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I’m going to do a write up of how I think education curriculum should be reformed. For context: I went through highschool in Ontario, Canada. The way it worked was from kindergarten to grade 8, we’d have a set curriculum every kid in the grade followed, with lots of english and math classes, some science classes, history, geography, French, and gym, and one each of art, music, and health classes a week. Then starting in grade 9, which is highschool, we are given two elective choices, where we choose a minimum of one between art, drama, and music, and the second may also be a general technology course or a general business course. Each year of high school there are more electives choices offered and fewer mandatory courses, with the priorities of what the school system requires us take being the same as elementary school. There were also choices between more difficult and easier options for some classes like math, english, and science as well. Universities and colleges would also require higher level math and sciences for STEM programs too, and there is a standardised literacy test needed to graduate.
I think a lot of people when talking about school want to just add more requirements without thinking about what to cut. It’s very easy to say “all kids should learn to program” or “all kids should have PE every day”, but if you’re adding you either have to keep kids there longer, or cut something. First, I think the elementary school program is basically good, I wouldn’t change anything there. Maybe take a little of time out of science and add it to more PE.
For highschool, I would start more drastically reworking it. First, I would basically replace English with history in the mandatory curriculum for everyone who is literate. Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events. You gain the same “critical thinking” skills analysing what motivated the people in WWI to conflict as you do analysing what motivated the people in Hamlet to conflict, plus it actually happened, giving it substantially more value. The same english classes will be kept as optional electives, like how history is optional in higher grades now. Science will only be mandatory in grade 9, and computer science will be mandatory in grade 10.
Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.
There will be extra emphasis on making sure every single person who graduates is literate and numerate. I wouldn’t really require anything else to hand out a highschool diploma, but if they can’t do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, they don’t get the diploma. They’re stuck in adult night classes until they can or they give up. Ontario high schools also require 40 hours of volunteer community service which I like and anywhere else that doesn’t have that should implement it.
It might be a good idea to have a class on how to get the most out of AI too because it’s looking like that’s becoming an ever more important skill, but it’s changing so fast I don’t know.
It is a bit interesting to me that very, very few educational reform proposals I hear ever mention that we should be teaching and implementing epistemics as a core, fundamental aspect of any well-rounded curriculum. It seems almost self-evident and yet...
It's cliche to say that "education should be about teaching you how to think, not what to think," but I think that's actually a pretty decent goal. I'm not say you completely excise the 'rote memorization' aspects, but perhaps also provide the tools that make that rote memorization useful.
Seriously. Shouldn't we be able to at least ensure that someone who graduates high school has the ability to consider the truth-value of a statement and at least weigh whether they should incorporate the statement into their beliefs about the world or not? That they're able to make predictions based on limited evidence and reject falsehoods when there are actual consequences on the line.
And working off the assumption that not many students will be capable of autistically applying Bayes' Theorem to every new piece of evidence they encounter, it would still be pretty useful to teach the variety of heuristics that have a proven track record and teach the more blatant fallacies to avoid, and provide them with ample opportunities to learn in a controlled environment how to detect when people are lying or when the evidence isn't strong enough to support the purported conclusions, and to notice when someone is just trying to manipulate them.
Epistemics is like the ONE truly useful branch of philosophy, so it seems like making students slog through Ethical, Political, and Aesthetic philosophers without addressing the foundations of knowledge is a backwards approach to 'classical' education.
I say all this already knowing that even if we taught all students how to ascertain truth, the real lesson of high school is how to navigate complex social environments and to identify where you are situated in the hierarchy and, from that, what beliefs you need to adopt and which signals you need to send in order to maintain or improve your status.
And that's a core of human psychology that has been engrained into us over millions of years, so any lessons about how to think better will, in most cases, be suborned to the innate need to fit in with and protect the tribe.
So it's not like I expect teaching epistemics to produce a generation of enlightened thinkers, it just seems like its a bare minimum that ought to be done to ensure education isn't merely brainwashing/propagandizing with some math and science tacked on.
(Yes, I know that from the perspective of the state and ideological actors, the brainwashing is in fact that point)
I'll second this one. Learning about epistemology in college was extremely helpful for me. It seems pretty core to the idea of what we think of as critical thinking. Who is telling me this information? Why are they telling it to me? Why do I believe X? What makes X true? Are all important questions to be asking and to be able to answer to understand the world around you. Especially appreciating the distinction between why you believe a thing and what would need to be the case for a thing to be true.
I am not sure about teaching Bayes Theorem or specific fallacies, but I think teaching students the ability to reflect on their beliefs and how they formed them would be very valuable. School itself is rife with opportunities for this since most of the time you learn things by trusting the testimony of a teacher or some other expert source rather than by direct firsthand experience of the facts that establish something as true.
Yes, there's an irony in that if you do really well at traditional academics, you're basically training yourself to accept the word of an authority figure as truth.
"Teacher lectured on this topic, the textbooks confirmed their teachings, and then I was tested on my ability to accurately recite the teachings! What a useful way to discover the truth!"
It'd be interesting, for example, if teachers explicitly told students that they'd be slipping occasional falsehoods into the lessons and teaching them as true, and that there were extra credit available to anyone who not only could identify the falsehoods, but explain exactly how they figured out it was false.
Its a good exercise to test one's epistimics AND to teach that authority figures occasionally (lol) outright lie to you!
I'd say that's a good idea, and what should have been done, but these days what will happen is that someone will copy paste lecture transcripts into an LLM and have it find the error and explain it lol. I suppose that does still deserve points for diligence.
I recall a professor back in med school who did do that, and I'm particularly proud of catching several of the bugs myself, even if I suspect a handful were simply him misspeaking from memory instead of being intentional heh.
Actually, medicine might be a bad idea for such tricks, plenty of things are outright counter-intuitive or edge-cases where we need to memorize where the heuristics fail. If you try this before the students have a good fundamental underpinning of theory and some practise, they might well never figure out where they went astray unless they crack out a textbook and pour over every claim.
Or the more traditional pre-Internet failure mode: the student knows better than the teacher, finds "intentional" errors that are unintentional and just the teacher not knowing better, and gets punished for it.
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Also probably true, but I'll also say that if we have LLMs that are reliably able to spot and correct actual falsehoods we're probably in a world that is a little epistemically safer for the average person than our current one.
But this will tip into my other concern that people will become utterly reliant on AI tools for information, and thus almost ALL of their knowledge will ultimately rest on an appeal to authority. "The AI says this was true, no need to question that."
And finally, I do think relying on authority is not the worst thing people can do! If you've found an actual reliable source of information then you can choose to simply take most of what they say as accurate! I have a handful of people I follow on Twitter who I believe are making a good faith effort to be correct about complex issues, so when they summarize things or make a prediction, I lend them a lot of credence. Because I don't have the energy to assess every single claim I encounter for accuracy, myself.
But there's gotta be some bedrock somewhere where the person(s) making certain claims actually care about getting it right.
Entirely dependent on your standards for "reliability" in my eyes. I have found SOTA models adequate for that purpose in almost everything I've cared to try, and I have checked to see whether they were providing corrections that had a basis in objective fact. It's not perfect, but I say we're past "good enough" to catch anything the teacher says that they already expect diligent students to notice.
I broadly agree with the rest of your comment, I'm happy to defer to Scott for most things, even if I do disagree with certain things he's said, and there are certainly plenty of crime-thinkers on Twitter I follow because I trust them to give me information that's both true and suppressed because it's outside the general Overton Window.
If, say, we had an aligned AGI that proved itself to be smarter and more capable in terms of answering questions I had of it, including taking into account my values where relevant, I'd have few qualms about eventually handing over my decision making to it. But if I had a route to improving my own cognition to the point where I didn't need it, being able to match it myself, I'd prefer that.
I think we should probably continue exercising caution with current LLMs due to their propensity to hallucinate, especially if given a prompt that encourages such.
And since they're able to do internet searches now, we're hinging some of their reliability/truthfulness on the accuracy of the internet at large which... well, you know why we're here on THIS site rather than on Reddit.
I suspect that I won't be ready to accept LLM's as 'oracles'/truth-sayers until they've got the ability to tap into the real world directly and explain their reasoning for their logic.
If I ask ChatGPT "Is the sun currently shining right now"
I don't want it to just say "Based on your location data (which I scraped from your browser) I figured out what your time zone is and based on weather reports for your zip code is appears that it is a bright and sunny day!"
I'd want to hear something like "I've checked several camera feeds from various locations around the globe and it appears the sun is shining brightly in the following areas []."
This is definitely the future I want but ain't sure I'm gonna get it.
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