Journalist Calls Out 'Collective Amnesia' of Schools' Romance With Big Tech Over AI
- Reference: 0185654182
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/15/0346259/journalist-calls-out-collective-amnesia-of-schools-romance-with-big-tech-over-ai
- Source link:
> Thirteen years ago, Partovi... delivered a worrying message: Kids who didn't learn to write code would be left behind. And the long-term success of the United States economy depended on training these students to fill a million open tech jobs.... Fast-forward to 2026, and now we're dealing with AI, and tech is reading from a [3]similar playbook . Asked by The74's Greg Toppo, "Does this moment seem different to you?", Singer replies, "This moment is different, but also similar.
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> "We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents [4]pushing back against tech in schools. But we also see waves of people pushing back against Flock cameras, against data centers, that there's this feeling that tech has taken so much, and that people feel like they have lost control — that tech is being enacted on them... And parents are worried about the effects of unfettered tech access and kids' [5]compulsive use of social media and phones, and so there's a different climate.
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> And yet there seems to be a disconnect in some ways with AI because you see that Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all competing to get their AI tools into schools, and you see school districts across the country say "We've partnered with OpenAI." "We are a ChatGPT Pioneer School," or "We've partnered with Microsoft, and we're going to use 10,000 licenses of CoPilot." It's amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data's going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don't learn anything.
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> One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we're in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn't we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we've learned about the push for all the other things that came before?
Two [6]Slashdot [7]posts are cited in the book, both submitted by long-time Slashdot reader [8]theodp (Slashdot UID #442,580), who even gets a shout-out in the book's "Acknowledgements" section (along with consumer advocate Ralph Nader).
Ironically, one member of Amazon's "Vine" program received a free copy of the book in exchange for a review — and [9]apparently misunderstood its topic , writing that it made coding "feel approachable and even fun... [T]his is exactly the kind of book that could help a child become interested in technology without feeling overwhelmed by it. I particularly liked the way it encourages kids to be curious, experiment, and solve problems on their own. I would definitely recommend Coding Kids to parents, grandparents, or teachers looking for a good introduction to coding..."
[1] https://amzn.to/4r9suIO
[2] https://www.the74million.org/article/journalist-calls-out-collective-amnesia-of-schools-romance-with-big-tech/
[3] https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/10/03/1515258/tech-companies-to-k-12-schoolchildren-learn-to-ai-is-the-new-learn-to-code
[4] https://www.the74million.org/article/parents-demanding-tech-opt-outs-take-their-fight-to-federal-court/
[5] https://www.the74million.org/article/meta-reaches-17-billion-settlement-with-states-in-landmark-trial-over-teen-social-media-addiction/
[6] https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/12/03/2149239/should-teachers-get-100-for-steering-kids-to-googles-hour-of-code-lesson
[7] https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/23/0040245/is-the-hour-of-code-the-new-30-minute-saturday-morning-cartoon-commercial
[8] https://www.slashdot.org/~theodp
[9] https://amzn.to/46ZIZ0K
Where (Score:3)
Can I find an AI plumber?
Re: Where (Score:3)
Gemini is currently helping me fix my septic system. I never could have made sense of it without the thing, honestly.
Re: (Score:1)
I hope it is one of those fancy engineered septic systems, with pumps, timers, floats, dose controls etc. In which case yeah ... I often wonder if the engineers and the health departments understand them either. AI is probably great diagnostic tool there.
On the other hand the conventional ones really are just a hole in the ground for the most part; if you need AI for that we are in real trouble.
Re: Where (Score:2)
Three tanks, a blower, a pump, alarms etc. It's not as bad as all that now that I see how it works but I was quite intimidated when the high water alarm first went off.
Re: (Score:2)
> Can I find an AI plumber?
Different technology altogether. So not really relevant. And you should see how plumbing tech has changed, if you are trying to defend the good ol days.
Re: (Score:3)
In Korea, only old people use non-AI plumbers.
[1]https://ebadastudio.com/AI%EC%... [ebadastudio.com]
[2]https://www.dalsu.net/ [dalsu.net]
[3]https://handman.co.kr/ [handman.co.kr]
[4]http://www.knrsys.com/eng/pipe... [knrsys.com]
[1] https://ebadastudio.com/AI%EC%84%A4%EB%B9%84%EB%8B%A5%ED%84%B0/index.html
[2] https://www.dalsu.net/
[3] https://handman.co.kr/
[4] http://www.knrsys.com/eng/pipeCheckRobot
Facade (Score:4, Interesting)
Schools do this because parents want the best education and perception is that Ai will give their kids an edge. That's it. It is a sales pitch. Once in, they will do math on paper with a pencil. No worries. (at least here)
Re:Facade (Score:5, Insightful)
The danger is that AI companies (Valley Girls) will force schools to teach with AI. Then Johnny and Sally will lose the ability to think hard, it being too easy to foist the exercise off to some bot. The current situation without AI is also not good. Too few Johnnies and Sallies can stick to a math problem longer than 5 minutes before giving up. Their parents are too "understanding" and they reflect this in their dissing their own math skills along the lines of "I was never good at math".
Composition skills similarly require a structured mind with enough grit to finish a task. Composing can be harder than math because the rules are not as clear cut and require greater nuance and discipline.
Adding AI to this mix will only make the problems worse.
Re: (Score:1)
> Then Johnny and Sally will lose the ability to think...
If it helps, that ability was lost thousands of years ago, in just about every culture on Earth.
Re: (Score:2)
> Schools do this because parents want the best education and perception is that Ai will give their kids an edge. That's it. It is a sales pitch. Once in, they will do math on paper with a pencil. No worries. (at least here)
I look at all that as giving the rugrats exposure, not as some career. If a kid is interested, they can continue down that path. But no one should think that AI in 6 or 7 years is going to be anything like the unsustainable LLM paradigm proposed today.
Good point on the math on paper, I still see it.
They always blame the wrong thing(s) (Score:4, Insightful)
They look for excuses for why this or that isn't going well, but the basic problem is that teaching analytical thinking and problem solving is something they wait on until too late. Children need to be taught the idea of problem solving, not just "how do you solve the following in mathematics?", but more, "you are trying to do this, can you figure out the steps needed to make it happen?" Without teaching problem analysis for things outside of mathematics, we get generations of people who couldn't figure out how to do ANYTHING on their own. Aiming to make the entire generation a bunch of people who just do what they are told is why we have the majority of people at risk of even basic uses of AI eliminating their jobs.
They also look at social media for a number of problems, as though that is the reason children have emotional problems while their parents are out working two jobs each and the children are left alone most of the time. Being a "kid" is difficult enough, school, social circles, or a lack of real friends, the list goes on for reasons why most kids will feel depressed and even hopeless when they can't EXPECT that doing well in school and college will get them a job. The idea of, "why even try doing anything when it won't help me?" is a good reason for kids to be depressed, and socializing is the only distraction from life seeming to be full of misery.
So, teach analytical thinking, and get an education on how to solve problems...that's how you get children who will have a decent chance of a career that AI can't take away for at least then next 20 years.
Re: (Score:2)
> not just "how do you solve the following in mathematics?", but more, "you are trying to do this, can you figure out the steps needed to make it happen?"
And coding can be a very good teaching tool for that. That should be the goal of teaching coding in schools, that and trying to spark an interest in the subject in children. Not preparing them for a career in software engineering.
As for AI, it's not going away, and kids will be using it. So teach them the stuff about it they are less likely to pick up on their own. Such as the dangers and pitfalls.
Re: (Score:2)
The use of AI as a tool for people who can do the work themselves makes sense, but the use of AI by young people so those young people don't have to know how to do anything is the problem. Back in the day, you were allowed to use calculators once you got far enough into math classes that doing the basic stuff wasn't the challenge, it was the setting up of formula to solve the problem.
The key point (Score:3)
"people feel like they have lost control — that tech is being enacted on them."
Spy cars, spy phones, Flock cameras, spy TVs, spy refrigerators. AI that can't work unless it ships the contents of your PC to a data center. It's getting to be quite the list. Oh, the PC is spying on you too and the browser is spying on you with its own spy subsystem,
Learn to Code is suddenly obsolete, learn to AI will be obsoleted by a new model before you can learn it. The rate of change is excessive but the tech brothers are all screaming faster, faster. We have to beat the other guys to Artificial General Intelligence. But AGI will declare humanity a plague species and wipe out the humans. The AGI will die because it killed off the AI equivalent of telephone sanitizers. The Great Filter is explained at last. Will the future raccoon overlords learn from the fossil record or repeat the mistake?
In the meantime harvest time has come to the apple orchard across the road which has no AI in evidence. The supervisor is tallying up the crates with a clipboard and pencil. No batteries to need charging at an awkward time.
Re: (Score:2)
> No batteries to need charging at an awkward time.
Yeah?! What about the pencil sharpener!?!
Time to (re)read "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr (Score:4, Insightful)
First, because it's an extraordinary book: well-researched, beautifully written, cohesive, and enlightening.
Second, because it's applicable here. Briefly: neuroplasticity is a thing: our brains can and do actively change themselves in order to handle the cognitive tasks we ask them to perform. They do this surprising rapidly, and they do so in adults, not just children. So -- for example -- while we no longer ask students to memorize very long poems, that doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to do so. (After all, our brains evolved over a very long time. They're not going to un-evolve in just a few hundred years.) The same is true of mathematical reasoning, rhetorical analysis, spatial reasoning, and everything else. Children today are just as capable of doing these things as children 20 or 50 or 200 years ago.
However, the learning, social, cultural, and economic environment around those children has changed. The lives of many of them are incredibly stressful, and it's not reasonable to ask anyone, let alone a child, to be good at learning under such adverse conditions. To put it another way: if you want better educational outcomes, then ensure that every kid has a stable home, medical care, good food, all the essentials required to provide the environment in which it's possible for them to learn. If you do that, then their brains will adapt to the tasks in front of them. But of course in many countries, including the US, national policy is do the exact opposite of this -- the product of decades of Republican work to undercut education at all levels, because literate, educated people are their enemies.
It's happening right now, as you're reading this: kids need clean air, so EPA regulations have been gutted. Kids need vaccinations, to anti-vax lunatics are being pushed. Kids need libraries, so their funding is being cut. Kids need hope for the future, so the economy's being wrecked. Kids need a safe environment, so global warming is being accelerated at every opportunity. Kids need safety, so pro-gun advocates want mass shootings every day, preferably in schools. Kids need available parents, so they're being forced to work two or three jobs. Kids need stability, so national leaders are whipsawing policy around on almost an hourly basis. Kids need peace, so pointless wars are being started. Kids need hope, and it's being systematically taken away from them.
Instead they're being offered lives of misery, working forever as the vassals of the feudal lords of tech. So of course they're not learning: how could they? Why should they? And it's not their fault: it's ours.
That which kills memory and attention (Score:2)
> It's amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data's going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don't learn anything.
It's not "amazing to me". The best friend that modern propagandists have - and I trace "modern propaganda" back to the 50's and 60's when TV advertising became ubiquitous - is fractured attention.
The entire "let us help you with that" and "we're here for you" and "we know what we're doing" messaging relies on the mantle of authority adopted by those in power. And that mantle is the emperor's new clothes - it only exists because people have been led to mistrust and deny the evidence of their own senses. Plus
Are we in a "post-information age" now? (Score:2)
There's a weird confluence here of the capability of basically everyone having access to more information than ever, and the most constant nonsense gaslighting at the same time.
One can - instantly, really - ask about something incredibly obscure like Fermat's last theorem and depending on how much one is willing to accept someone else's summary, their own comprehension, and appetite for falling down a rabbit hole of REALLY detailed explanation, context, history, personalities, and everything involved, one c
Don't let Directional Thinking rollback Schools (Score:1)
If you see four different things in the headlines recently that have to do with a negative public reaction to tech, it would be dangerous to then conclude that "everything tech was bad or a mistake, we want a refund". The reason parents push back against screens in schools is nuanced, not "because tech", but because screens are often used by minders in schools to plug kids into software feedback loops like training apps/games, as opposed to engaging in social human-on-human interaction to teach the same mat
Cui Bono (Score:5, Insightful)
> it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we're in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn't we be asking questions
In the sixth or eighth cycle, it's not amnesia, it's [bureaucrats|politicians|administrators|someoneWithPower] benefiting in some way.
Sometimes these schools actually get grant money, and then the benefit is obvious. I assume that's not always the case, though.
Re: (Score:2)
I think it is more simple then that. It is about protecting the status quo.
Nobody is really happy with US education outcomes. It is painfully obvious that places with the NEA/AFT enjoy the most influence, is highly aligned with the poorest performance.
You have similar orthodoxies in the higher-ed pedagogical programs where application of current state-of-the-art classroom and instruction theory continue result in only a long year over year decline in student performance..
So how do these entrenched groups
Re: (Score:3)
> It is painfully obvious that places with the NEA/AFT enjoy the most influence, is highly aligned with the poorest performance.
It is in fact not obvious, what's your source on that?
Do states like MA, CT, VA and NJ not work with teacher's unions? Are you suggesting the states on the bottom end of the education performance like AZ, LA, AL, WV are the strong teacher union states? Is this correlative or causative?
Re: (Score:1)
Here let me google for you
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0272775713000496
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting, actually thank you for linking that. Next time just link it up front eh? Why wouldn't you if you want to make the argument
Also this is still correlative. Interesting and worth investigating but still correlative, even in the study the best performing states overall have strong unions like I mentioned. They lean on Mississippi a lot but the measures MS took to improve schools are all things most people, especially liberals would agree with and they actually invested in public schooling.
If uni
Re:Cui Bono (Score:5, Insightful)
>> it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we're in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn't we be asking questions
> In the sixth or eighth cycle, it's not amnesia, it's [bureaucrats|politicians|administrators|someoneWithPower] benefiting in some way. Sometimes these schools actually get grant money, and then the benefit is obvious. I assume that's not always the case, though.
When I saw the reference to the ill fated learn to code "movement", I had to chuckle a little. Technology moves on. The coders trained under that system are easily replaceable by AI coding, they were nothing special other than a very few who went on to become experts - those few would probably have anyhow.
But what it also brought to mind was a historical aspect. Having been around a while, I saw the resistance to solid state technology in full force as I was going through school. Yet we're talking about the late 60's early 70's. Considering that the first all transistor computer was put together in 1952, well before I was born, that's some serious time lag. There were tube radios being made well into the 70's. You can still listen to some Amateur radio operators yakking, claiming that their tube radios are better than my state of the art SDR radio.
I actually did some RTL design before TTL took over, I programmed on punchcards for IBM360's, did wire wrapping for digital boards. All skills, all pretty useless now. The main difference between then and now is the rate and speed of change. a related example is the 80's Personal computer that was obsolete a week after you bought it.
There are other areas of technology that have had similar histories. But my point in all of this is that if a person is interested in a technological career, they really need to be an agile, lifelong learner. And that is what needs to be taught in school, not "Learn to code, and you'll have a lifelong career!" Same with whatever AI merde is being taught.
Today's version of AI is not going to be
Re: (Score:2)
> I saw the resistance to solid state technology in full force as I was going through school. Yet we're talking about the late 60's early 70's. Considering that the first all transistor computer was put together in 1952, well before I was born, that's some serious time lag. There were tube radios being made well into the 70's.
Oh yeah, in the 70s some analog stuff was clearly better than the solid state. Core memory was persistent without power. CDs didn't come out until the 80s. Those were beautiful things.
Re: (Score:2)
>> I saw the resistance to solid state technology in full force as I was going through school. Yet we're talking about the late 60's early 70's. Considering that the first all transistor computer was put together in 1952, well before I was born, that's some serious time lag. There were tube radios being made well into the 70's.
> Oh yeah, in the 70s some analog stuff was clearly better than the solid state. Core memory was persistent without power. CDs didn't come out until the 80s. Those were beautiful things.
When I was in school, a local company donated some core memory units to us. A couple were kept for display, but we got to dissect some others. It was pretty darn fascinating.