The internet age opened a million of possibilities to improve education: improved visual explanations, scalable access to the world's best educators, lowered friction to access students to work with, replayable lessons...
We mostly just kept the old model and placed an addictive device in front of children.
You mention the addictiveness of the devices, this probably plays a big role in shaping the outcome space.
It's just sad. I sometimes help kids with math, and it's amazing how screwed they are. Like, smart kids with good grades who are totally unable to do basic manipulations with fractions. I mean questions like "write 25% as a fraction". They are getting absolutely nothing from math classes. How could they? Even the best teacher in the world can't pause class for everyone when they realize that one of their students is missing some foundational concepts. That student is just going to get left farther and farther behind, and they will never catch up. It happens to almost every student at some point. They'll get sick for a week or just have their mind on other things, miss some important concept, and then be left behind forever.
I honestly have a hard time imagining how we would possibly make the situation any worse with technology honestly. But if you just took Math Academy and made students use that instead of their math classes, I bet 99% would have better understanding and fluency with math than they do now.
> Imagine asking a high-school math teacher to compute i^i. Almost none will be able to.
Mine could. And of those who couldn't they would have leveraged the technology available to them (Google) to find the answer with me, and would be able to make it make sense to me. This is an example of technology bettering my education.
There's many breadcrumbs like these, of a change in culture globally. 50s social expectations about expression and characters were way deeper. And it gradually fades away as life becomes comfy and entertainment based (80s+) I'd say.
Vs one for Patient Zero, the most popular song today: https://www.sheetmusicplus.com/en/product/patient-zero-24016...
The idea of an AI tutor that could step-by-step customize an education plan to each student and patiently apply every approach to getting the students to understand each lesson, is such an attractive vision.
Both of my kids chafed under lock step pacing of lessons, even in a school where disruptive or unmotivated students were pretty much nonexistent.
It’s terribly ironic that things like calculus, linear algebra and matrix manipulation were being weeded out of the curriculum, right before machine learning took off.
I suspect that it's a lot less about making children feel better and more about keeping the general population stupid and unable to think critically so that the ruling class can exploit them easier. The children of the ruling class are given the opportunity to be well educated by private institutions that are overpriced to keep out the poors.
If we're talking about the US; then it's simply the very healthy and functional economic inventive of students taking out lifetime loans to pay school tuition for schools that have not actually risen in quality or format in 40 years. The more students; the more money to the school board! Lower those bar riiight down!
Lazy kids these days amiright!
It’s not even a flyover state thing, if you just look at Wisconsin and Minnesota. It’s uniquely red state. Also Indiana department of transportation is terrible as well.
AI certainly seems to be making students much less competent.
1. Computers have allowed me to gather more information, access more journals, more results from around the world, but what really seems to matter in learning is just sitting down with a tiny bit of material like one book and REALLY understanding it.
2. Computers make things more distracting because while they make typing up reports, proofs, and assignments more efficient, there's actually just too much information. What really seems to help is having LESS information so there's some space to just think and work things out.
The fact is, what computers do is help you keep up with other people in the field, so they might accelerate progress at the research level, but what they don't do is help you become a rigorous, independent thinker.
Academia in fact has always been an uneasy tension between the two: building capable individuals and getting results and money for progress. Computers help with the latter - they certainly impede the former.
You still need to calculate calculus yourself long after you could buy books where the result is written in. That supposed "paradoxon" is not even specific to electronic tools. It's just that the point of education has never been to get results, but to exercise in as much as side paths as possible and memorable while following the path to the results. The result mostly get thrown away immediately.
Not everyone on hn is American or part of the Anglosphere.
if someone knew a better way to improve test scores without cheating on them, we'd use it. it's a very hard problem.
on the flip side it is pretty obvious how construction and manufacturing can be automated and what the impact will be. it's so obvious that we already tariff and ban stuff that, from our POV, is automated, like prefab buildings, for solely political reasons.