiwork.

    It's not so dissimilar to company managers who thought that the ability of AI to make employees more efficient at busiwork would somehow reduce their need for people to perform that busiwork.

    I may not be describing it very well but it boils down to this: Students and workers are getting more efficient with the bullshit and nobody seems to know what to do about it.

    Insert meme:

    "You mean most of the time we spend on homework and in the classroom is just bullshit?"

    "Always has been."

    Now replace that with someone in an office asking, "You mean most of what we do at work is just pointless bullshit?" 😁

    AI is really good at producing bullshit. It was trained on a whole lot of it! Why shouldn't we be using it to produce bullshit more efficiently?

    You want students to learn stuff? How about we reduce class sizes to like 5 kids per teacher, get rid of homework entirely, and quiz the students constantly in order to find out what they missed/need to learn and focus on filing in those gaps. Then AI and grades wouldn't even matter! You'd always know where each kid was at (in educational terms).

    • The existence of ai doesn't reduce the amount of busy work. It just means studenta can press buttons and pull levers rather than doing it by hand.

      I'm not sure what constant quizing would accomplish. It sounds like its own busy work.

      Even if there were the number of teachers to have 5 students per class, it has been my experience that a class under 10 leaves less room for discussion and difference of opinion

      • The point of regular quizzing is for the teacher to keep track of the student's progress. It's the entire point of quizzes!

        Any classroom that includes quizzes in grading is already off on the wrong foot. They're doing it all wrong.

        When it comes time to grade a student—via a test—the student should be so used to the questions—that they don't have to think much about it. They should already know the answers and have a strong command over the process used to answer them. If they're not ready the teacher should already know that because of regular quizzing.

        This needs to happen in the classroom. Not at home. When students are outside of school they shouldn't be thinking about their schooling. They should be allowing their brains to rest and not stress over the possibility that their entire life trajectory could be made or broken based on how much time and effort they put in to homework or studying.

        We're creating a society where no one spends time together because they didn't have time for that growing up!