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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.
Education reform is, at least to me, one of the many things I no longer get particularly worked up about because even if the world's most optimized, ideal and effective curriculum (for any purpose) was introduced today, it would likely have a minimal effect on anything.
This is both because of AI, as you noted yourself, and because the main bottleneck is intelligence, especially combined with diligence. There are a few scalable ways to provide better educational outcomes, for example, we know that one-on-one tutoring is by far the most effective didactic method, yet it remains cost-prohibitive for public deployment.
Firstly, I don't expect a student entering pre-school or even middle-school today will ever be employable on the basis of what they learn in school, so at that point the debate looks to me more like an argument about what general knowledge and ethics are good to have in the citizenry, or more like an idle classical education for the purposes of being a well-rounded and erudite person, not someone who has to think for a living.
However, it's AI that promises a temporary flourishing of personalized tutoring. For a brief period in time, we have cheap, scalable models that are better in almost every way than the average school teacher available for personalized 1:1 tutoring for every kid alive. I certainly make full use of it to learn things, and will continue doing so after it makes me obsolete, because I enjoy learning.
That's not a bad thing, if we can be sure the AI isn't going to hallucinate "this author wrote this poem" (no they didn't) or that the word "potato" contains the letter "b".
But the major problem is the same one bedeviling conventional education today - kids who want to learn will, be that teacher, homeschooling, or AI. Kids who don't want to, won't. Johnny playing on his phone instead of listening to the fun! interactive! personal tutor! AI is not going to learn. And how do you make Johnny pay attention?
You studiously refrain from even using any LLM, so take it from me that hallucinations aren't a debilitating problem, and presumably teachers are going to check their students work in the first place. I don't deny it's an issue, but every new and improved model suffers from it less and less, and I don't think even you can claim that every statement made by a human teacher in class can be accepted as gospel truth.
They're already anal enough about not considering Wikipedia a "source", leaving aside it comes with its own citations for claims.
This isn't a problem that can be entirely solved today, far from it. But an AI had the benefits of having much more leeway in organizing a tailored curriculum, assessing mastery, rephrasing or reformulating knowledge and so on than a harassed teacher grappling with a class of 30 students.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the better and all that jazz.
Look, friend, we've had decades of exciting! new! educational! reform! that were going to absolutely alter all the fusty old ways of teaching, engage every child, lift every boat, mend the hole in your bucket, and I don't know what else.
iPads for the classrooms was the last iteration of "new fancy computer tech will entice kids to learn", and how is that going?
Somehow I'm still seeing stories about standards dropping like a stone, kids graduating without being able to read, gross misbehaviour in class, etc.
AI individual tutoring will work for the kids who want to learn. For the kids who can't, and especially the ones who don't want to learn, it'll be no more use than anything else. The kid who five minutes into the class starts throwing chairs around, either because of psychological problems or because he's a budding criminal, how is AI going to deal with that?
Taps sign: "Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good (or at least better)"
Existing, presumably 100% real human (not that they act like it) US teachers are largely powerless in the same situation, correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't even have the leeway to kick the little shit out of class, let alone rap them on the knuckles. This is the same line of thinking that prevents gifted students from entering fast track programs, because imagine the plight of those left behind!
So if helps those who can be helped, while not really making things worse for those who can't be fixed short of a good caning, what's there to lose?
There are plenty of intermediate situations between purely human teachers and purely artificial ones, you could simply have the electronics that each kid has come loaded with the AI so they can ask it questions, during class or after, about things they couldn't quite get. Or have it tell the human teacher where the kid is struggling.
I think GPT-4 is a better tutor than the average human teacher, certainly if given a curriculum to follow and metrics to track, but even if it's worse, it seems to be clearly additive to the capabilities of having the human around while not costing much.
See, that's the thing. If your individually tailored AI is - let's be blunt here - run along the lines of streaming or segregation or the other methods whereby children were sorted out into classes based on academic ability, it might work.
That doesn't mean the less academic kids are condemned to the 'stupid pile'; AI tuition for woodworking and metalwork classes (I think materials technology is the fancy new name) and practical subjects would be great, also.
But that does mean Johnny with the anger management issues needs to be in a separate class, and probably still needs human teacher supervision. That's not even the main problem, because if Johnny gets proper support, he may do as well as he can.
What we need - and what nobody wants to do - is separate out the troublemakers. Forget the bleeding-heart stuff about "school to prison pipeline"; if Johnny or Jamal or Jésus is smashing up stuff, dealing drugs, assaulting other students and teachers, and not paying a second's attention to any attempt to teach him something useful, then boot him out. Schools would love to do this, but for a combination of reasons - the political lack of will, the bureaucratic social worker belief in not doing anything because of culture or not imposing values, the legal requirement that children get an education which means that parents will go to court to force some unlucky school to take their little budding Al Capone for daycare because they don't want him hanging round at home - they can't.
I've seen early school leavers programmes, and the result there depends on the same thing: motivation. A kid who drops out of ordinary school but does want to turn their life around will work in that environment. A kid who is bored, surly, and violent, and only interested in weed, sex, and easy money, hence moving towards crime all of their own volition, won't do anything except waste time until they're finally old enough to be sent to adult prison.
AI on its own won't work, if the expectations are "this will solve the problem of dropping out, lack of attainment, illiteracy, crime, and so forth" - and those expectations will be loaded onto it! - because the roots of those are in social conditions as much as intelligence or academic ability. And until we're willing to look that Gorgon in the eye - that Jamal or Johnny may not be salvageable - then all the happy techo-optimism that this time this fix will work for sure - well, you know what I think there.
What solutions do you prefer instead?
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