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simonw 5 hours ago [-]
> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said.
Sounds right to me. Kids under 13 need to learn to read, write and comprehend text. Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.
They can play with AI at home, and after 13 they can learn how to use AI productively and, ideally, in a way that enhances rather than detracts from their education.
Also from the story:
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
A big hooray for that. Will be interesting to see what impact that has on Norway education - a quick search just now didn't turn up any detailed studies, presumably those will show up eventually.
WalterBright 1 hours ago [-]
I'd ban all technology in the classroom.
What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.
You'll never get strong by watching a video of people lifting weights. Similarly, you'll never understand math by watching a video or having an AI do the work for you. And, somehow, writing out the words and equations by hand is very effective for learning.
> I'd ban all technology in the classroom. What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.
You've prohibited technology and then listed four technologies. "Technology" needs a more concrete definition. Calculators? Computers? TVs? Overhead projectors? Musical instruments?
ajsnigrutin 3 minutes ago [-]
This is nitpicking
And sure, kids 6-13 don't need calculators, basic stuff, like multiplication tables is memorized.
tacomagick 60 minutes ago [-]
I do not think your example is at all fair. You can definitely learn from the way AI solves a math question.
WalterBright 48 minutes ago [-]
> You can definitely learn from the way AI solves a math question.
Challenge: learn some math from AI. Sleep on it. Duplicate it on paper the next day.
kcrwfrd_ 7 minutes ago [-]
It’s not math but I’m using AI to help study and learn DSA. I’m finding it helpful.
But yeah you need to make attempts to apply what you’re learning and answer questions on your own. You can’t simply watch problems being solved (whether by an AI or a person) and retain it.
tacomagick 47 minutes ago [-]
Is this supposed to be difficult?
WalterBright 20 minutes ago [-]
Try it and see.
techpression 10 minutes ago [-]
Not really, you might understand it in the moment, but to learn something you need to do actual work.
An example is, watch a thousand hours on photography, how to take great photos.
Go out and try to take great photos, you will fail. This is why all serious tutors keep saying ”stop watching and go out and take photos, every day, all the time”.
I don’t know Rust, but I can understand AI outputting some Rust code if I ask it to. Two days later I won’t be able to write it again.
WalterBright 59 minutes ago [-]
Here's how to tell if their homework is done by AI: if the homework was much better quality than the in-class work.
maplethorpe 25 minutes ago [-]
Not always. I once got accused of cheating at University because my take-home assignment was so much better than my in class work. At home there was no pressure to perform. I could practice and try things.
WalterBright 18 minutes ago [-]
I once was accused of cheating as well, as my term paper was "too good". (Long before computers.) I brought in my cites (books) the next day and dumped it on his desk. He grudgingly changed the grade from F to A.
Nothing is perfect.
bawolff 22 minutes ago [-]
If your in class work is of the same quality as homework you are obviously not trying very hard.
truncate 4 hours ago [-]
Totally agree!
For anyone who still thinks kids should use AI, another argument to make is we are still figuring out AI (hence the constant debate on it, hype, uncertainty, boundaries of its capabilities etc etc). I don't think anyone with right mind can disagree with that. Keeping that mind, wouldn't it make sense to at-the-very-least tread with caution when it comes to kids.
iwontberude 3 hours ago [-]
Whether they should or not is a moot point. They are using it and we need to figure out how to organise society to deal with it.
rwmj 3 hours ago [-]
We're in like year 2 or 3 of LLMs being serious tools, still with many disadvantages over humans. There's plenty of time to figure things out, we don't need to experiment on children right now.
Nux 3 hours ago [-]
Return to pen and paper, particularly for testing.
Extend school time for doing supervised "homework" that doesn't involve the Internet.
Like that?
NDlurker 22 minutes ago [-]
I don't understand what the controversy is in the US about banning phones in schools. I graduated highschool in the mid 2000s and cell phones were just starting to gain adoption in my town in the last couple years I was in school. I don't recall anyone using a phone in class, but Game Boys were definitely not allowed. I was surprised when I found out that kids were regularly on their phones in class. Why was that ever allowed? Did it get too hard to enforce and they gave up on it until recently?
theptip 3 hours ago [-]
> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.
I think it's more complex than this.
AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.
The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.)
On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.
wffurr 3 hours ago [-]
There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
LLMs are able to talk for a very long while now. Have you ever used Gemini as an assistant? It can even put in related images about your query and while it can use an improvement it can spell more or less.
rwmj 2 hours ago [-]
It's far from clear that this helps you to learn anything. More likely it's a way for most people to avoid having to think or learn.
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.
hparadiz 2 hours ago [-]
I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
KittenInABox 2 hours ago [-]
The thing I think is underspoken in this space is that LLMs will always hallucinate a bit. How will you know as a 13 year old that an LLM is not conversing truth at you?
hparadiz 1 hours ago [-]
My teachers were frequently wrong too and spoke with authority on subjects in hindsight they were frankly ill equipped to teach. Part of learning is understanding how to reason through these types of issues. It's a common problem solving problem in the work place just the same.
beepbooptheory 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah but the teacher says you're wrong even if you're right. The AI tells you you're right either way. The former can facilitate an important lesson, the latter doesn't ever give you the chance to.
hparadiz 1 hours ago [-]
I've been doing things like accounting where I upload receipts and have the LLM adjust a Google sheet with the money balances. The error rate over the past year has dropped from occasionally to never. That is because there's sub agents now running that check the work. If you have multiple LLMs running with a 94% success rate but you throw them into a group that requires a consensus suddenly the number basically hits 99%.
beepbooptheory 1 hours ago [-]
We simply need to run sub agents on the children's learning, then we will maximize pedagogic efficiency to 99%.
grayhatter 1 hours ago [-]
> [AI is] the best technology ever invented for learning.
About to get margin called on all your sketchy AI investments? Or just trying to recover from the most egregious example of the worst set of interactions any individual has ever had in any school system?
tacomagick 1 hours ago [-]
Ad hominem.
BobbyTables2 2 hours ago [-]
Learning is also impacted when homework/test questions are created and graded by AI.
The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map…
Why have teachers?
The AI might as well grade
itself.
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
Hard agree. AI generated questions should be absolutely forbidden. In our university I helped a instructor set up a custom Gemini Gem to let students grade themselves in recording because we did not have time to read the final scores in time, It was a nightmare to restrict or get consistent results.
runarberg 2 hours ago [-]
> and the best technology ever invented for learning.
This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement.
Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.
alexashka 2 hours ago [-]
Stupid people never have the appetite or ability to 'tackle' anything. It's their defining characteristic.
It's not more complex than stupid people in charge, stupid results follow. Smart people with integrity in charge, good things follow.
AI changes nothing.
20k 2 hours ago [-]
AI is a terrible teacher though. It makes stuff up all the time, and for some subjects it has a remarkably low accuracy rate
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
I would argue it has gotten way better. Depending on the subject it can be really helpful and some tools even have a learning mode built in now that can generate questions and tests. They are often way too easy to solve but it does not demotivate i guess.
runarberg 2 hours ago [-]
It has always gotten better, just like how self-driving cars have gotten better, and how the case for bitcoin is always getting stronger.
Many people have stopped believing this lie. Yes AI has gotten better by some metric which AI companies are pushing. It has not gotten good enough to be a qualified teacher, and it never will.
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
I have never claimed it to be good enough to replace a qualified educator, however for self learning it is a good tool with no hustle. You also consider how qualified some educators are...
hparadiz 2 hours ago [-]
It's far superior in many cases. Teachers get tired, lose patience, etc.
runarberg 1 hours ago [-]
Better then what for self-learning though? Better then textbooks? Better then an online course? Better then watching youtube videos from Khan academy, or just better then nothing at all as described some metrics which the AI companies came up with them selves?
I suspect it is the last one. This is a trillion dollar industry and if the AI companies claim this, then they should be able to to show it with quality research, they however have not, and the reason is that this is a lie. AI is not better then anything for self-learning. Go to the library and check out a chess book, go to r/trumpet, join a weekly meetup to practice you Spanish, etc. etc. all of these are vastly superior then AI.
You claim self-learning via is hustle free, perhaps you are right, however I suspect that there is no such thing as hustle free learning. If you want to learn something you have to use your brain, and you have to struggle. AI will just act like you got this, flatter you for a minute, and in the worst cases, you may start to believe the AI when it lies to you about how much you’ve learned.
tacomagick 1 hours ago [-]
I agree with the last part, however I disagree with the others. To learn something you can't just watch or just read, I personally try to do both, first watch to get a basic grasp, then read to get some of the finer details. It stimulates a bigger area of my brain and lets me remember it faster. AI comes in as a helper to this cycle, creating me a study plan letting me know what to focus on, finding me videos on the topic and sorting them on their success rates based on their comments and finding sources. It lets me ask it questions about parts i find difficult or don't comprehend fully. To go beyond it can create an hour long audio discussion about the topic, create flash cards for me to import to Anki, it can create video summaries for me, it can transcribe the videos and let me know which time mark is a topic i want to focus on is at. These are not lies these are self experience. I am a student too, you know.
vovavili 1 hours ago [-]
>Better then textbooks? Better then an online course? Better then watching youtube videos from Khan academy, or just better then nothing at all as described some metrics which the AI companies came up with them selves?
The value of all of these self-learning routes has increased enormously due to existence of AI assistants. At least the way I do it now, I get the initial structure for a subject from YouTube/Udemy/textbooks and then fill out my personal comprehension gaps with the help of AI. You can even point AI to a specific material you're trying to grasp and usually it will rephrase a point you failed to get in a simpler language.
Previously, you'd need some trained person to explain to you something that led you to hit a roadblock. Now, the level of understanding you get easily beats most of the tutors in public schools or community colleges.
runarberg 1 hours ago [-]
> The value of all of these self-learning routes has increased enormously due to existence of AI assistants.
This is a lie and most of us know it. AI companies have been lying and lying and lying and lying. If you believe this then the AI companies have successfully lied to you and are making you pay money for an inferior product. If this weren’t a lie then the AI companies should have the research to prove it, they have not, because it is not true. AI does not help anybody learn anything better then using traditional methods.
vovavili 1 hours ago [-]
So my personal experience apparently is a folly that requires some bureaucratically approved scientific study to validate?
runarberg 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, it is well known that people trying to sell you stuff lie about your experience with the product. A good salesmen will make you extremely happy to pay 10x more for a worse product. In fact a good salesman will convince you those bugs are actually feature, and you should be happy to pay 10x for so many “features”.
vovavili 59 minutes ago [-]
What exactly am I selling here?
enraged_camel 2 hours ago [-]
>> It makes stuff up all the time
There are a few reasons AI is not the best teacher, but this is not one of them because teachers are also frequently wrong. I say that as someone who comes from a family of teachers, ranging from kindergarten to PhD.
And here is the problem: unlike AI, a lot of teachers don’t like being questioned or challenged. If your teacher doesn’t know a subject well, and you realize this, your options as a student are pretty limited. This is especially true at lower grades.
I don’t believe that AI can replace teachers. But, if used well, it can supplement them. I think Norway is making the right call here with elementary schools, but I wouldn’t support this kind of policy at higher grades where levels.
JimsonYang 3 hours ago [-]
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
I remember seeing an nyt article where there was mixed results on cell phone bans. While they increased socialization among students, the school didnt see better test scores.
We'll have to see if a ban on AI can improve test scores-I am bullish on the idea tho
Jakob 2 hours ago [-]
I would see that as an absolute win. Socialization is the main point I send my kids to school.
Socialization leads to discourse which leads to learning.
JimsonYang 2 hours ago [-]
I agree but unfortunately the US education budget is driven by test scores.
Unless theres strong evidence that test scores will increase, Karen from the PTA insists that her child be given access to their phone
cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago [-]
Here in Ontario they "banned" phones in class/school and the teens just ignore it and the teachers are unable/scared to enforce it. As parents we've tried over and over with both our kids to lay down the law -- including taking phones away, consequences etc -- but the attitude is intense with both them and their peers and enforcement becomes very difficult once they're out of "child account" parental control range.
It's a shitty time to be a parent of a teen.
kevin_thibedeau 1 hours ago [-]
Canadian schools operate under the principle of in loco parentis. Your administrators are just unwilling to do their jobs. If they laid down strict policies of zero tolerance and consequences for offenders that inconvenience the parents there would be compliance. Any parent not on board with such policies can send their kids elsewhere.
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
How about if we target the social media apps for their predatory algorithms?
cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago [-]
That's precisely what needs to happen.
That said, my youngest just reads gaming wikis and hangs out on Discords for roguelike video games and this somehow consumes 900% of their attention span.
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
I'd say that's one of the best ways to spend time. It's okay to have a hobby even if it's just rougelike games. Much better than doomscrolling on Tiktok in every way.
cmrdporcupine 1 hours ago [-]
Not when it takes precedence over... doing your math homework, touching grass, communicating with a real flesh and blood friend (or parent/sibling), showering...
tacomagick 1 hours ago [-]
That's wildly putting things off track. I meant spend time as in free time. I assumed and took for granted things such as showering or doing homework was already done and dusted. Other than that I think students do see each other at school every day anyway so communication is not as desperate as one might think.
shusaku 21 minutes ago [-]
Connect the dots also banned, though there is some discussion of loosening the rules to allow interpolating up to four points.
testfrequency 2 hours ago [-]
Why is this the most upvoted comment, yet when the UK repents teens form social media it’s met with “aDulTs arE bEiNg monItoRed”.
I agree with Norway here, and it’s slightly exhausting to see people attack any country that’s trying to protect kids as somehow coming for everyone’s supposed sovereignty.
I care about the youth and know they are in the midst of a culture war with adults, leave them out of it until we figure out a path forward.
edit: (crazy to see +11 on my comment, and also -1 when refreshing. Clearly my comment is divisive. This is honestly validating that adults simply cannot find common ground in this topic - especially HN)
mattnewton 2 hours ago [-]
Because banning smartphones in schools doesn’t affect adults not in those schools, whereas age verification does?
How you implement these protections matter.
testfrequency 2 hours ago [-]
The rhetoric I often see online is forcing children to identify themselves which, obviously leads to adults being required to identify themselves.
How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?
It’s all complicated, but I am exhausted from reading doom articles of how the UK wants adults to not exist online while trying to force children offline for their own existence and long term health..
It’s worth me noting that I’m extremely liberal, but I’ve admittedly been failing to see how we keep children safe online without forcing identity of adulthood. We do not allow teens to buy cigarettes or vapes based on vibes either, right?
(please correct or roast me, I really am struggling with this and am tired of reading refutes that are not productive)
mattnewton 1 hours ago [-]
In my view, it’s very simple. There are places like schools, or parents buying phone plans, to identify children. Will some children get access outside of that? Sure. But 100% enforcement isn’t possible even if you thought it was worth destroying privacy on the internet.
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
Is Norway forcing all internet users to provide their ID to access all internet services?
testfrequency 2 hours ago [-]
So how would you know who is who?
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
Some other way without making all internet usage identifiable, like maybe parents start parenting? The UK laws aren't even to protect children anyway. It is just a shell to identify everyone online.
testfrequency 2 hours ago [-]
Everyone says this..it’s not working! The more kids are online, the less traditional parenting is working. It worked when I was younger, I didn’t know any better. Nowadays, a kid can go on Reddit or Roblox and be told otherwise. We had Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica..
..now kids have /r/ihatemyfamily or #fuckeverything
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
So your solution is to deanonymize the whole internet? Also can't teenagers ever vent? I would much rather them use websites such as Reddit or Facebook to socialize instead of Instagram or Tiktok to just scroll endlessly. We should target the social media apps for their predatory algorithms I believe.
testfrequency 2 hours ago [-]
Look, I don’t disagree. Kids need a safe space to moan. It would be hypocritical of me otherwise, as I spent much of my time in my formative years on ventrilo and various other niche pockets of the internet.
That said, the only cess pool that existed at the time was 4chan - which I avoided, despite actually knowing the founder.
The internet has obviously evolved a lot since, and I feel adults unfairly believe that all persons deserve the fully open internet. We’ve clearly reached beyond the point where most companies care about children, as it’s all profit at the end of the day for engagement. If you keep up with Apple, it’s no surprise they concisely spent a large portion of their precious WWDC showcase on child safety. There’s obvious pressure on them, but I also believe firmly Apple is fully aware the online world cannot behave the same way it has with children having access more easily than ever. It’s not like families share a single desktop computer anymore in the living room where all can see…
My (probably) bad comparison is still vapes and porn. Why should kids be allowed to purchase and view this online, but if they went into a retail store they would be denied? Why the double standard? Why immediately presume it’s about tracking adults? What proof do we have that identity verification is leading to adults being scrutinised and tracked? It all just feels like a tin foil hat fan fiction that has no proven purpose other than conspiracy and proof that every person should never be restricted, regardless of age.
tacomagick 1 hours ago [-]
Blocking acess to porn sites is as easy as setting up a firewall, my phone carrier has a feature called family shield, Google Parental Tools lets you see which websites your kid accessed, and restrict them. You do not need to ID everyone in order to let them access the internet. Did the past generations never got their hands on porn back then? Of course they did one way or another. Same with vapes or cigarettes or alcohol. There will always be a website out there that will provide free porn with no ID restriction residing in god knows where. This ID verification is useless and while it appears to be in good faith unfortunately it is not. I'd recommend watching a few videos about this such as this one from Louis Rossmann
In the end, yes there is a possibility that this won't happen, but there is a much bigger possibility that it will happen based on the track record of past bills.
cindyllm 2 hours ago [-]
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dev1ycan 2 hours ago [-]
13? there is no reason a minor should use a brain rotting technology like AI, in fact, AI for pretty much most teens is way WAY more damaging than even tiktok ever was.
tacomagick 2 hours ago [-]
Care to elaborate with an example?
aaron695 5 hours ago [-]
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irishcoffee 5 hours ago [-]
Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8. I don’t even like LLMs and I’m against this mess. Imagine having regulations rolled out when we were 8 saying “you can’t use the internet!” And I was running my own websites by 10 years old.
Let’s stop pretending this tech is as interesting as we wish it was. If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet. I don’t see the difference at this point.
simonw 5 hours ago [-]
> Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8
A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.
> Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent.
> Adults at level 1 are able to locate information on a text page, find a relevant link from a website, and identify relevant text among multiple options when the relevant information is explicitly cued. They can understand the meaning of short texts, as well as the organization of lists or multiple sections within a single page.
28% of US adults are just at or below that level.
froh 4 hours ago [-]
in the intermediate oecd [piaacs report] pages 64ff (PDF page 66ff) there are bar charts indicating the percentiles of each level for each participating nation.
the report also visualizes not only inter country but also intra country outcomes correlating socio economic influences (age, parents, family migration history, ...) and level of education (school, high school, college and higher) with test outcome (literacy, numerics problem solving)
it also has 10y ago/now comparison.
a trove for the Q "how are we doing, capability wise?"
>A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.
Yes and AI isn't to blame for that as adults predate AI. It's the governments, schools, teachers, parents, teacher's unios, who taught them(or more accurately didn't teach them) and graduated them out of school anyway regardless just so they don't look bad in statistics. Sorry but if you graduate people out of high school who can't read you should be trialed for fraud. Simple as.
People blaming AI for adults unable to read puts us back to the 90s when Doom was to blame for school shootings or back to 60s when rock music was to blame for juvenile delinquency, all of them being wrong, and they're wrong here too. People always want to blame a third party external scapegoat that isn't' the parents and isn't the government, for the problems of their kids.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
Nobody is blaming AI. The point is we don’t have the luxury of throwing nonsense at our kids when they’re illiterate. Particularly not nonsense where all the evidence shows it harms on average more than it helps.
embedding-shape 3 hours ago [-]
Just wanna start off by saying that with young unformed minds, it does probably harm more on average than it helps. But particularly for spelling and reading, it might maybe actually help?
To be efficient with AI and LLMs you need to be good at least two things, reading and writing. One easy way of getting better is by reading a lot, and writing a lot. Maybe if we coax the kids into understanding (believing?) that better reading and writing helps them use AI better, they'd pay more attention to it?
wccrawford 3 hours ago [-]
No, you can talk to them, and have them talk back. And it's really easy. You don't need to be good at reading or writing to use it.
simonw 5 hours ago [-]
AI hasn't had a chance to demonstrate if it helps or hurts education yet.
That's the big problem with education in general. If you introduce a new factor to children's education you can't realistically measure the effect it has had for about five years, because you need to wait for a cohort of kids to go through that system and then see how they did.
This means that if you introduce something with clear negative effects it will be five years before you spot them!
That's pretty catastrophic given that ChatGPT only emerged in late 2022 and only got good around early 2024.
coryrc 2 hours ago [-]
That's not true, it absolutely depends on effect size. I'll give you an obvious example: large lead acetate infusions. You'll notice pretty fast.
simonw 5 hours ago [-]
Right, AI isn't to blame for that, but cell phones might be? The bad number increased from 19 to 28 percent between 2017 and 2023.
rootusrootus 5 hours ago [-]
Someone always finds a way to shit on the US. Every single time.
kubb 5 hours ago [-]
When quoting a factual statistic is "shitting on the US", you're losing the ability to address issues.
Planktonne 5 hours ago [-]
The US is a context that is generally relevant to HN, and for which we have lots of data.
Literacy is a worldwide problem.
hparadiz 2 hours ago [-]
The United States has always been at the forefront of pushing higher literacy both internally and world wide. We have just had multiple crazy tech breakthroughs, a world wide pandemic, and various other uncontrolled variables like SAT tests no longer being required at some institutions. It's impossible to draw any conclusions with so many moving pieces but ultimately I'm sure we'll figure it out. A slight regression isn't the end of the world.
Planktonne 22 minutes ago [-]
Your 'slight regression' has lasted a lot longer than the last ten years, and is a real problem that has a significant effect on many people's lives. Again, this is not uniquely a US problem, but it is a problem.
Jingoistic deflection doesn't change that.
simonw 5 hours ago [-]
In this case it's the US that's shitting on the US. These numbers don't compare the US with other countries, they compare the US in 2023 with the US in 2017. And the numbers are from the US government National Center for Education Statistics.
vinyl7 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah well unfortunately the US is pretty shitty in this day and age
darlachaps 3 hours ago [-]
You poor, pathetic, piece of shit.
Maybe it’s because the US is a statistically a shithole? Just maybe we should do something to fix that?
But no, let’s dismantle science, health, education, etc instead.
Fucking magot idiots.
greggoB 5 hours ago [-]
Price of ruling the world I guess
llbbdd 5 hours ago [-]
It's lonely at the top
throw4847285 4 hours ago [-]
No one likes us, I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try...
(Just mixing my Randy Newman metaphors for fun. I could have also thrown in a few words in defense of our country)
platevoltage 4 hours ago [-]
imagine still thinking we are at the top. The empire is crumbling.
zemvpferreira 5 hours ago [-]
From what I can tell the average school at best can aspire to teach kids how to work and how to socialize. That's it. I'd personally be very happy with computers mostly going away from school too. Most actual learning and exploring will hopefully happen at home.
varenc 3 hours ago [-]
Those are important skills schools teach, but I'm skeptical that most learning happens at home. I strongly suspect most adults learned to read and write because of the education they received in school, not home. Especially when it comes to the high school level and learning things like how to structure an essay or more advanced math. I doubt many parents are having their 16 year olds write essays and do trigonometry problems on the weekend.
watwut 5 hours ago [-]
This is really not true. Kids do actually learn a lot in school - includong weak students. And you actually see huge difference between places with and without schools.
paytonjjones 5 hours ago [-]
> and you actually see huge difference
Correlation, causation, and all that
bebe83939 5 hours ago [-]
Many kids in Norwegian schools do not speak Norwegian or English. Kids need "computers" just to translate what other kid is saying.
throwaway2037 3 hours ago [-]
This is true for many children of non-English speaking immigrant parents anywhere in the developed world. Schools will use language immersion and extra help to get these kids up to speed very quickly. Computers are sometimes used for educational games and activities, but these can be done just as well without.
Can I guess that you are (native/ethnic) Norwegian and upset by the recent waves of immigration to Norway? Your comment is very specific, plus you used a new throwaway account.
stackghost 4 hours ago [-]
Do you have a source for this?
assimpleaspossi 3 hours ago [-]
I didn't have the internet when I was in school. Neither did my kids till they got to college. We've all gone pretty far. For myself, that's in the technology world as a software engineer.
cryo32 5 hours ago [-]
At eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills. They need a lot longer to develop those in tandem.
And also you may be above average there.
stackghost 4 hours ago [-]
>At eight they have limited comprehension of the world around them and limited language skills.
I have two kids and can confidently say eight year olds generally have good language skills, are capable of expressing themselves just fine, and have good comprehension of the parts of the world that they've been exposed to.
cryo32 4 hours ago [-]
So they can conduct a nuanced debate then?
Mine couldn’t until they were much older. And I have more so perhaps that’s more statistically valid?
stackghost 4 hours ago [-]
>So they can conduct a nuanced debate then?
Oh, can I move the goalposts too?
orwin 4 hours ago [-]
Can they identify easy stylistic device, like an extended metaphor or an anaphora?
Because until they do, I will consider their comprehension skills limited.
mh- 2 hours ago [-]
I guess you can consider mine limited too.
ilovecake1984 4 hours ago [-]
8 years olds shouldn’t be using the internet.
beejiu 5 hours ago [-]
When I was 8, I could use the Internet at school but every website was whitelisted.
sumeno 3 hours ago [-]
> If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet.
Now we're talkin'
I'm all for it, let's teach kids the fundamentals of the world without relying on computers before we introduce them
slashdev 3 hours ago [-]
They can use it at home.
Using it school is likely undermining their learning.
pertymcpert 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, there's also a push to ban all computers in classrooms because data is showing that it's of no benefit and if anything is a negative effect on education.
throwaway2037 3 hours ago [-]
There is also a push to ban certain childhood vaccines amoungst crazy people in the US. What is being said here, really?
Example: what if Internet access was removed, but the computer remained? It would still be very useful.
xboxnolifes 5 hours ago [-]
If you think an 8 year old can comprehend text at the same level of a 13 year old (or an 18 year old for that matter), I don't know what to tell you. Reading comprehension doesn't peak at 8.
lukan 4 hours ago [-]
"and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
A big hooray for that."
I don't suppose they are allowed to use physical violence again, still I would like to know what exactly you are cheering here for?
simonw 4 hours ago [-]
I was cheering for the phones bit. I honestly hadn't noticed the dark undertones of "enforce discipline".
b112 3 hours ago [-]
That's not dark, that's love.
lukan 3 hours ago [-]
It can be. But some also love dark shit.
ddp26 5 hours ago [-]
You mean chatgpt style AI won't help them with those skills?
If a human parent or teacher can help with skills like reading, an AI system can too, once it's trained and designed to do so. (How good are humans at teaching reading anyway?)
stackghost 5 hours ago [-]
>How good are humans at teaching reading anyway?
Writing developed thousands of years BCE. So, considering we as a species have been successfully teaching our offspring how to read for hundreds of generations, I'd say we're probably pretty decent at it.
bcrosby95 4 hours ago [-]
It's funny how people let cultural narratives get in the way of actual analysis. I think some of it is modern convenience has made us intolerant of any imperfection then they label even minor imperfections as a catastrophe.
raincole 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it baffles me that the sentiment here is that AI can only hurt kids' reading ability, when AI (in the form of a chatbot) is practically a tool that forces its users to read a lot.
I still support for some sort of AI restriction for kids, though, since school is a place for kids to socializing. It's a more aspect important than reading and writing.
simonw 3 hours ago [-]
Not if they turn on voice mode, which is pretty excellent these days (at least in ChatGPT and Gemini.)
raincole 3 hours ago [-]
I do 100% support banning voice mode for school. (Again mostly for the socializing... or anti-socializing aspect.)
chalupa-supreme 3 hours ago [-]
We need to remember there are going to be human admin tasks that still need human interaction and critical thought into what you read and write. Adult users of these tools already accept AI outputs without too much thought in varying scenarios.
As a child, your willingness to question a tool that’s already better then you at most tasks probably isn’t going too high, and if you go through early education without exercising critical thinking… well we can point to cursive reading/writing as an example of a skill that completely disappears from a generation when not practiced enough.
sillysaurusx 1 hours ago [-]
Good. My 4th grade cursive writing was a waste of time. Studying anything else would have been more beneficial.
raincole 1 hours ago [-]
I think what they meant was "no matter how common something used to be, once we stopped teaching it in school it got lost quickly. Example: cursive."
Not "we should keep teaching cursive indefinitely."
tacomagick 1 hours ago [-]
I had to learn regular writing after cursive at the age of 20 eventually when I was forced because my instructors at the university would not let me use cursive. Those times were BAD.
wseqyrku 4 hours ago [-]
They need those skills to be able to communicate with others, not to .. research?
basch 4 hours ago [-]
and with a structured tool, what better place to practice writing, process, iteration, revision, editing.
this happens constantly, every day. a current implementation of a technology isnt optimal so the entire class of anything related to that technology is treated as equally flawed.
the solution here is better tools, not preventing better tools from being created.
ilovecake1984 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds dystopian.
What kids need to learn to read is an adult to engage with them, listen to how they read and engage them on the contents of the book.
ekjhgkejhgk 4 hours ago [-]
LOL
Jimmc414 5 hours ago [-]
Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.
Plus "Generative AI" isn't one single thing. Using it to write your essay is cognitive offloading but using it as a Socratic tutor that gives immediate feedback and adapts to the student is closer to the thing education research says works.
There's an equity angle as well. A school ban doesn't ban AI at home. It bans the equalizing version. Kids in educated, rich households will get AI exposure from parents. Kids without that won't get it anywhere, because the one place where the field is leveled has opted out. If AI fluency becomes a differentiator in the labor market infrastructure which is very likely a 7 year exposure gap sorted by household class is the opposite of what public education is supposed to be for.
(edit: By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.)
conception 5 hours ago [-]
I feel like two decades of data that it doesn’t work seems the opposite of shortsighted and reactionary.
4 hours ago [-]
willsmith72 4 hours ago [-]
It's not just Norway. Here in Australia many modern style schools were leaning hard into the digitized classroom era in the 2010s. Now slowly they're realizing their mistake
The problem is, a lot of the parents have bought into the digital parenting age too. They were told ipads etc were part of getting the best education for their kid. Now they're fighting hard on rolling it back (not least because they can't comprehend that it's a problem, that their child can't focus 5 minutes without a device)
Saline9515 4 hours ago [-]
Every parent knows that the Ipad is awful for their kid's education, but it keeps them quiet, so they happily take it.
jasonfarnon 4 hours ago [-]
I certainly believe that, but why did school systems jump on board, especially to be such early adopters as the 2010s, when the iphone was just a few years old? We used to use TV to keep kids quiet, but schools always talked about how bad it was.
tartoran 3 hours ago [-]
For similar convenience as parents: less work on correcting homework and such
Saline9515 4 hours ago [-]
Please define "AI fluency"? From what I see, it's mainly being able to write and read at a high level, and having a strong media litteracy and critical reasoning sense something you don't need AI for.
And having no TV and no smartphone at home and at school is likely the best way to acquire it.
Jimmc414 4 hours ago [-]
By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.
simonw 4 hours ago [-]
I feel like "detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify" is the key skill, but it's also extremely demanding.
You need to have a very solid understanding of things like sources, and bias, and how to evaluate if something is likely to be true, and how to get to a credible answer.
Given the number of people online who try to read arguments with screenshots of a ChatGPT conversation, this is not an obvious process at all.
QuadmasterXLII 4 hours ago [-]
All of those skills have a half life of like 8 months.
jimbokun 4 hours ago [-]
> Norway spent two decades digitizing classrooms and is now unwinding it. Seems a bit shortsighted and reactionary although I think they are trying to do the right thing.
Sounds like following the evidence.
EA-3167 4 hours ago [-]
It stinks that investments are going to be unwound, but it would be worse to engage in a sunk-cost mindset and keep it digital. Since the move was made we've had research suggesting that writing by hand is superior at generating lasting recall and learning than typing.[1] There's very early evidence that skills we use AI for begin to atrophy. [2] Erring on the side of nurturing young people's minds while their ability to learn is maximized seems completely rational to me.
Spend a few minutes on the teacher subreddits: /r/teachers and /r/professors, specifically. AI has been a disaster for student outcomes and educator performance, more or less across the board. It should be banned in education, but there's no way to enforce that without increasing educator workload substantially (eliminating homework and re-working lesson plans around that; moving tests and projects back into the classroom; etc.)
dools 2 hours ago [-]
Computers generally are stupid for schools. There should be a computer room and computer classes, but all other learning should happen offline. Computers are far too distracting.
tacomagick 1 hours ago [-]
Half of my classmates in university failed Compsci, they could not use a computer but they somehow could install Instagram, do basic video edits there and doomscroll. It is NOT conputers! Phones should be the main target.
0xpgm 58 minutes ago [-]
> without increasing educator workload substantially
Isn't this a good thing, employing more educators, building more schools?
Any sane society will always invest more into its future well being and incentivize investments into education.
jasongill 10 minutes ago [-]
Not sure what country you live in, but I don't think that the US falls under your definition of a "sane society"
ori_b 4 hours ago [-]
Banning it in classrooms isn't going to fix things, not when adults are broadcasting to students that (in the actual words of Sam Altman) "intelligence will be too cheap to meter", that (in the words of Darius Amodei) half of white collar jobs will be gone by the time these students graduate school, and so on. If intelligence is too cheap to meter, mental labor is a losing proposition. We've also spent decades emphasizing STEM and de-emphasizing arts and culture. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?
So, it's no surprise they're going to opt out of a system that's investing trillions to make education useless.
Even if the people building this world are wrong -- not all students are equipped to call some of the wealthiest people in the world complete bullshitters. Not all adults are ready to call them out as bullshitters, for that matter.
raincole 3 hours ago [-]
> If intelligence is too cheap to meter, selling your mental labor is a losing proposition. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?
The ban is for elementary school. I don't know about you, but when I was 11, what motivated me to go to school definitely wasn't the idea that I could monetize my intelligence later on.
bethekidyouwant 2 hours ago [-]
11 year olds don’t want to go to school.
hoofedear 3 hours ago [-]
I’d argue education (especially those early years) is less about making them good white collar workers and moreso making them well rounded people. Education has value beyond monetary gains
kristianp 4 hours ago [-]
"intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.
What makes you think school students are being told that? I've heard that they are told everyone will be using AI to help them write.
dragonwriter 4 hours ago [-]
> "intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.
They’ve always been metering AI access (whether this is meaningfully intelligence is a separate question), but that doesn’t prove that there isn’t some time in the future where it won’t be worth metering, only that if there will be, it isn’t here yet.
OTOH, it is still worth noting that from a a consumer-of-the-service perspective, the trend is for more metering, not less (even if that is due at least in part to the rollback off unsustainable subsidies and not to the fundamnetal shifting what is sustainable farther from unmetered access.)
ori_b 4 hours ago [-]
Do you think they're too illiterate to read what industry leaders are saying? I assure you they're not.
ryan_n 3 hours ago [-]
Hm maybe I was sheltered or something but I was definitely not reading what industry leaders were saying when I was under 13. I don't think I really even knew who industry leaders were at that time...
ori_b 3 hours ago [-]
I was definitely reading articles online by the age of 13. This is not exactly a small part of the discourse.
I'd expect, at this point, it's rather hard to avoid hearing about AI and its impact.
insane_dreamer 3 hours ago [-]
it'll start to raise the question of not only is college not worth it, but why should we even have compulsory education through high school? (just think of all the money we could save aka spend on the military instead)
ares623 4 hours ago [-]
I'm a software engineer and yesterday with Fable's help I solved a problem I've had for years on how to safely release memory, reliably, with no bugs. That's one of the hardest problems of humanity today, so obviously I know more than those other professions. Compared to that, teachers have it easy in my opinion. I mean, how hard could teaching a bunch of 5 year olds be? It's definitely not Rust's borrow checker.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4 hours ago [-]
Is this satire?
QuadmasterXLII 4 hours ago [-]
He’s either an anthropic employee or a joker, just based on basic timeline math
ares623 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, I hoped it would've come across as so without the /s. Just goes to show where our fellow engineers are at. "Memory safety is humanity's last problem. Once we solve that then all of life's problems will naturally follow."
suyavuz 5 hours ago [-]
I think this is basically right. You don’t hand out calculators before kids understand arithmetic. LLM version is sneakier because skipping the work still produces something that looks finished.
aykutseker 5 hours ago [-]
A calculator gives you an answer. An LLM gives you an answer that sounds like it already checked itself.
cryo32 5 hours ago [-]
Not quite. The LLM gives you a statistically probable sounding token stream. The calculator gives you a qualified answer within documented and deterministic limits of the device.
No one knows how to use either.
charcircuit 3 hours ago [-]
That is GPT-3. Modern models are rewarded based off the accuracy of their responses.
Aerolfos 3 hours ago [-]
By... another AI model. Which uses statistical generation to decide whether the answer is likely to be accurate or not.
charcircuit 37 minutes ago [-]
Which still makes it more than probabilistic sounding words.
simianparrot 3 hours ago [-]
No they are not
2 hours ago [-]
p-e-w 3 hours ago [-]
> You don’t hand out calculators before kids understand arithmetic.
You do hand out driver’s licenses before people learned to ride a horse though, and you do hand out matches before people learned to make fire by hand. So this isn’t a universal pattern, and you shouldn’t expect it to hold true in the future.
enaaem 4 hours ago [-]
Buddhism identifies three stages of wisdom:
1. Wisdom through dogma.
2. Wisdom through reasoning.
3. Wisdom through experience.
AI is just stage 1. Instant and easily digestible. Traditional learning forces you to go to Stage 2, because you are often given too much information and you need to compress it to memorise it. And the best way to compress it, is by finding some kind of logical structure in the information.
aurelius_44 4 hours ago [-]
Good connection, never thought of it that way.
I learned it as:
1 Knowing what it is.
2 Knowing how it works.
3 Knowing what it can become.
jessinra98 2 hours ago [-]
Education right now has basically become a giant AI echo chamber, and it's happening nationwide. It’s this bizarre setup where teachers use AI to make assignments, students use AI to do them, teachers use AI to grade them, and principals use AI to watch over the teachers.
bko 6 hours ago [-]
Im confused, are there tasks given to 6 to 13 year old to use AI?
In the classroom, are they just throwing gpt in front of them? Is that the modern equivalent of watching a vhs?
Or do they have homework to vibe code something or given some prompts to ask at home and save somewhere?
Serious question, what does this mean?
sisve 6 hours ago [-]
There where no clear rules on the matter. Now the PM has given some guidance to schools so they know when they should use it and not.
If there are no guidance teachers and schools can do what they want and some teachers would probably go to far to early
JimsonYang 3 hours ago [-]
A kid gets homework to do a writing assignment online. Kid goes on chatgpt.
"Chatgpt do this work, heres the assignment' ctrl c + ctrl v
Chatgpt spits out a good answer.
Kid spent no time doing homework and learned nothing
Or imagine a reading log(typing out what you read) to encourage a kid to read, you have AI that can copy and paste your homework for you
bendriv 4 hours ago [-]
I have three children in that age span in a Norwegian school. For the ages 10-13, ChatGPT and the like has frequently been used in the classroom to help with the cold start problem when doing writing assignments, and for getting feedback on written work before handing in to the teachers. Also frequently used as a brainstorming tool or for writing whole speaches or presentations that should be held in front of the class or school. As for doing homework, the school-provided and school-managed iPad has (had I should say) www.chatgpt.com whitelisted, so using these tools also for homework is at least not blocked, and sometimes encouraged.
My children has at least not yet received any tasks or homework using AI for coding. They teach less coding in school now compared to when I was at the same age, at least at my elementary school.
vorticalbox 6 hours ago [-]
Well one can no longer search for information in the big search engines without it just giving you the answer.
This ruins “search and topic and write about it”
setopt 5 hours ago [-]
I guess Norwegian schools will have to use smaller / alternative search engines now?
pesus 4 hours ago [-]
Or books.
ransom1538 5 hours ago [-]
Teacher uses AI, creates lesson plan -> AI creates assignments -> Teacher gives assignments to students -> Students use AI to do assignment -> Teacher grades with AI -> Principal uses AI to monitor teachers progress.
This is happening at schools nationwide. It is unstoppable at this point. It's a bizarre charade.
throw101010 5 hours ago [-]
You forgot the parasite companies that sit between the teachers/student/principal which pretend they detect the big bad AI assisted/generated work to punish individuals using AI (with a majority of false positives and always late by 1 generation of models). The charade wouldn't be complete without rent seeking intermediaries.
avaer 5 hours ago [-]
It speaks to the nonsensical structure of the education system, that it functions just fine having optimized out the education.
Nobody seems to care enough to do anything about it.
bko 5 hours ago [-]
This isn't about teachers using Ai to make their life easier, otherwise it wouldn't only apply to elementary school, and from what I read it applies to students.
Students likely aren't allowed to use AI anyway for assignments. Or are they? That's the question, what is actually being banned if anything
ransom1538 4 hours ago [-]
"Students likely aren't allowed to use AI anyway for assignments"
This can be reduced to "Do students have access to a phone". Good luck after 12 years of age with that. That is a tough war.
kristianp 4 hours ago [-]
The same thing is happening in business settings. There's more words being sent around than ever before, with an ever lowering percentage that is read by humans. There has to be a way to stop the madness.
AlienRobot 4 hours ago [-]
AI starts charging money -> Everybody stops using it.
d3Xt3r 2 hours ago [-]
Nah, they're always going to have a free tier, that's how they get you hooked to their service. It might be even ad-supported in the future (watch an ad to earn credits, or by inserting sponsored content in the responses).
insane_dreamer 3 hours ago [-]
likely preemptive
6 hours ago [-]
baq 6 hours ago [-]
AI used to write homework should be banned.
AI in 1:1 tutor mode with proper hardware (live scanning pen and paper), harness and guardrails should be wildly successful (in terms of education outcomes) especially in elementary school.
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
Disagree. AI has no business being used in 1:1 tutor mode before the hallucination and sycophancy issues are completely resolved. As is, I can easily see it being a hindrance to building actual understanding.
Just one example - it's very common to see ChatGPT and the like respond with "you're absolutely correct! Great insight" to something that is a complete misunderstanding.
ndriscoll 4 hours ago [-]
This is specifically a consumer model (or specifically ChatGPT) issue. e.g. IME codex does not do this, and will just tell you when you're missing something or somehow wrong, and Gemini does this weird thing where it tells you you're a genius and then immediately starts correcting everything you said.
solid_fuel 3 hours ago [-]
Sycophancy is just one aspect of the problems I mentioned, though. Another huge one is hallucination, and one that is actually far worse than I thought:
> It’s been proven that when a model is trained on large volumes of highly factual and non-theoretical data, it learns to always have an answer. DeepSeek V4 Pro (1.6T params, 49B active, 44 AA Intelligence Index score) has a ludicrous 94% hallucination score on the AA-Omniscience benchmark, meaning on questions that it couldn’t figure out, it only stated that it didn’t know around 6% of the time, and the rest it confidently hallucinated an answer. GLM-5.2 scored a 28% hallucination rate, Opus 4.8 was 36%, Fable 5 was 48%, and GPT-5.5 was 86%.
I think even a 5% hallucination rate would be terrible for a teacher, who should generally be comfortable with saying "I don't know off the top of my head but here is how to find resources to answer your question".
---
So, just to drive the point home, Codex has an 86.9% hallucination rate on the AA-omniscience score in this index https://benchlm.ai/models/gpt-5-3-codex - if you ask it something that wasn't sufficiently covered in its training data, it will confidently make up an answer nearly 87% of the time.
While you might think it is happy to correct you when you are wrong, you don't know that for sure since you don't know when you're wrong. Codex may have been happily agreeing with you about things you had completely backwards.
ndriscoll 3 hours ago [-]
Except I generally do know when I'm wrong because I'm working in a domain I am familiar with, and it will often create experiments on the fly unprompted (well, prompted, but generically in AGENTS.MD) to check itself. My experience actually using it for software is that it almost never makes up answers. The answer for hallucinations is fairly simple: give it facts and tools to ground itself.
HKH2 2 hours ago [-]
> Gemini does this weird thing where it tells you you're a genius and then immediately starts correcting everything you said.
That's a great way to get you to listen because your guard is down. Imagine if it told you you were an idiot and then corrected you.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
Just realized 1:1 AI is 90s self-esteem medals-for-everyone parenting on steroids.
therealdrag0 5 hours ago [-]
Teachers hallucinate too. I’ve had creationists and communists and tin-foil-hat (chem trails, 5g, etc) teachers. Surely you can imagine an AI tutor that is higher than zero ROI.
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
> I’ve had creationists and communists and tin-foil-hat (chem trails, 5g, etc) teachers.
I certainly have, too, but there is still a difference between a person who has a factually incorrect but consistent worldview and an LLM which simply reflects the worldview of the user or even changes between queries.
I don't think creationists have any business being in schools either, for what it's worth, but I think it's easier for a teenager to sort out "Mr. Smith has no clue what he's talking about" vs "I have no clue what's true because the LLM everyone expects me to learn from just confirms everything I ask regardless of what I'm asking".
beejiu 5 hours ago [-]
A bit part of education is (should be) independent learning with textbooks and reading. You don't need to be "tutored".
HKH2 2 hours ago [-]
Tutors should be able to approximate the ZPD better than any student can. Most students lack intrinsic motivation and it's a tutor's job to help them get started.
geraneum 5 hours ago [-]
That’s rather disingenuous. But it seems nowadays that words have lost meaning… so, I don’t blame you. I blame the LLMs for this deterioration.
seiie 3 hours ago [-]
lol scraping the bottom of the barrel
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
Tutor mode sucks because even if it was actually accurate and didn't hallucinate, it isn't scoped to what the class is actually covering within a given topic.
Best AI is still your own brain, trained on paying attention in class and reading the assigned content.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> AI in 1:1 tutor mode with proper hardware, harness and guardrails should be wildly successful
I’m open to the idea! Show me the evidence. Then we can roll it out to our kids.
“AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years.”
Yup. Short-term metrics juice. Actual comprehension and cognition falls. This seems to be the case across the board, including with adults.
I’m genuinely optimistic that there is a way to make AI helpful in education. I just don’t think we’ve found it yet. (We certainly haven’t demonstrated it.)
sisve 5 hours ago [-]
> reduces completion time by 30%
This is probably the big problem, or at least one of them.. If you use less time on learning, it will probably be harder to remember what you learned also. We need to spend some time to make it stick
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
The behavioral issue I see is that LLM users tend to immediately reach for an LLM and do their thinking in concert with it.
This tempts users to approach problems by first feeding them into the LLM and then simply following the route the LLM lays out, which does improve task completion time for tasks that the LLM can simply regurgitate, but it stops the user from developing the actual critical thinking skills that school is supposed to teach.
cheesecakegood 4 hours ago [-]
It’s not just critical thinking skills, it’s also that there’s a big difference between recognition/following instructions, and recall/generating your own memories of an approach. But most students don’t recognize the difference. In other words, “following the route” is a big part of the problem - it doesn’t engage the brain the same and isn’t representative of real world use, and having something explained well doesn’t mean you can in turn explain it well yourself (the more revealing test of internalized true understanding)
sisve 5 hours ago [-]
Can agree on that.
The description of the paper also said:
AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.
This was a surprise too me. I would have thought otherwise.
Would love to see some evidence about if more or less people fall behind and have worse results. In my head the AI should be able to get the weakest students a bit highere.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> In my head the AI should be able to get the weakest students a bit higher
I think the evidence so far is all students lose learning and cognition, but the brighter students lose less.
The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys.
No mention of the weakest student. Which probably means they did not have a significant worse or better score
ApolloFortyNine 5 hours ago [-]
I think AI could (and by some students probably already is) be used to help a student better understand the material, and faster than you could before. I still recall some parts of Physics taking a while to click, and often having to reread different sections of a textbook to try and understand the what and why behind something.
The biggest issue is a child has to want to do that, since they also could just ask the AI for the answer and then go back to playing video games. End of the day past age 13 or so I just don't see legislation making any difference, they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> I think AI could (and by some students probably already is) be used to help a student better understand the material, and faster than you could before
I think so too. But we haven’t demonstrated we’ve found how, in kids or in adults.
> biggest issue is
We genuinely don’t know what the biggest issue is. We just know it doesn’t work. There is zero quality evidence for AI helping with learning or cognition in kids or adults. (Happy to be proven wrong. This is a fast-moving and big field.)
> they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting
And community. Rich towns restrict devices in school, monitor use at home and thus will have less of an issue with AI exposure.
ApolloFortyNine 5 hours ago [-]
>I think so too. But we haven’t demonstrated we’ve found how, in kids or in adults.
Ask chatgpt or claude, on their highest model (probably unnecessary but I'm sensing a vibe) to explain a simple linear algebra problem, and if you don't understand it, ask about what part you don't understand.
And if you truly believe it made something up, prove it.
This is seriously the easiest thing to prove out there, you can see for yourself in the next 5 minutes.
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
> And if you truly believe it made something up, prove it.
You seem to be assuming that the issue is around factual correctness, and that may be the case but the evidence we have so far doesn't support jumping to such a narrow cause.
Is the poor performance because the LLMs are frequently wrong? Unknown.
Is it because the LLMs are sycophantic? Unknown.
Is it because the chat interface is a poor one for learning? Unknown.
What we do know is that students who rely on LLMs learn less and perform worse in the long term. And that alone is enough evidence to support a ban. If better tools come along in the future and are shown to aid learning, then the ban can be re-evaluated.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
Sure. I already know linear algebra. If it’s a new branch of mathematics, this is a terrible way to learn.
Again, the research points almost exclusively in one direction when it comes to learning and cognition around AI. You’ll solve more problems more quickly but wind up learning and thinking less.
ApolloFortyNine 5 hours ago [-]
Honestly, what do you think a teacher does that an llm can't? If you want to learn you absolutely can ask an llm how to _solve_ x and explain the steps and why.
My leaving out the word solve seems to have led some of you astray, I apologize.
Again the problem is you have the option to solve your problem and move on without understanding it. That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it.
I live in fear that instead of learning how to use the tool, some might just vote to ban the tool.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> what do you think a teacher does that an llm can't?
I don’t know! It’s an interesting question. All we know is it does.
> That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it
It doesn’t. But we have no evidence it can.
We have lots of evidence of people thinking they’ve learned something, taking a benchmarking test, and being found wholly deficient compared to folks who worked through a textbook, went to a class or even solved problems off YouTube videos or instructional websites.
wieiw 2 hours ago [-]
lol people like this guy prove AI psychosis is legit.
If you can’t figure out what the value add of a human teacher is then.. fkin lmao. It’s well beyond simply transmission of information.
The best teachers have passion - that passion is infectious. I was lucky enough to experience that and it grew my curiosity.
LLM’s provide no such equivalent.
skydhash 5 hours ago [-]
> to explain a simple linear algebra problem, and if you don't understand it, ask about what part you don't understand.
The goal is not to understand a linear algebra problem. The goal is to learn how to solve it using lessons and techniques taught beforehand. Aka not to get a fish, but learning how to fish.
ApolloFortyNine 5 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry the wording of my post didn't match what you wanted.
Type in "Explain how to solve a simple linear algebra problem" into the AI of your choice instead.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> Type in "Explain how to solve a simple linear algebra problem" into the AI of your choice instead
I’m more interested in seeing how someone who teaches themselves with this approach scores on a standardized exam of linear-algebra competence.
skydhash 3 hours ago [-]
> Type in "Explain how to solve a simple linear algebra problem" into the AI of your choice instead.
I’ve seen this particular philosophy in college where the student focus exclusively on passing exams. They would memorize notes and past exercises. The focus is on solving a particular set of exercises instead of understanding the concepts. Change things slightly and they’re lost.
That may not matter in college where you can focus on a few disciplines and half-ass the rest. But everything in lower stages is truly foundational.
cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
A crucial part of learning is struggling with understanding and overcoming problems by yourself. AI removes that part.
YawningAngel 6 hours ago [-]
>AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.
Seems like there's no benefit even if it's used "correctly"?
lelandfe 6 hours ago [-]
Care to give us the bits you found interesting in the paper to spare me plonking down £6?
Would hate to dissect this just off a paragraph.
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
Considering that the paper concludes that even students who take the long approach and use LLMs in the most appropriate way for learning still retain less over the long term than students who simply don't use LLMs, I think it's likely they didn't read the paper in the first place.
logickkk1 5 hours ago [-]
fwiw, Alpha School is the supervised version. the New York campus is $65k/yr and not legally a school.
private school money with homeschool paperwork and an app doing the teaching.
We thought the same of electronic devices in general and digital learning content specifically. In actual practice both result in lowered test scores and declining critical thinking skills.
SubmarineClub 6 hours ago [-]
Idk why you screeching AI touts are so confident about its ‘wild’ success in all areas given absolutely zero evidence to that effect.
It’s tiresome.
LtWorf 5 hours ago [-]
It's inevitably your fault for prompting incorrectly or using the wrong model.
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
"You just have to repeat the prompt 3 times and then spin around counter-clockwise twice! That always works for me. You obviously just don't know how to prompt the model correctly."
Every time I see LLM enjoyers yapping on like this, it just reminds me of people trying to read tea leaves. There's all these goofy little rules about how to structure the prompt and how mean or nice to be to get it to work optimally, but I think it's obvious that most of these users are just seeing incidental successful outcomes in a largely random system and extrapolating from there because it makes them feel in control.
It is, quite literally, superstition.
kklisura 5 hours ago [-]
Instead of prompts, let’s call them incantations.
wolvoleo 5 hours ago [-]
I think AI should be used in higher level schools but with the added requirement that the output will be held to a much higher standard and that it's fact checked. Teach the students to use AI to reach a higher level while mitigating the inherent issues like hallucination and sycophancy.
cryo32 5 hours ago [-]
I'm glad this is the case. It is the correct outcome.
I've heard students actually discussing that they will just use an LLM to shortcut work. I even have friends in their 50s who can barely think for themselves now without having to refer to "AI". And at least two of them are teachers.
Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.
No one taught anything of value. No one learned anything of value. I am very worried we'll see a lost generation at some point rippling through the ages.
Aerolfos 3 hours ago [-]
> Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.
They have also been explicitly told by the department of education to NOT do this, but it hasn't stopped lazy teachers all over. Apparently not doing your job, in direct contradiction to your given rules, is ok because "it's the future".
replwoacause 6 hours ago [-]
Good, wholeheartedly agree with this. Too bad US legislators are impotent.
tadfisher 6 hours ago [-]
US legislators have almost no say in how schools are run. The DoE is a husk, and states call the shots. In my state of Oregon, you will have wildly different curricula and standards depending on your district, because there's almost no state oversight either.
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
They made a choice - US legislators effectively gave up their control of how schools are run when the conservative coalition allowed the trump administration to dismantle the DoE without congressional approval. Congress itself could legally retain control of education, but if congress refuses to assert that power then it is meaningless.
The end goal is to dismantle public education and route public money to religious and private schools.
gpt5 3 hours ago [-]
No - US always delegated education policy decision locally. Not just the state level, but the local district has the most amount of control. Nothing material here has changed in the last few years.
solid_fuel 3 hours ago [-]
> Nothing material here has changed in the last few years.
Bald faced lies from you, nothing surprising here. I could take the time in explaining how state and federal responsibilities are divided, I could go through the history of the Department of Education and how funding for schools works in the US. I could point to dozens of examples of you being wrong from any decade in the last century, from de-segregation to "no child left behind".
But there's no point, since you're just a troll and not here for a real discussion. No one interested in a sincere exchange of ideas would start from such a stupid premise. So you can go ahead and look through my comment history all you want, and respond all you want, but it'll just make you mad and get you flagged.
You would be better served by finding a large rock to kick.
gpt5 3 hours ago [-]
Please do share how education policy has materially changed in the last couple of years instead of resorting to ad hominem attacks?
cheesecakegood 4 hours ago [-]
To be fair, the US has long followed a model prioritizing district-level control, this isn’t anything new.
LastTrain 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, that is what impotent means.
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
Impotent? You mean bought by these companies.
Aeolun 38 minutes ago [-]
This feels so obvious I’m surprised it needed to be news.
sohrob 4 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty certain the execs who run the large AI companies would limit their children's AI usage also.
petercooper 4 hours ago [-]
Nothing mentioned about the use of AI by elementary school teachers who may well be using it to generate sub-par worksheets or to rapidly, and potentially inaccurately, mark work.
Every special event flyer I get from my kids' school now seems to be AI generated. I'd be surprised if quizzes and worksheets don't head the same way.
greekrich92 3 hours ago [-]
This is Norway, not the US. They have standards and a functioning social contract.
abujazar 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is they were two decades late digitizing the classroom. Now we're dealing with the aftermath with the educational system still not being capable of keeping up with societal progress.
froh 4 hours ago [-]
that's dismissing that brains need time to evolve. what if brains need to be mature enough in and by themselves before they benefit from digital support? as in "no telly before 3-4, no smartphone before 14, prioritize pen and paper proficiency until 12-14" makes sense biological brain maturity?
then "give'm a computer ASAP" is the wrong answer.
abujazar 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think giving children tech adults don't fully understand is a goal by itself. But children shouldn't be limited by their parents' shortcomings either. Strict age limits may seem like a safe approach, but children and their capacity to bypass those rules should not be underestimated.
jenthoven 11 hours ago [-]
Surprised to read this as Norway also has Sikt AI for schools, where teachers can monitor how AI systems are used. Seems like it has both embraced AI and banned it.
embedding-shape 6 hours ago [-]
> Seems like it has both embraced AI and banned it.
Indeed, seemingly they done so by age/educational progression:
> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said. In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added.
wwweston 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder if the struggle is really comprehending thoughtful selective adoption.
Schools are the place where the product is a more fully developed person. There's no LLM shortcut for generating that. There are many ways you could use LLMs that would discourage it. There may be some that can encourage it.
Personally, I can see aggressively keeping kids away from LLMs until they've learned effort, living in tension/frustration, the pleasure of breaking through to discovery, trust evaluation, hypothesis/test cycles, and good socratic dialogue from the learner's side.
It may be possible at intermediate phases to prime some models to help with this process.
FloorEgg 6 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't it matter a lot how AI is being used?
I would assume if children are allowed to use AI without rails as a shortcut it will undermine their learning, and it's used for feedback and as a patient tutor it would accelerate their learning?
It seems like the problem is that they don't have the science and tooling to use it constructively at scale, so the desperate solution is to ban it outright until a scalable constructive approach is understood?
The article doesn't explain any of this directly...
It's frustrating to me when bold statements are directed at "AI" holistically and vaguely, completely ignoring any nuance.
There is a massive gap between letting elementary students free reign use chatGPT 3.5 (hallucinations and all) to do whatever, vs using a very guard-railed pedagogically optimized app powered by a SOTA model to support students in a specific way that accelerates good outcomes.
Most respectful interpretation is that the leaders know this and have a plan to figure it out, but for some reason it's not making it's way into this article. Is the absence representative of the truth of the situation, or some editors choice to pile on to a holistic anti-ai narrative?
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> it's used for feedback and as a patient tutor it would accelerate their learning?
We have mounting evidence AI hurts learning and cognition in many circumstances. I have not yet seen similar-quality evidence for it helping.
Given that balance, restricting AI in education in the general population (while studying how to best deploy it) seems prudent. Especially given the Norwegian approach, which gradually introduces AI as kids get older.
FloorEgg 6 hours ago [-]
I'm actually not really criticizing the decision so much the article and communications around it. If student learning outcomes are crashing and they desperately want to turn them around I understand why they would take dramatic action.
Giving students uncontrolled access to generic LLMs probably would hurt outcomes. Research process is slow (IRB and all that) so they are dealing with data from years ago (models that confident hallucinated a lot more than current SOTA) so if thats what they are basing it on its reasonable.
My frustration isn't with the decision (hey all teachers - no more chatGPT in the classroom). My frustration is with the reporting / nuance of "until we can research this better and figure out how to harness AI to improve outcomes and not undermine them".
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> the reporting / nuance of "until we can research this better and figure out how to harness AI to improve outcomes and not undermine them"
It’s balancing the irrationally exuberant narrative of the tech bros and AI pushers. You have to stop the bleeding before you can dress the wound to promote healing.
FloorEgg 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think one balances a lack of nuance with more lack of nuance.
One avoids nuance for clicks or to propagate a narrative, sew division, distract, etc.
Again. As I said in both my comments, I'm not criticizing the ban, I'm criticizing the absence of any communication regarding a plan for researching potentially constructive uses. As a reader, I can't tell if the Norwegian leaders have no plan, or if they didn't communicate a plan, or if they did and Reuters chose not to include it in the article.
Not everything has to be a culture war. When we are talking about our children's future it would be cool to do so pragmatically.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
Eh, if the politician thinks this is the clarity of language necessary to send the message, I think that’s fine. Studying this and that can come later. It’s not like anyone is banning that research.
FloorEgg 5 hours ago [-]
And I guess that's a big part of my frustration. I don't know what the politician actually said. I don't see any link to the/an official statement in the article.
I'm just an old man shaking fist at clouds.
I'm sitting on a mountain of evidence (n=44,000) that used in a very specific way and context AI accelerates and improves lasting learning outcomes. Th3 data is new, but the science that explains it actually goes back decades, predating AI - it's based on pedagogy from texts such as How People Learn (NRC).
My data also shows that students using AI the wrong way perform way worse - the performance gap is widening between students who want to learn and struggle (and use AI to optimize struggle) and students who want instant gratification and use AI for shortcuts.
So I know that if they truly slammed the door on this potential then they threw the baby out with the bath water.
But I don't know the truth because Reuters doesn't report the truth, and that's what tips me from concerned to frustrated. But I guess by complaining about modern journalism standards in a thread about banning AI I'm breaking HN guidelines. Time for me to log off...
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> sitting on a mountain of evidence (n=44,000) that used in a very specific way and context AI accelerates and improves lasting learning outcomes
Can you point to it?
bpodgursky 6 hours ago [-]
AI makes me worse at programming but helps me learn things much more quickly than reading textbooks. Both can be true.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> but helps me learn things much more quickly than reading textbooks
Have you tested this against an external metric of competence? The research seems to show that AI is great at making you feel you know something. But I think the studies looking at language learning found those using AI extensively tested below peers using traditional methods.
gpt5 3 hours ago [-]
You don't always need the same level of deep knowledge on everything you do. A lot of things in software development requires some basic level understanding of some obscure API you would never use again. LLM definitely speed up that part.
bpodgursky 5 hours ago [-]
I don't care what the studies say. It's an incredibly good tutor.
AI helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter which kind-of-but-not-quite explains the concept I am hunting for.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> It's an incredibly good tutor
It feels like a good tutor. If you aren’t externally benchmarking your comprehension, you really can’t say.
> helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter
Have you considered that learning to phrase your questions is part of indexing and thus learning a subject?
I’m not saying AI can’t help with that search process. But we have no evidence it helps and lots of evidence it hurts, and everyone with anecdotes to the contrary seems to be going off vibes around how much they learned without any external reference.
beej71 6 hours ago [-]
Be careful. Speed of learning isn't necessarily the goal. Durability is another metric. I learn more quickly with LLMs, too, but it's certainly questionable if that learning is as durable or deep as learning through struggling with a book.
The students of lowly-rated profs had better 10-year outcomes than those with highly-rated profs according to a study that I think came out of the Naval Institute a decade or two ago. "No shine without friction."
We need more data. Certainly turning students loose with AI stunts them. There's probably some happy medium. But where kids need the most practice with fundamentals when they're young, a blanket ban for now seems sensible. And it also seems like a good plan to introduce it when they get older. I suspect we'll learn a lot from this Norwegian experiment.
MrDresden 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, but (I assume) that you are old enough to have already gone through elementary school and perhaps further and learned and internalized a model for learning and retaining information.
I think that is what is at risk.
analog31 5 hours ago [-]
Oddly enough, I never was able to learn things from textbooks, except in the context of a traditional classroom lecture course. I've also met maybe one or two people in my life who were able to learn the subjects of my college majors -- math and physics -- at any level from a textbook alone.
5 hours ago [-]
newfriend 6 hours ago [-]
Do you delegate all opinions to only those which have studies?
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> Do you delegate all opinions to only those which have studies?
For policy decisions around something like education standards, something for which we have an established status quo (which works in Norway)? Yes. I don’t think waiting for evidence to act is imprudent in that situation.
morkalork 6 hours ago [-]
Social media execs are already known for keeping their children off their platforms* and even phones so my question is: Do the leading ML/AI people let their children interact with LLMs yes or no?
Broadly speaking, the wealthier the parents the more restrictive device is in general in the household.
This used to be a tech/non-tech line. It shifted to class sometime over the last ten years. The iPad kids are probably getting served slop. The AI-employed parents don’t have to directly police AI exposure because their kids’ device use is already controlled; at school, at extra-curriculars and at home.
pawelmurias 6 hours ago [-]
The question is do the allow them to use their laptops to access llms. Like I assume before ai they where not allowing the kids to fry their brains doom scrolling but would allow programming. They weren't blocking all tech as they aren't raising subsistence farmers.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> I assume before ai they where not allowing the kids to fry their brains doom scrolling but would allow programming
Young kids don’t need to learn programming. They need to learn math, reading, spatial reasoning and social skills. (Among other things.)
The kids who were being taught Java in elementary school ten years ago aren’t particularly better off for it.
morkalork 5 hours ago [-]
I figure they let them use Wikipedia, google etc. before though so I am curious where the line exists now.
jackdoe 6 hours ago [-]
there is a difference in a kid asking a LLM to explain 0! or 0^0 and to ask it to be its friend.
golem14 5 hours ago [-]
The difference is between asking to explain x^y and reading and understanding the why and maybe go through a test, vs asking to do my homework for me and then go back to video games quickly. If the whole idea of using LLMs is to reduce effort on the part of the pupil, you are probably holding it wrong.
FinnLobsien 5 hours ago [-]
I think it’s quite tricky. On one side, writing is a form of thinking and cognitive training.
Just NOT doing that work by having AI simulate it is not good for anyone’s cognitive development.
At the same time, anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it.
I really feel for teachers/educators right now. It must be hard to remain demanding and insist on educating kids well while also preparing them for the future they’ll actually live in.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it
Whatever AI looks like in 20 years is going to be so different from what it is today as to make distracting from basic skill-building an almost-certainly net negative educational effort.
FinnLobsien 5 hours ago [-]
I agree to some degree. But by that logic, should kids in the 2000s not have learned about the internet because the internet fundamentally changed between then and now?
I think that if anything, it’s really good I learned how to operate a computer and the Internet BEFORE what the Internet became.
I pity the generation who don’t understand a computer’s folder structure because they grew up with smartphones and TikTok.
erentz 2 hours ago [-]
Your example would call more to create an "information technology" subject in schools, that updates its curriculum to include changes like the development of AI. Thus, you go to that class, some of your coursework in the year is going to involve learning about AI and how it works, what it can and cannot do, using it for some project, so on. Not using AI for doing your homework in every other subject.
Cpoll 5 hours ago [-]
> At the same time, anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it.
There's not so much to learn they can't put it into a high school course. Adults currently in the workforce haven't been using AI since they were in elementary school, and they're adjusting fine.
FinnLobsien 5 hours ago [-]
I would disagree that they’re adjusting fine. So much of the stuff we see now is full AI slop clearly created with the first output of ChatGPT. It’s like saying we don’t need to teach kids about the internet because older generations grew up without it and they’re scrolling TikTok.
a) what’s the actual percentage of professionals who actively use AI? It’s much smaller than we think in tech.
b) what percentage of those people understand the very basics of how LLMs work (e.g. token prediction, context windows, etc)
c) what percentage of those people understand AI Agents (or any of their ingredients (APIs, credentials, etc.)
You quickly arrive at a tiny fraction that has a real clue about what they’re doing.
fma 5 hours ago [-]
>using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do
These are elementary school kids...if they start using AI in 6th grade, they have 6 years to learn AI before graduating high school.
FinnLobsien 5 hours ago [-]
Fair point!
Planktonne 5 hours ago [-]
> anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it
Essentially the entire value proposition for AI, particularly as it advances, is that you don't need to learn how to do things anymore.
dyauspitr 1 hours ago [-]
I love how data driven and fast acting these European countries are. It takes forever for anything to happen in the US even with 80% support.
garganzol 6 hours ago [-]
I already saw it in my life: a ban on calculators, a ban on computers. But after a short period of rejection, everybody starts to embrace the new tech. Instead of bans we were getting computer classes in schools.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> after a short period of rejection, everybody starts to embrace the new tech
We’re banning cell phones in school after seeing the evidence, albeit along a class gradient. We’ll probably see something similar with AI. Poor kids get AI in school (and unmonitored at home). Rich kids do not.
bawolff 18 minutes ago [-]
Calculators might be allowed sometimes, but i dont think they are ever allowed when you are trying to teach school children how to add and multiply. Which feels like the appropriate comparison.
cryo32 5 hours ago [-]
I did mathematics, and a fair bit of computer science on the side. This was nearly all on paper, without computers. And I'd go a week or two without a calculator sometimes, mostly employing it when I had a bad hangover.
Do we really need to force technology into everything or are we just used to doing it so see it as necessary?
garganzol 5 hours ago [-]
I did mathematics on paper, and informatics on computers. Some of my peers weren't so lucky, so they had to do informatics on paper only. Needless to say that the magnitude of progress we were getting in informatics had day and night difference, not in the favor of paper.
AI is indeed dangerous. It gives super abilities when in the right hands. Some people don't like it as it creates competition for their mere existence. They start gaslighting campaigns - "AI is bad, dangerous, does not work, consumes too much energy etc". This is luddism of our century, but also a form of psychopathy. When everybody is being gaslit, some of the very same players who spreads false narratives use AI to their own benefit.
cryo32 4 hours ago [-]
It’s not really though is it?
It’s a fully centrally controlled technology that reduces your ability and makes you dependent on it to perform all daily and business functions with a huge environmental and economic impact. The economic impact is both the risks imposed by it failing and the risks imposed by it being successful.
It’s not Ludditism, it’s a good attitude to risk.
5 hours ago [-]
graphememes 5 hours ago [-]
just ban everyone from using ai completely lets go back to how it used to be
pesus 4 hours ago [-]
What a dream. If we could also somehow get rid of social media at the same time (or at least algorithmic recommendations and other predatory practices), the world would be a significantly better place.
nunez 4 hours ago [-]
can't come fast enough
this tech is unsustainable by design
spoaceman7777 3 hours ago [-]
Am I imagining things, or are all of the "vaguely pro-AI" comments being brigaded into oblivion?
I can't remember ever seeing this many reasonable posts being downvoted to the point of greying out.
lacoolj 5 hours ago [-]
"..ban on smart phones.." "..ban on gen AI.." "..ban on social media.."
yes
YES
YASSSSSSSSSSSS
Ban all the things for kids. I don't want to be interviewing people in 10 years and decline every candidate because they can't correctly answer the question "You are 50ft away from the car wash. Do you walk or drive?"
LtWorf 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair, norwegian kids would probably fail because they don't have a clue how much 50 feet are.
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
> To be fair, norwegian kids would probably fail because they don't have a clue how much 50 feet are.
I... are you an LLM? The distance doesn't matter - you probably don't want to walk to the car wash.
gpt5 3 hours ago [-]
I was going to comment that you missed the joke. However, it was still curious to me that you took it so seriously, so I looked at your comment history.
It is almost all political (and outraged) commentary, and you tend to dominate posts like this with many comments, without adding nuance, substance, or listening to the other side.
It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.
solid_fuel 3 hours ago [-]
> It is almost all political (and outraged) commentary, and you tend to dominate posts like this with many comments, without adding nuance, substance, or listening to the other side.
Facts don't care about your feelings, bud. And neither do I.
> It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.
Yes I'm certain you will be happier if you ignore everything that challenges you.
gpt5 3 hours ago [-]
You've probably made 20 comments just in this post alone, all attacking people and treating things as black and white. Do you really don't realize that this makes Hacker News worse, and is probably not healthy for you either?
Rapzid 5 hours ago [-]
Got'em! Yes, this one right here officer; that's the clanker!
WCSTombs 5 hours ago [-]
The question is slightly vague (since I could be going there not to wash my car), but I'm pretty sure in the intended interpretation, the actual distance is irrelevant. :)
snvzz 4 hours ago [-]
>50ft
I only have two feet, so if I am to get there, I must use a vehicle.
insane_dreamer 3 hours ago [-]
It's absolutely the right move. We're already seeing declines in cognitive capabilities among adults using AI. We're going to wind up with future generations of ignorants if we let them start as kids.
We are seriously in danger of "we need AI" becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as humanity becomes too stupid to do anything without AI, and we end up with a few companies essentially holding the keys to our collective ability to produce anything of value. Am I the only one freaked out about that?
iamflimflam1 6 hours ago [-]
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charcircuit 5 hours ago [-]
The traditional schooling system can't stand that they are being outcompeted by AI and are trying to use the government to maintain their monopoly and keep those tax dollars flowing.
solid_fuel 5 hours ago [-]
> The traditional schooling system can't stand that they are being outcompeted by AI and are trying to use the government to maintain their monopoly and keep those tax dollars flowing.
Learning is a conspiracy by Big Knowing, it's all a myth. Let's just ask an LLM to all our thinking, no need to be a functional human.
charcircuit 5 hours ago [-]
LLMs can teach better than the human teacher could. Big Knowing wants to be the one to teach, but that is not the only option.
HKH2 1 hours ago [-]
Students need motivation to honestly and openly talk about their doubts or lack of understanding.
charcircuit 35 minutes ago [-]
I've had LLMs both help motivate myself into getting better at things and help me understand things I don't. Being open with an AI is much easier than a human since there is no risk of being judged.
solid_fuel 4 hours ago [-]
> LLMs can teach better than the human teacher could.
Clearly not, given that you seem to believe this despite it being incorrect. Every single bit of evidence gathered so far indicates LLMs are worse teachers than humans or every self-directed learning.
LtWorf 5 hours ago [-]
Yep… I mean scientific studies seem to suggest that you are completely wrong. But big science is all a conspiracy against those AI companies that work so hard for the betterment of mankind after all.
charcircuit 5 hours ago [-]
I believe my eyes more than studies. I have learned so much, so fast through the process of talking with LLMs.
bebe83939 5 hours ago [-]
Great, yet another "no child and no teacher left behind!"
I was gifted kid, bored to death at basic school. I was reading books under the table, and was lucky to have tolerant teacher. Total ban would just push me to misbehaving and disrupting the class.
AI is amazing tool for learning, if Norway can not harness it, there is something deeply wrong with the educational system. Perhaps teachers unions?
Norway has a big problem with young immigrant kids at school not speaking Norwegian. Right now other kids are expected to teach them basic language, holding back their own development (like learning reading and writing)! Again, AI could provide amazing help here!
bborud 5 hours ago [-]
So I take it you have some expertise in teaching? At what level? K-12? Middle school?
What, in your professional opinion as an educator, should schools do about AI in schools?
bebe83939 5 hours ago [-]
I would allow schooling in other languages in primary schools in Norway. Basic education is a human right, and it is not right to force kids out of their mother tongue. Insisting on some obscure language is just misplaced nationalism!
AI could help with that.
bborud 4 hours ago [-]
The the only conclusion I can draw from that is that you know nothing about education and even less about Norway.
FYI: all Norwegians learn at least one foreign language in school. It is mandatory. That means you have to, in case that’s a big word for you.
If you so prefer you will have the option to learn one or two more in middle school and one or two more in high school.
By the time I was 15 I spoke three languages. Everyone at that age would know at least two. Some would know four.
Is it so much to ask that you at least consult the AI tools you speak so fondly of as tools of education before babbling about something you so obviously are deeply ignorant of? If nothing else then at least in lieu of growing a brain?
throw93934i 4 hours ago [-]
> all Norwegians learn at least
But this is not about Norwegian kids. And many imigrants have no use for Norwegian (obscure) language. I have polish and ukrainian friends in Norway.
bborud 3 hours ago [-]
So now you are arguing what? That the AI tools, that so thoroughly failed to educate you on education, should be used to teach immigrants in their mother tongue?
And keep in mind, if you move to a country you kind of have to accept that they won’t be able to offer you education in every possible language. In fact, learning the language is often a prerequisite for permanent residency.
I am not going to ask you how you envision that AI somehow magically solves this, since we have already established that education isn’t something you appear to know much about. The last thing we need is more speculation, fantasy or anecdote.
Have the courtesy of at least researching things online for more than 2 minutes before you expect to be taken seriously.
5 hours ago [-]
platevoltage 4 hours ago [-]
Calculators are amazing at multiplication tables. Let's just give those to the kids too. It's the same thing. This type of thinking is ruining kids' futures.
throw93934i 4 hours ago [-]
Some kids can understand and memorize multiplication tables in a day. Are they just suppose to sit idle, for rest of semester not to disrupt "normal kids"?
Should we ban programming as well? You know, kid could program multiplication and cheat this way! I can not believe I am reading opinions like this on "hacker" news!
petcat 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder if at some point we will look back on stuff like this as back in the 1990s schools banning internet research and search engines. Obviously that seems ridiculous now, but the internet was big and scary back then too.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
Those bans were implemented without evidence. We have evidence AI exposure reduces learning and cognition. There are probably situations where it enhances it. But we haven’t delineated those yet, and so shouldn’t be rolling out a half-baked system more likely to hurt than to help.
petcat 5 hours ago [-]
what is the evidence
wieiw 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mapmeld 5 hours ago [-]
Were schools banning search engines? I remember teachers recommending Dogpile (because it would combine search engines), and we did some computer lab stuff in the 00s, but there was no one saying that we should ignore search or the internet altogether.
In middle school I remember being assigned a book report that would include the author's biography. I'd just finished a book (The Gammage Cup) and of course my local library did not have any information about the author. So in that situation it was assumed that you would learn traditional research methods, but also that you would just pick a classic book where the information was readily available.
Retric 6 hours ago [-]
Few schools allow unrestricted internet access these days.
The general question here is risks vs rewards and with any new technology both are unknown making caution perfectly reasonable be that internet searches or anything else.
So sure in 30 years the policy will look different, but that doesn’t mean they are making the wrong decision.
Sounds right to me. Kids under 13 need to learn to read, write and comprehend text. Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.
They can play with AI at home, and after 13 they can learn how to use AI productively and, ideally, in a way that enhances rather than detracts from their education.
Also from the story:
> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom.
A big hooray for that. Will be interesting to see what impact that has on Norway education - a quick search just now didn't turn up any detailed studies, presumably those will show up eventually.
What works is chalkboard and chalk, pencil and paper.
You'll never get strong by watching a video of people lifting weights. Similarly, you'll never understand math by watching a video or having an AI do the work for you. And, somehow, writing out the words and equations by hand is very effective for learning.
https://www.holdenluntz.com/artists/keystone-press-agency/al...
You've prohibited technology and then listed four technologies. "Technology" needs a more concrete definition. Calculators? Computers? TVs? Overhead projectors? Musical instruments?
And sure, kids 6-13 don't need calculators, basic stuff, like multiplication tables is memorized.
Challenge: learn some math from AI. Sleep on it. Duplicate it on paper the next day.
But yeah you need to make attempts to apply what you’re learning and answer questions on your own. You can’t simply watch problems being solved (whether by an AI or a person) and retain it.
Nothing is perfect.
For anyone who still thinks kids should use AI, another argument to make is we are still figuring out AI (hence the constant debate on it, hype, uncertainty, boundaries of its capabilities etc etc). I don't think anyone with right mind can disagree with that. Keeping that mind, wouldn't it make sense to at-the-very-least tread with caution when it comes to kids.
Like that?
I think it's more complex than this.
AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.
The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.)
On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.
About to get margin called on all your sketchy AI investments? Or just trying to recover from the most egregious example of the worst set of interactions any individual has ever had in any school system?
The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map…
Why have teachers?
The AI might as well grade itself.
This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement.
Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.
It's not more complex than stupid people in charge, stupid results follow. Smart people with integrity in charge, good things follow.
AI changes nothing.
Many people have stopped believing this lie. Yes AI has gotten better by some metric which AI companies are pushing. It has not gotten good enough to be a qualified teacher, and it never will.
I suspect it is the last one. This is a trillion dollar industry and if the AI companies claim this, then they should be able to to show it with quality research, they however have not, and the reason is that this is a lie. AI is not better then anything for self-learning. Go to the library and check out a chess book, go to r/trumpet, join a weekly meetup to practice you Spanish, etc. etc. all of these are vastly superior then AI.
You claim self-learning via is hustle free, perhaps you are right, however I suspect that there is no such thing as hustle free learning. If you want to learn something you have to use your brain, and you have to struggle. AI will just act like you got this, flatter you for a minute, and in the worst cases, you may start to believe the AI when it lies to you about how much you’ve learned.
The value of all of these self-learning routes has increased enormously due to existence of AI assistants. At least the way I do it now, I get the initial structure for a subject from YouTube/Udemy/textbooks and then fill out my personal comprehension gaps with the help of AI. You can even point AI to a specific material you're trying to grasp and usually it will rephrase a point you failed to get in a simpler language.
Previously, you'd need some trained person to explain to you something that led you to hit a roadblock. Now, the level of understanding you get easily beats most of the tutors in public schools or community colleges.
This is a lie and most of us know it. AI companies have been lying and lying and lying and lying. If you believe this then the AI companies have successfully lied to you and are making you pay money for an inferior product. If this weren’t a lie then the AI companies should have the research to prove it, they have not, because it is not true. AI does not help anybody learn anything better then using traditional methods.
There are a few reasons AI is not the best teacher, but this is not one of them because teachers are also frequently wrong. I say that as someone who comes from a family of teachers, ranging from kindergarten to PhD.
And here is the problem: unlike AI, a lot of teachers don’t like being questioned or challenged. If your teacher doesn’t know a subject well, and you realize this, your options as a student are pretty limited. This is especially true at lower grades.
I don’t believe that AI can replace teachers. But, if used well, it can supplement them. I think Norway is making the right call here with elementary schools, but I wouldn’t support this kind of policy at higher grades where levels.
I remember seeing an nyt article where there was mixed results on cell phone bans. While they increased socialization among students, the school didnt see better test scores.
We'll have to see if a ban on AI can improve test scores-I am bullish on the idea tho
Socialization leads to discourse which leads to learning.
Unless theres strong evidence that test scores will increase, Karen from the PTA insists that her child be given access to their phone
It's a shitty time to be a parent of a teen.
That said, my youngest just reads gaming wikis and hangs out on Discords for roguelike video games and this somehow consumes 900% of their attention span.
I agree with Norway here, and it’s slightly exhausting to see people attack any country that’s trying to protect kids as somehow coming for everyone’s supposed sovereignty.
I care about the youth and know they are in the midst of a culture war with adults, leave them out of it until we figure out a path forward.
edit: (crazy to see +11 on my comment, and also -1 when refreshing. Clearly my comment is divisive. This is honestly validating that adults simply cannot find common ground in this topic - especially HN)
How you implement these protections matter.
How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also?
It’s all complicated, but I am exhausted from reading doom articles of how the UK wants adults to not exist online while trying to force children offline for their own existence and long term health..
It’s worth me noting that I’m extremely liberal, but I’ve admittedly been failing to see how we keep children safe online without forcing identity of adulthood. We do not allow teens to buy cigarettes or vapes based on vibes either, right?
(please correct or roast me, I really am struggling with this and am tired of reading refutes that are not productive)
..now kids have /r/ihatemyfamily or #fuckeverything
That said, the only cess pool that existed at the time was 4chan - which I avoided, despite actually knowing the founder.
The internet has obviously evolved a lot since, and I feel adults unfairly believe that all persons deserve the fully open internet. We’ve clearly reached beyond the point where most companies care about children, as it’s all profit at the end of the day for engagement. If you keep up with Apple, it’s no surprise they concisely spent a large portion of their precious WWDC showcase on child safety. There’s obvious pressure on them, but I also believe firmly Apple is fully aware the online world cannot behave the same way it has with children having access more easily than ever. It’s not like families share a single desktop computer anymore in the living room where all can see…
My (probably) bad comparison is still vapes and porn. Why should kids be allowed to purchase and view this online, but if they went into a retail store they would be denied? Why the double standard? Why immediately presume it’s about tracking adults? What proof do we have that identity verification is leading to adults being scrutinised and tracked? It all just feels like a tin foil hat fan fiction that has no proven purpose other than conspiracy and proof that every person should never be restricted, regardless of age.
https://youtu.be/Xa3-TkHBh90
In the end, yes there is a possibility that this won't happen, but there is a much bigger possibility that it will happen based on the track record of past bills.
Let’s stop pretending this tech is as interesting as we wish it was. If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet. I don’t see the difference at this point.
A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp for 2023:
> Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased from 19 to 28 percent and in numeracy from 29 to 34 percent.
The literacy proficiency levels section on https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp describes what Level 1 means:
> Adults at level 1 are able to locate information on a text page, find a relevant link from a website, and identify relevant text among multiple options when the relevant information is explicitly cued. They can understand the meaning of short texts, as well as the organization of lists or multiple sections within a single page.
28% of US adults are just at or below that level.
the report also visualizes not only inter country but also intra country outcomes correlating socio economic influences (age, parents, family migration history, ...) and level of education (school, high school, college and higher) with test outcome (literacy, numerics problem solving)
it also has 10y ago/now comparison.
a trove for the Q "how are we doing, capability wise?"
thanks for pointing to the study!!
[piaacs report] https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...
Yes and AI isn't to blame for that as adults predate AI. It's the governments, schools, teachers, parents, teacher's unios, who taught them(or more accurately didn't teach them) and graduated them out of school anyway regardless just so they don't look bad in statistics. Sorry but if you graduate people out of high school who can't read you should be trialed for fraud. Simple as.
People blaming AI for adults unable to read puts us back to the 90s when Doom was to blame for school shootings or back to 60s when rock music was to blame for juvenile delinquency, all of them being wrong, and they're wrong here too. People always want to blame a third party external scapegoat that isn't' the parents and isn't the government, for the problems of their kids.
To be efficient with AI and LLMs you need to be good at least two things, reading and writing. One easy way of getting better is by reading a lot, and writing a lot. Maybe if we coax the kids into understanding (believing?) that better reading and writing helps them use AI better, they'd pay more attention to it?
That's the big problem with education in general. If you introduce a new factor to children's education you can't realistically measure the effect it has had for about five years, because you need to wait for a cohort of kids to go through that system and then see how they did.
This means that if you introduce something with clear negative effects it will be five years before you spot them!
That's pretty catastrophic given that ChatGPT only emerged in late 2022 and only got good around early 2024.
Literacy is a worldwide problem.
Jingoistic deflection doesn't change that.
Maybe it’s because the US is a statistically a shithole? Just maybe we should do something to fix that?
But no, let’s dismantle science, health, education, etc instead.
Fucking magot idiots.
(Just mixing my Randy Newman metaphors for fun. I could have also thrown in a few words in defense of our country)
Correlation, causation, and all that
Can I guess that you are (native/ethnic) Norwegian and upset by the recent waves of immigration to Norway? Your comment is very specific, plus you used a new throwaway account.
And also you may be above average there.
I have two kids and can confidently say eight year olds generally have good language skills, are capable of expressing themselves just fine, and have good comprehension of the parts of the world that they've been exposed to.
Mine couldn’t until they were much older. And I have more so perhaps that’s more statistically valid?
Oh, can I move the goalposts too?
Because until they do, I will consider their comprehension skills limited.
Now we're talkin'
I'm all for it, let's teach kids the fundamentals of the world without relying on computers before we introduce them
Using it school is likely undermining their learning.
Example: what if Internet access was removed, but the computer remained? It would still be very useful.
A big hooray for that."
I don't suppose they are allowed to use physical violence again, still I would like to know what exactly you are cheering here for?
If a human parent or teacher can help with skills like reading, an AI system can too, once it's trained and designed to do so. (How good are humans at teaching reading anyway?)
Writing developed thousands of years BCE. So, considering we as a species have been successfully teaching our offspring how to read for hundreds of generations, I'd say we're probably pretty decent at it.
I still support for some sort of AI restriction for kids, though, since school is a place for kids to socializing. It's a more aspect important than reading and writing.
As a child, your willingness to question a tool that’s already better then you at most tasks probably isn’t going too high, and if you go through early education without exercising critical thinking… well we can point to cursive reading/writing as an example of a skill that completely disappears from a generation when not practiced enough.
Not "we should keep teaching cursive indefinitely."
this happens constantly, every day. a current implementation of a technology isnt optimal so the entire class of anything related to that technology is treated as equally flawed.
the solution here is better tools, not preventing better tools from being created.
What kids need to learn to read is an adult to engage with them, listen to how they read and engage them on the contents of the book.
Plus "Generative AI" isn't one single thing. Using it to write your essay is cognitive offloading but using it as a Socratic tutor that gives immediate feedback and adapts to the student is closer to the thing education research says works.
There's an equity angle as well. A school ban doesn't ban AI at home. It bans the equalizing version. Kids in educated, rich households will get AI exposure from parents. Kids without that won't get it anywhere, because the one place where the field is leveled has opted out. If AI fluency becomes a differentiator in the labor market infrastructure which is very likely a 7 year exposure gap sorted by household class is the opposite of what public education is supposed to be for.
(edit: By AI fluency I mean basically knowing how to drive the tools, an intuition for what the tools can and can't do, when to use AI vs doing it yourself, plus detecting when output is wrong, knowing what to verify, etc.)
The problem is, a lot of the parents have bought into the digital parenting age too. They were told ipads etc were part of getting the best education for their kid. Now they're fighting hard on rolling it back (not least because they can't comprehend that it's a problem, that their child can't focus 5 minutes without a device)
And having no TV and no smartphone at home and at school is likely the best way to acquire it.
You need to have a very solid understanding of things like sources, and bias, and how to evaluate if something is likely to be true, and how to get to a credible answer.
Given the number of people online who try to read arguments with screenshots of a ChatGPT conversation, this is not an obvious process at all.
Sounds like following the evidence.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529... (Article is fine, but more importantly has multiple study links)
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01947-1
Isn't this a good thing, employing more educators, building more schools?
Any sane society will always invest more into its future well being and incentivize investments into education.
So, it's no surprise they're going to opt out of a system that's investing trillions to make education useless.
Even if the people building this world are wrong -- not all students are equipped to call some of the wealthiest people in the world complete bullshitters. Not all adults are ready to call them out as bullshitters, for that matter.
The ban is for elementary school. I don't know about you, but when I was 11, what motivated me to go to school definitely wasn't the idea that I could monetize my intelligence later on.
What makes you think school students are being told that? I've heard that they are told everyone will be using AI to help them write.
They’ve always been metering AI access (whether this is meaningfully intelligence is a separate question), but that doesn’t prove that there isn’t some time in the future where it won’t be worth metering, only that if there will be, it isn’t here yet.
OTOH, it is still worth noting that from a a consumer-of-the-service perspective, the trend is for more metering, not less (even if that is due at least in part to the rollback off unsustainable subsidies and not to the fundamnetal shifting what is sustainable farther from unmetered access.)
I'd expect, at this point, it's rather hard to avoid hearing about AI and its impact.
No one knows how to use either.
You do hand out driver’s licenses before people learned to ride a horse though, and you do hand out matches before people learned to make fire by hand. So this isn’t a universal pattern, and you shouldn’t expect it to hold true in the future.
1. Wisdom through dogma. 2. Wisdom through reasoning. 3. Wisdom through experience.
AI is just stage 1. Instant and easily digestible. Traditional learning forces you to go to Stage 2, because you are often given too much information and you need to compress it to memorise it. And the best way to compress it, is by finding some kind of logical structure in the information.
I learned it as: 1 Knowing what it is. 2 Knowing how it works. 3 Knowing what it can become.
In the classroom, are they just throwing gpt in front of them? Is that the modern equivalent of watching a vhs?
Or do they have homework to vibe code something or given some prompts to ask at home and save somewhere?
Serious question, what does this mean?
If there are no guidance teachers and schools can do what they want and some teachers would probably go to far to early
Kid spent no time doing homework and learned nothing
Or imagine a reading log(typing out what you read) to encourage a kid to read, you have AI that can copy and paste your homework for you
My children has at least not yet received any tasks or homework using AI for coding. They teach less coding in school now compared to when I was at the same age, at least at my elementary school.
This ruins “search and topic and write about it”
This is happening at schools nationwide. It is unstoppable at this point. It's a bizarre charade.
Nobody seems to care enough to do anything about it.
Students likely aren't allowed to use AI anyway for assignments. Or are they? That's the question, what is actually being banned if anything
This can be reduced to "Do students have access to a phone". Good luck after 12 years of age with that. That is a tough war.
AI in 1:1 tutor mode with proper hardware (live scanning pen and paper), harness and guardrails should be wildly successful (in terms of education outcomes) especially in elementary school.
Just one example - it's very common to see ChatGPT and the like respond with "you're absolutely correct! Great insight" to something that is a complete misunderstanding.
> It’s been proven that when a model is trained on large volumes of highly factual and non-theoretical data, it learns to always have an answer. DeepSeek V4 Pro (1.6T params, 49B active, 44 AA Intelligence Index score) has a ludicrous 94% hallucination score on the AA-Omniscience benchmark, meaning on questions that it couldn’t figure out, it only stated that it didn’t know around 6% of the time, and the rest it confidently hallucinated an answer. GLM-5.2 scored a 28% hallucination rate, Opus 4.8 was 36%, Fable 5 was 48%, and GPT-5.5 was 86%.
https://arrowtsx.dev/bigger-models/
I think even a 5% hallucination rate would be terrible for a teacher, who should generally be comfortable with saying "I don't know off the top of my head but here is how to find resources to answer your question".
---
So, just to drive the point home, Codex has an 86.9% hallucination rate on the AA-omniscience score in this index https://benchlm.ai/models/gpt-5-3-codex - if you ask it something that wasn't sufficiently covered in its training data, it will confidently make up an answer nearly 87% of the time.
While you might think it is happy to correct you when you are wrong, you don't know that for sure since you don't know when you're wrong. Codex may have been happily agreeing with you about things you had completely backwards.
That's a great way to get you to listen because your guard is down. Imagine if it told you you were an idiot and then corrected you.
I certainly have, too, but there is still a difference between a person who has a factually incorrect but consistent worldview and an LLM which simply reflects the worldview of the user or even changes between queries.
I don't think creationists have any business being in schools either, for what it's worth, but I think it's easier for a teenager to sort out "Mr. Smith has no clue what he's talking about" vs "I have no clue what's true because the LLM everyone expects me to learn from just confirms everything I ask regardless of what I'm asking".
Best AI is still your own brain, trained on paying attention in class and reading the assigned content.
I’m open to the idea! Show me the evidence. Then we can roll it out to our kids.
Yup. Short-term metrics juice. Actual comprehension and cognition falls. This seems to be the case across the board, including with adults.
I’m genuinely optimistic that there is a way to make AI helpful in education. I just don’t think we’ve found it yet. (We certainly haven’t demonstrated it.)
This is probably the big problem, or at least one of them.. If you use less time on learning, it will probably be harder to remember what you learned also. We need to spend some time to make it stick
This tempts users to approach problems by first feeding them into the LLM and then simply following the route the LLM lays out, which does improve task completion time for tasks that the LLM can simply regurgitate, but it stops the user from developing the actual critical thinking skills that school is supposed to teach.
The description of the paper also said:
AI users who maintain similar homework completion time as non-AI users experience small learning losses.
This was a surprise too me. I would have thought otherwise.
Would love to see some evidence about if more or less people fall behind and have worse results. In my head the AI should be able to get the weakest students a bit highere.
I think the evidence so far is all students lose learning and cognition, but the brighter students lose less.
From https://cepr.org/publications/dp21577 :
The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys.
No mention of the weakest student. Which probably means they did not have a significant worse or better score
The biggest issue is a child has to want to do that, since they also could just ask the AI for the answer and then go back to playing video games. End of the day past age 13 or so I just don't see legislation making any difference, they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting.
I think so too. But we haven’t demonstrated we’ve found how, in kids or in adults.
> biggest issue is
We genuinely don’t know what the biggest issue is. We just know it doesn’t work. There is zero quality evidence for AI helping with learning or cognition in kids or adults. (Happy to be proven wrong. This is a fast-moving and big field.)
> they'll find a way past any law blocking them from using AI. Like a lot of education it'll probably come down to parenting
And community. Rich towns restrict devices in school, monitor use at home and thus will have less of an issue with AI exposure.
Ask chatgpt or claude, on their highest model (probably unnecessary but I'm sensing a vibe) to explain a simple linear algebra problem, and if you don't understand it, ask about what part you don't understand.
And if you truly believe it made something up, prove it.
This is seriously the easiest thing to prove out there, you can see for yourself in the next 5 minutes.
You seem to be assuming that the issue is around factual correctness, and that may be the case but the evidence we have so far doesn't support jumping to such a narrow cause.
Is the poor performance because the LLMs are frequently wrong? Unknown.
Is it because the LLMs are sycophantic? Unknown.
Is it because the chat interface is a poor one for learning? Unknown.
What we do know is that students who rely on LLMs learn less and perform worse in the long term. And that alone is enough evidence to support a ban. If better tools come along in the future and are shown to aid learning, then the ban can be re-evaluated.
Again, the research points almost exclusively in one direction when it comes to learning and cognition around AI. You’ll solve more problems more quickly but wind up learning and thinking less.
My leaving out the word solve seems to have led some of you astray, I apologize.
Again the problem is you have the option to solve your problem and move on without understanding it. That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it.
I live in fear that instead of learning how to use the tool, some might just vote to ban the tool.
I don’t know! It’s an interesting question. All we know is it does.
> That does not mean you can not use the tool to understand the problem and how to _solve_ it
It doesn’t. But we have no evidence it can.
We have lots of evidence of people thinking they’ve learned something, taking a benchmarking test, and being found wholly deficient compared to folks who worked through a textbook, went to a class or even solved problems off YouTube videos or instructional websites.
If you can’t figure out what the value add of a human teacher is then.. fkin lmao. It’s well beyond simply transmission of information.
The best teachers have passion - that passion is infectious. I was lucky enough to experience that and it grew my curiosity.
LLM’s provide no such equivalent.
The goal is not to understand a linear algebra problem. The goal is to learn how to solve it using lessons and techniques taught beforehand. Aka not to get a fish, but learning how to fish.
Type in "Explain how to solve a simple linear algebra problem" into the AI of your choice instead.
I’m more interested in seeing how someone who teaches themselves with this approach scores on a standardized exam of linear-algebra competence.
I’ve seen this particular philosophy in college where the student focus exclusively on passing exams. They would memorize notes and past exercises. The focus is on solving a particular set of exercises instead of understanding the concepts. Change things slightly and they’re lost.
That may not matter in college where you can focus on a few disciplines and half-ass the rest. But everything in lower stages is truly foundational.
Seems like there's no benefit even if it's used "correctly"?
Would hate to dissect this just off a paragraph.
private school money with homeschool paperwork and an app doing the teaching.
https://www.wired.com/story/alpha-schools-new-york-city-camp...
It’s tiresome.
Every time I see LLM enjoyers yapping on like this, it just reminds me of people trying to read tea leaves. There's all these goofy little rules about how to structure the prompt and how mean or nice to be to get it to work optimally, but I think it's obvious that most of these users are just seeing incidental successful outcomes in a largely random system and extrapolating from there because it makes them feel in control.
It is, quite literally, superstition.
I've heard students actually discussing that they will just use an LLM to shortcut work. I even have friends in their 50s who can barely think for themselves now without having to refer to "AI". And at least two of them are teachers.
Leading on from that, the staff are the most dangerous. My daughter has had generated exercises provided to her from multiple teachers, which are quite frankly entirely wrong. This was hilariously pointed out after I called a meeting with her mathematics teacher over it. They questioned my knowledge on the matter with the insane assumption that "AI is foolproof". I had to hit them with a clue stick then.
No one taught anything of value. No one learned anything of value. I am very worried we'll see a lost generation at some point rippling through the ages.
They have also been explicitly told by the department of education to NOT do this, but it hasn't stopped lazy teachers all over. Apparently not doing your job, in direct contradiction to your given rules, is ok because "it's the future".
The end goal is to dismantle public education and route public money to religious and private schools.
Bald faced lies from you, nothing surprising here. I could take the time in explaining how state and federal responsibilities are divided, I could go through the history of the Department of Education and how funding for schools works in the US. I could point to dozens of examples of you being wrong from any decade in the last century, from de-segregation to "no child left behind".
But there's no point, since you're just a troll and not here for a real discussion. No one interested in a sincere exchange of ideas would start from such a stupid premise. So you can go ahead and look through my comment history all you want, and respond all you want, but it'll just make you mad and get you flagged.
You would be better served by finding a large rock to kick.
Every special event flyer I get from my kids' school now seems to be AI generated. I'd be surprised if quizzes and worksheets don't head the same way.
then "give'm a computer ASAP" is the wrong answer.
Indeed, seemingly they done so by age/educational progression:
> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said. In upper secondary education, from ages 17 to 19, students should learn to use AI appropriately so that they are prepared for further education and work, it added.
Schools are the place where the product is a more fully developed person. There's no LLM shortcut for generating that. There are many ways you could use LLMs that would discourage it. There may be some that can encourage it.
Personally, I can see aggressively keeping kids away from LLMs until they've learned effort, living in tension/frustration, the pleasure of breaking through to discovery, trust evaluation, hypothesis/test cycles, and good socratic dialogue from the learner's side.
It may be possible at intermediate phases to prime some models to help with this process.
I would assume if children are allowed to use AI without rails as a shortcut it will undermine their learning, and it's used for feedback and as a patient tutor it would accelerate their learning?
It seems like the problem is that they don't have the science and tooling to use it constructively at scale, so the desperate solution is to ban it outright until a scalable constructive approach is understood?
The article doesn't explain any of this directly...
It's frustrating to me when bold statements are directed at "AI" holistically and vaguely, completely ignoring any nuance.
There is a massive gap between letting elementary students free reign use chatGPT 3.5 (hallucinations and all) to do whatever, vs using a very guard-railed pedagogically optimized app powered by a SOTA model to support students in a specific way that accelerates good outcomes.
Most respectful interpretation is that the leaders know this and have a plan to figure it out, but for some reason it's not making it's way into this article. Is the absence representative of the truth of the situation, or some editors choice to pile on to a holistic anti-ai narrative?
We have mounting evidence AI hurts learning and cognition in many circumstances. I have not yet seen similar-quality evidence for it helping.
Given that balance, restricting AI in education in the general population (while studying how to best deploy it) seems prudent. Especially given the Norwegian approach, which gradually introduces AI as kids get older.
Giving students uncontrolled access to generic LLMs probably would hurt outcomes. Research process is slow (IRB and all that) so they are dealing with data from years ago (models that confident hallucinated a lot more than current SOTA) so if thats what they are basing it on its reasonable.
My frustration isn't with the decision (hey all teachers - no more chatGPT in the classroom). My frustration is with the reporting / nuance of "until we can research this better and figure out how to harness AI to improve outcomes and not undermine them".
It’s balancing the irrationally exuberant narrative of the tech bros and AI pushers. You have to stop the bleeding before you can dress the wound to promote healing.
One avoids nuance for clicks or to propagate a narrative, sew division, distract, etc.
Again. As I said in both my comments, I'm not criticizing the ban, I'm criticizing the absence of any communication regarding a plan for researching potentially constructive uses. As a reader, I can't tell if the Norwegian leaders have no plan, or if they didn't communicate a plan, or if they did and Reuters chose not to include it in the article.
Not everything has to be a culture war. When we are talking about our children's future it would be cool to do so pragmatically.
I'm just an old man shaking fist at clouds.
I'm sitting on a mountain of evidence (n=44,000) that used in a very specific way and context AI accelerates and improves lasting learning outcomes. Th3 data is new, but the science that explains it actually goes back decades, predating AI - it's based on pedagogy from texts such as How People Learn (NRC).
My data also shows that students using AI the wrong way perform way worse - the performance gap is widening between students who want to learn and struggle (and use AI to optimize struggle) and students who want instant gratification and use AI for shortcuts.
So I know that if they truly slammed the door on this potential then they threw the baby out with the bath water.
But I don't know the truth because Reuters doesn't report the truth, and that's what tips me from concerned to frustrated. But I guess by complaining about modern journalism standards in a thread about banning AI I'm breaking HN guidelines. Time for me to log off...
Can you point to it?
Have you tested this against an external metric of competence? The research seems to show that AI is great at making you feel you know something. But I think the studies looking at language learning found those using AI extensively tested below peers using traditional methods.
AI helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter which kind-of-but-not-quite explains the concept I am hunting for.
It feels like a good tutor. If you aren’t externally benchmarking your comprehension, you really can’t say.
> helps me fill gaps in my knowledge quickly rather than hunting around for hours for exactly the right chapter
Have you considered that learning to phrase your questions is part of indexing and thus learning a subject?
I’m not saying AI can’t help with that search process. But we have no evidence it helps and lots of evidence it hurts, and everyone with anecdotes to the contrary seems to be going off vibes around how much they learned without any external reference.
The students of lowly-rated profs had better 10-year outcomes than those with highly-rated profs according to a study that I think came out of the Naval Institute a decade or two ago. "No shine without friction."
We need more data. Certainly turning students loose with AI stunts them. There's probably some happy medium. But where kids need the most practice with fundamentals when they're young, a blanket ban for now seems sensible. And it also seems like a good plan to introduce it when they get older. I suspect we'll learn a lot from this Norwegian experiment.
I think that is what is at risk.
For policy decisions around something like education standards, something for which we have an established status quo (which works in Norway)? Yes. I don’t think waiting for evidence to act is imprudent in that situation.
[*] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/13/youtubes-ceo-is-latest-tech-...
This used to be a tech/non-tech line. It shifted to class sometime over the last ten years. The iPad kids are probably getting served slop. The AI-employed parents don’t have to directly police AI exposure because their kids’ device use is already controlled; at school, at extra-curriculars and at home.
Young kids don’t need to learn programming. They need to learn math, reading, spatial reasoning and social skills. (Among other things.)
The kids who were being taught Java in elementary school ten years ago aren’t particularly better off for it.
Just NOT doing that work by having AI simulate it is not good for anyone’s cognitive development.
At the same time, anyone growing up today will be using LLMs for massive parts of the jobs they grow up to do. So they should learn about it.
I really feel for teachers/educators right now. It must be hard to remain demanding and insist on educating kids well while also preparing them for the future they’ll actually live in.
Whatever AI looks like in 20 years is going to be so different from what it is today as to make distracting from basic skill-building an almost-certainly net negative educational effort.
I think that if anything, it’s really good I learned how to operate a computer and the Internet BEFORE what the Internet became.
I pity the generation who don’t understand a computer’s folder structure because they grew up with smartphones and TikTok.
There's not so much to learn they can't put it into a high school course. Adults currently in the workforce haven't been using AI since they were in elementary school, and they're adjusting fine.
a) what’s the actual percentage of professionals who actively use AI? It’s much smaller than we think in tech.
b) what percentage of those people understand the very basics of how LLMs work (e.g. token prediction, context windows, etc)
c) what percentage of those people understand AI Agents (or any of their ingredients (APIs, credentials, etc.)
You quickly arrive at a tiny fraction that has a real clue about what they’re doing.
These are elementary school kids...if they start using AI in 6th grade, they have 6 years to learn AI before graduating high school.
Essentially the entire value proposition for AI, particularly as it advances, is that you don't need to learn how to do things anymore.
We’re banning cell phones in school after seeing the evidence, albeit along a class gradient. We’ll probably see something similar with AI. Poor kids get AI in school (and unmonitored at home). Rich kids do not.
Do we really need to force technology into everything or are we just used to doing it so see it as necessary?
AI is indeed dangerous. It gives super abilities when in the right hands. Some people don't like it as it creates competition for their mere existence. They start gaslighting campaigns - "AI is bad, dangerous, does not work, consumes too much energy etc". This is luddism of our century, but also a form of psychopathy. When everybody is being gaslit, some of the very same players who spreads false narratives use AI to their own benefit.
It’s a fully centrally controlled technology that reduces your ability and makes you dependent on it to perform all daily and business functions with a huge environmental and economic impact. The economic impact is both the risks imposed by it failing and the risks imposed by it being successful.
It’s not Ludditism, it’s a good attitude to risk.
this tech is unsustainable by design
I can't remember ever seeing this many reasonable posts being downvoted to the point of greying out.
yes YES YASSSSSSSSSSSS
Ban all the things for kids. I don't want to be interviewing people in 10 years and decline every candidate because they can't correctly answer the question "You are 50ft away from the car wash. Do you walk or drive?"
I... are you an LLM? The distance doesn't matter - you probably don't want to walk to the car wash.
It is almost all political (and outraged) commentary, and you tend to dominate posts like this with many comments, without adding nuance, substance, or listening to the other side.
It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.
Facts don't care about your feelings, bud. And neither do I.
> It reinforces a pet theory I have, that if I'll build a dynamic filter to HN to filter out political/ideological commentors, the quality of discussion I'll see will rise up again.
Yes I'm certain you will be happier if you ignore everything that challenges you.
I only have two feet, so if I am to get there, I must use a vehicle.
We are seriously in danger of "we need AI" becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as humanity becomes too stupid to do anything without AI, and we end up with a few companies essentially holding the keys to our collective ability to produce anything of value. Am I the only one freaked out about that?
Learning is a conspiracy by Big Knowing, it's all a myth. Let's just ask an LLM to all our thinking, no need to be a functional human.
Clearly not, given that you seem to believe this despite it being incorrect. Every single bit of evidence gathered so far indicates LLMs are worse teachers than humans or every self-directed learning.
I was gifted kid, bored to death at basic school. I was reading books under the table, and was lucky to have tolerant teacher. Total ban would just push me to misbehaving and disrupting the class.
AI is amazing tool for learning, if Norway can not harness it, there is something deeply wrong with the educational system. Perhaps teachers unions?
Norway has a big problem with young immigrant kids at school not speaking Norwegian. Right now other kids are expected to teach them basic language, holding back their own development (like learning reading and writing)! Again, AI could provide amazing help here!
What, in your professional opinion as an educator, should schools do about AI in schools?
AI could help with that.
FYI: all Norwegians learn at least one foreign language in school. It is mandatory. That means you have to, in case that’s a big word for you.
If you so prefer you will have the option to learn one or two more in middle school and one or two more in high school.
By the time I was 15 I spoke three languages. Everyone at that age would know at least two. Some would know four.
Is it so much to ask that you at least consult the AI tools you speak so fondly of as tools of education before babbling about something you so obviously are deeply ignorant of? If nothing else then at least in lieu of growing a brain?
But this is not about Norwegian kids. And many imigrants have no use for Norwegian (obscure) language. I have polish and ukrainian friends in Norway.
And keep in mind, if you move to a country you kind of have to accept that they won’t be able to offer you education in every possible language. In fact, learning the language is often a prerequisite for permanent residency.
I am not going to ask you how you envision that AI somehow magically solves this, since we have already established that education isn’t something you appear to know much about. The last thing we need is more speculation, fantasy or anecdote.
Have the courtesy of at least researching things online for more than 2 minutes before you expect to be taken seriously.
Should we ban programming as well? You know, kid could program multiplication and cheat this way! I can not believe I am reading opinions like this on "hacker" news!
In middle school I remember being assigned a book report that would include the author's biography. I'd just finished a book (The Gammage Cup) and of course my local library did not have any information about the author. So in that situation it was assumed that you would learn traditional research methods, but also that you would just pick a classic book where the information was readily available.
The general question here is risks vs rewards and with any new technology both are unknown making caution perfectly reasonable be that internet searches or anything else.
So sure in 30 years the policy will look different, but that doesn’t mean they are making the wrong decision.