Writing essays, specifically expanding a list of well-reasoned bullet points into communicative written prose will be a worthless operation in the future, and likely already is.
There's no market for kids essays, we never made them write these things with the purpose of being useful output. The market for essays for grown ups is also very small, making kids write things down was not with the purpose of covering the case of them becoming journalists or something. It's just that makes them learn to think and structure their thought process. That's why people take notes and write down things even if its not going to be graded or read by anyone else.
Yes. And one interesting thing about ChatGPT is that, when asked to write an essay about a topic, it defaults to the standard introduction-body-conclusion organization of a school essay assignment [1]. Since its training data must have included texts organized in many other ways, I wonder if it was tweaked to default to the school-essay format.
[1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html
Writing an idea down as concisely as possible is important, the rest is just embellishment and is easily handled by AI.
For students, the objective is to write what to an adult would be mediocre essays, because they are on a path to writing adult level essays.
The AI can write mediocre essays, but not adult level essays.
Assuming that a student must write a bunch of mediocre essays in order to progress past the AI to write adult level essays, then they need to be evaluated on writing a bunch of mediocre essays.
If the teacher cannot distinguish between AI output and the student's output, and the result is that we give up on evaluating mediocre student essays, then the students are ultimately inhibited from progression to adult level essays, which, currently, are superior to the AI's output.
We automated a lot of arithmetic and then some higher math decades ago, but that hasn't meant that knowing how to do it is worthless.
Effective communicative prose is an inherently high-value part of coordinating human activity. The number of roles exclusively dedicated to it might shrink but it's part of nearly every activity in a specialized society. What's most likely is that people will use it as a time-saving tool but everyone will be evaluating how good the output is and tweaking it. And that means until we're at a point where people trust AI to actually evaluate the value of AI output, many of these roles (and certainly anyone building AIs that do this) will need to know how to recognize good output -- and the training involved in that probably involves practice in personally doing it.
Or, maybe practicing things we know how to do is a good way to practice?
You're missing the point. Why are we making them achieve progress on something that is being trivialized by AI? Let them use AI as a complementary tool and test them on something that requires measurable human skill. If this is difficult it's a sign that perhaps you're not teaching anything valuable.
Vocational schools do exist and they are useful but that's not what we are concerned about. People who cheat not to learn useful skills simply spend their time and money.
I'm not sure this is so significant. Humans naturally communicate and synthesize information. The school system is like a stick that pokes and prods the tip of the iceberg to try to nudge it here or there. By comparison, people's interests, skills, and drives play such an overwhelming role that I think we could chop off several years off the standard education curriculum and be better off.
I would argue the main limitation isn't education, but the opportunity for a student to pursue what their instincts are telling them to pursue. This is difficult today because school is designed for scale at the expense of being one size fits all. This is because teachers are a limited resource, not because it's the ideal way to do things. AI has the potential to provide more targeted education, where different students could take wildly different paths.
Why just use the written word via essays? You could use other forms of media such as video, physical art, or maybe programming to teach this as well. The five paragraph essay isn’t the only game in town!
It will go the same way. You need to understand the basics (to various degrees depending on the direction of your education), then learn how to use the new tools we are creating.
Honestly, I'd prefer we treat this as an opportunity to introduce tight feedback loops into essay writing the way we do with programming. Then evaluate the end result as a whole rather than a way to nitpick grammar rules.
While you likely always have a calculator with you which can do division much more quickly than you can do long division, if you want to teach students more advanced math, it is nonetheless useful to have previously taught them long division of numbers, so that you can teach them long division of polynomials.
If students haven't learned how to do long division of decimals, and how that works, it is harder to teach them to do long division of polynomials.
Of course, nowadays there are computer programs which can do long division of polynomials more quickly than a person can, but this is just an example.
Suppose there are a sequence of levels, where for each level n, it is much easier to teach someone level n+1 if they already have an understanding of level n. If computers can do levels up to level k faster than humans can, it may still be useful to start teaching someone at level 1 and then proceed to level 2, and so on, even though computers can already do those levels, until finally it is time to teach them level k+1 which we have not yet managed to teach computers to do.
I always viewed grades as a way of establishing intellectual hierarchy, which probably wasn't the most healthy way to look at them; a way of deciding where amongst my peers I stacked up. In University, we had class ranks.
Those with the best grades and thus highest rank would be given the best opportunities for wage-slave class work. Eventually people hit University and split up according to passion, goals as well as grades. Of course, there were exceptions; entrepreneurs were the folks that buck the system and don't need grades to succeed. In a sense, the grades were exchanged for food stamps and toys, only later in life. The winners drove the lambos and the losers are still living in their parents' basements.
I don't believe that this observation is true. Those who got into tech, bitcoins etc. at the right time got the lambos - not the most brilliant ones. Tech is full people with inert brains who make much much more mone than some of the most brilliant scientists out there.
It has been good time to be into plumbing instead of astrophysics if you are optimising for money BTW. Just like knowing ReactJS has provided better income opportunities than being rocket scientist.
that's because rocket science requires massive capital investment for said scientist to achieve anything - this aint no more backyard rocketry in the modern day.
ReactJS provides better income because it does not require massive capital investments on the dev to produce usable output.
The idea that societal benefit should match financial benefit is just a story made up because of the inclination that people who are moral should be rewarded etc. It has no economic basis.
This sounds like kind of a good summary of what we are doing to ourselves as we speak. Case in point: the crypto scandal, the housing bubble etc. A ton of people made out like thieves.
One of the interesting voices about this John Taylor Gatto. Mainstream methods of “training” as you described them, may indeed be the most common method today, but it is by no means the most effective, and Gatto goes into detail about it in his book, _The Underground History of American Education_.
For example, an older notion of education is not so much to train people to mechanically repeat results (like you would train people in a factory), but rather, to develop informed and educated citizens that are able to reason, think critically, and participate meaningfully in a republic. There’s little point in having a voting body of citizens unable to think for themselves, and are merely regurgitating ideas they hear.
You can check my other replies in this thread to understand better.
- That there is some outside agent that observes progress and "improves" someone
- That such progress can be quantified, and comparable
- That such measurement is the only way to acertain the truth of progress.
- That there is such a thing as an universal standard by which someone needs to be educated
- That the purpose of education is to produce productive members of society
- That a person starts education as a "blank slate", ready to be filled by what the teacher is teaching
- That the capacity to learn and the potential to be educated is fixed, and therefore, some should be selected for even further education
- That learning only happens when there's an outside agent educating the person
There are so many problematic things with this frame, even if it is fairly mainstream.
> The whole point of testing is to put them in hypothetical situations and grade their progress with purpose of being aware of their development so we can improve it.
Yes, that is the stated purpose, but it does not match reality. I have only seen a couple of examples of this approach to assessment in all of my years of education. Most teachers optimize for their time commitments and "coverage" of the syllabus material.
The whole point of testing is to put them in hypothetical situations and grade their progress with purpose of being aware of their development so we can improve it. Another thing we do is selecting the particularly good ones for further advanced training.
The problem with cheating is that it provides wrong data about their progress, you don't want to end up with a generation that cheated their way up without learning anything.
The selection for further training is probably not that big of a problem, its mostly about supply and demand and ChatGPT won't change that.