This isn't binary, teachers have limited bandwidth and supplementing real teaching with AI supported research can work.
Students need to understand what AI is and is not.
Something got lost as we transitioned from parents telling their kids to 'go play and do not come back until dinner is ready' to us handholding & driving our kids from one social/sport activity to the next.
While it causes fights with my kids, I blank refuse to do certain things for them (fix their internet connection, repair a toy or bike) I'll give them the tools and they know to ask when they get stuck.
The act of learning through failure is a dying art these days. It's 'teach to the test', stressed out teachers, parents having too much to do compounded by taking on second, third jobs in this economy.
Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.
As a parent I agree with you, but watching other kids get a leg up because their parents continue to jump in and save them. And your own get the double harsh reality of learning failure and then being punished for it through loss of placement and status. It's tragedy of the commons since everyone must pass no one can fail.
> Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.
The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
> Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
This is a real question though. One I've been asking since the early 00s. Learning means something different than it did in decades previous. Merely remembering easy to look up facts is not the slam dunk it used to be.
Memorizing facts was never the slam dunk in and of itself, but just a path to something greater, and I don't think that's changed. Think about the most obvious example - what we're doing right now: language. You can only fluently speak and communicate with others because you've memorized, to the point of complete subconscious mastery, a completely ridiculous amount of information and knowledge - thousands of words, countless grammatical nuances, cultural and contextual connotations/implications, and much more.
Imagine trying to speak without having this base of knowledge. Even if possible, you'd never be able to use the language in a comparable fashion. And I think this generalizes to basically everything in every domain. If you want to get good at chess, you need to study a ridiculously massive amount of tactics/patterns. If you want to get good at basketball, you need to simple practice dribbling and shooting a ball into a hoop for many thousands of hours, and so on.
The whole point of the memorization is to make it feel like it's not memorized. Like when you see these words, or come up with your own - it requires absolutely zero effort. There's nothing magical there. It's the exact same way that a master chess player can easily play a competent game of chess with 1 minute on their clock or while blindfolded.
If, and as, we start doing away with the rote, I'd expect we're going to see worse and worse outcomes. Arguably, this is already happening as Western education is continually 'rethought' while China rockets ahead of everybody with an education system that looks very much like a more centralized version of the US education system of 70 years ago.
You hit the nail on the head. It sounds silly to say, but it simply is useful to know things. And to know things, you "memorize" them. More specifically, you build neural pathways as the information becomes better known to you, and which can be activated quickly. This is why I maintain a massive Anki deck for anything I find curious and want to remember, inspired by Michael Nielsen (https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html) and others.
Even if AI is very powerful, it is very obvious that someone actually knowledgable in a given domain can leverage AI more usefully than someone without that base of knowledge. And to be actually knowledgeable, as opposed to vaguely familiar with terms, takes significant effort over time. Luckily we have tools like spaced repetition that make that effort easier.
The last thing I'd add is that it's useful to know lots of things in various domains. Much like an LLM, our brains draw connections between disparate things which we know well, in the process of diffuse mode thinking.
Was learning easy to look up facts ever slam dunk useful?
It had its place in the 80s when looking up involved at least finding the right book. But that time was already on the way out in the 00s. My impression was more that education likes to ask for facts because they are easy to test for.
What you really want to teach are concepts and broad strokes. Nobody needs to know on which weekday the Soviet Union collapsed, but an understanding of the causes of the collapse is useful. Similarly, you don't need to know the speed of light to more than one digit of precision, but knowing the role of the speed of light as the speed at which information can travel through space is useful
That kind of knowledge also continues being useful in the age of AI. It allows you to see the connections in the world, and know which questions you even have to ask
You need to be able to hold facts in your own working memory while you think about them. If you do this with the same facts, and think through different combinations, they’ll stick in your memory for longer.
I never sat down to memorise trivia about the Roman calendar, but I know Julius Caesar was assassinated on the 15th, the ides of March, because of repeated exposure while thinking things through.
It seems like old assessment techniques could luck in to testing comprehension, because the people who understood things would also remember them. This devolved into the recall being seen as the goal, instead of as proxy measure of something harder to test.
Hey you wrote out my general thoughts on the subject pretty damn well :)
>> Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
> This is a real question though.
Is it? Why bother to learn how to add 2 numbers when you can just use a calculator.
> Learning means something different than it did in decades previous.
Not really. This is just the acquisition of a new tool. It can possibly be incorporated into education like how calculators were used in the 00s/90s, but you must know how to do the work without the tool.
Once smart glasses with displays or just talking to Ai in your earbuds becomes humanly ubiquitious then I believe the game changes. As long as it's 100% correct humans become know it alls.
I hooked up my local LLM with zim-tools and a 120GB copy of Wikipedia. With some very strict instruction it's turned into a bar-trivia machine, it can answer factual questions faster than I can look them up and it's all offline.
The fun starts when you ask it more complicated questions like 'i have a device that communicates with microwaves and draws a maximum of 20mA at 12v, is it safe for use near humans?' It will look up microwave safety, ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, workplace exposure limits and eventually come up with 1/4W is already safe and the device likely is not a 100% efficient microwave transmitter.
Don't agree. If you know no facts, you'll be unable to think even the most basic thoughts. The more you know, the deeper your thinking can be as well as the more subtle.
For every fact you learn there is a necessary context and numerous exceptions when it's applied in other contexts. If you expect AI to spit all relevant facts at you every time you're clueless, you will have no idea when AI is wrong or lying. You will have to trust everything AI (or its owner) tells you.
Yes. Fact fluency allows higher level of abstraction. This is very clear in the case of mathematics - try doing algebra without having your addition and multiplication tables memorized, kids who fail algebra are often missing these basic facts, along with other basics like order of operations.
It's not just math either. Try to be an electrician without memorizing the basic principles of electricity and how they interact. You're going to have a bad time.
By induction we can see how this scales upwards, basically infinitely, to higher and higher levels of thinking.
I think this is mostly compounding confidence at play that unlocks your mind to be more fluid when faced with a task to do/problem to solve that actually requires skill (not just following a series of known steps). It’s like public speaking (unless you have really bad stage fright) you generally will give a better presentation if you really know your stuff, or at least will be less nervous allowing yourself to get into that flow state.
> Try to be an electrician...
> By induction...
Well played.
I think the shift is in part from learning behavior indicating an ability to apply (‘I wanted to do something so bad I went to the library/college/etc.!’), to the free availability of knowledge leading to a delinkage of knowledge v.s. the ability to apply knowledge and get a desired outcome.
AI can really help the outcome part (by just doing it for you), so for better or worse I see that delinkage continuing.
People who bother to actually learn while using AI will have an edge on those shovel slop, but there’s clearly a difference from previous eras.
> I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results.
I think it will actually be much, much worse.
It might look like those kids are having a leg up, but really they aren't learning to stand on their two feet and the wheels start coming off when they aren't under the wing anymore.
If parents are stepping in and constantly saving their kids they are not giving them a leg up. They are effectively handicapping them.
Being able to say 'I attended $famous_uni' counts for much if not most in many circles. Upper classes are beyond merit; being there and staying there is all that's needed. In fact, stepping in to save offspring is a way of life for them. School is just the first time it happens.
Generational wealth usually disappears within 3 generations so real life skills are necessary if the upper class wants to remain there.
Mate, I’m visiting Europe right now. The tail of generational wealth is so long here you can even see it. We can certainly see a few examples of family wealth being squandered. And it makes a great narrative about karma and balance. But I’ve met even more families that while not individually wealthy will never, ever be poor in the foreseeable future for the next 5 generations at least.
That's an awfully long runway.
That severely depends on legal and social system you operate it. It is not universal truth, that was artifact some concrete historical period. And the loss is frequently result of large war, revolution, violent displacement, that sort of thing.
I assume they weren't advocating for using AI to just blindly give answers to the students...
You can argue the same about humans. Growing up, I definitely did encounter people who charged money for tutoring and never taught anything - they just gave the answers. Wasted money.
As for dealing with kids whose classmates' parents help them a bit too much... I honestly don't have a solution. From my experience growing up, beyond a certain amount of help, you definitely are hampering the kid if you overhelp them. I guess I was just fortunate that none of my peers' parents cared to, so I could still be near the top of the class.
Oh, and our final scores were heavily weighted on in-class tests/exams, so even if some kid's parents did overhelp, they wouldn't do well overall.
They're not really getting a leg up though, it will bite them later in life.
Young adults are less competent and resilient than ever for exactly this reason
> but watching other kids get a leg up because their parents continue to jump in and save them
Can you give us an example to what his looks like in your context (not necessarily you and your kids)?
> The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results
Laptops, tablets, and AI are just tools. If the folks wielding these tools (or ostensibly teaching others to wield these tools) are not using a tool effectively, then we shouldn’t be surprised when the outcomes are unimpressive.
Simple example — put a hammer in the hands of a skilled builder, and you can get a deck or a house frame. Put the same hammer in my hands, and you will get nothing more than bent nails and sore thumbs.
All that said, just like I feel confident that I could learn how to use a hammer well if I took the time to learn and practice, I think students and teachers can learn to use their tools (laptops, tablets, AI, etc.) well if they take the time to learn and practice (ideally with some good scaffolding).
> If the folks wielding these tools are not using a tool effectively
I struggle with this argument when the subject ("the folks") turns out to be "many people", perhaps even a majority of people. If one teacher is an outlier that uses it badly then sure, the teacher is to blame and be judged. But if a collective is using it badly, then perhaps the capability of the collective should have been evaluated before handing the tool to them.
I don't have an answer - it is bad to withhold a tool from the hands of people who will use it badly. But the overall outcome has to also count.
> If one teacher is an outlier that uses it badly then sure, the teacher is to blame and be judged. But if a collective is using it badly, then perhaps the capability of the collective should have been evaluated before handing the tool to them.
You won’t get any argument from me that most teachers are poorly trained. Money can largely buy someone out of that trap.
That said, just forbidding a tool that is critical in modern life just because some/many people are bad at using it does not strike me as a particularly constructive solution to the problem.
> I don't have an answer - it is bad to withhold a tool from the hands of people who will use it badly. But the overall outcome has to also count.
My “solution” to this is not a popular one. Lower expectations for public mass education.
Over the last 120 years, we have taken a curriculum that was targeted at elites and forced it onto almost everyone.
High quality education should be available and cheap or free to everyone, but I really don’t think it should be mandatory.
If we stopped compulsory education at 8th grade and replaced most high schools with some sort of other skill development program or work/study program, the expectations and outcomes would probably be better aligned.
Large parts of the tertiary education system would be gutted, but maybe that’s a good thing.
And now we have junior programmers that don't understand the code being generated and submit pull requests with garbage code.
We were all once junior coders. We Also didn’t understand the code we had written or what we were being asked to do. I have yet to meet any junior coders who hasn’t written garbage code that hasn’t managed to squeak through unit testing.
I’m embarrassed by some of my early work and simultaneously impressed it managed to work at all! And someone was dumb enough to pay me money to do it?!
> And now we have junior programmers that don't understand the code being generated and submit pull requests with garbage code.
Sounds just like most 'senior' devs tbh.
> The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
I remember growing up being told similar things about the internet and how you can't trust anything written on it. There was some truth to that, of course, but how many people will say that of search engines, despite them being filled with utter crap?
When I grew up we couldn’t use the internet as a reference for our research. There didn’t exist a standard for citing articles and blogs as there was for journals and books. Eventually, that was fixed.
I use AI extensively now, it also cites the websites and electronic documents it uses. It’s a little frustrating in that it cites the URL but not the exact paragraph or chart cited. For that I have to read the entire article. Sometimes it gets it wrong because the context is incorrect. It’s still a great tool, but without my last generation experience in high school and undergrad research, someone without that experience would blindly follow wherever it takes you.
You're basically describing the established pedagogical field of Problem Based Learning, which is around as long as personal computing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem-based_learning
In PBL the teacher adopts a constructivist approach - supporting, guiding, and monitoring the learning process as opposed to delivering a defined curriculum via lectures or seminars.
Agentic AI is arguably a better fit for this as it can scale infinitely to monitor student progress, offer timely feedback on design choices, and adjust difficulty dynamically based on how the student interacts with the problem.
Your main contention is one I'd broadly agree with - that use of Agentic AI for tutoring abdicates intellectual agency, allowing the AI to perform the critical synthesis and analysis that the student should be doing themselves for learning to occur.
The solution, however, is clear: guardrail the AI to promote core pedagogical principles rather than replace learner cognition by mandating things like instructional friction and the strategic fading of AI support as students build competence.
As explored in the paper I link below, by balancing proactive scaffolding with necessary and beneficial cognitive challenges, AI can preserve the productive struggle essential to effective learning.
https://arxiv.org/html/2606.04543v1
(A final thought: have a look at the current field of companies who specialise in turning training materials into engaging interactive experiences for the likes of Compliance and Security training. This is a corporate field now being automated and democratised for use by the average student in Academic pursuits in an on-demand fashion. Appropriate AI tutoring is basically the same concept.)
AI has its own benefits but its really a bad idea to use it in education as a primary source. LLMs have lots of information, reasoning ability, however they have their own limitations and by the nature these limitations just amplify.
Few days ago my son was working on a problem which asked if square is a rectangle. Turns out his class teacher and external tutor (who was using AI) had different opinions on it. My wife consulted AI as well and she also came to the conclusion that square is not a rectangle cause AI told her so, AI told the same answer to external tutor. I understand that the context matters and if one probes AI more with additional context it may come up with correct answer, but this depends on the assumption that the person asking AI for something already knows the answer.
This is not a problem with AI, this is a problem with a human accepting an answer without understanding why it is correct. The tutor could also read a book that states "A square is not a rectangle" (or vice versa) and repeating it back to the student as established fact.
The whole point of having teachers is to give intellectually developing and still vulnerable children the best possible support they could have from a human which is ideally interested in their well-being, being responsible and in doing a good job.
Replacing that with AI is the kind of SV-stupid which starts making sense after the educational system was hollowed out for profit reasons and is failing. The human in that system is just checking in and DGAF.
I am very curious what either person asked that led them to say that AI had told them a square is not a rectangle.
The obvious question of “is a square a rectangle?” is definitely NOT causing any LLM to say “no”.
Hallucinations are an issue but they genuinely are no longer a concern for any modern non-tiny LLM for basic facts that you would expect a K-6 course to cover. Maybe you might be able to find a few random hallucinations in knowledge covered at the high school level but I’m quite skeptical even that still happens. Yes, they can still, at times, hallucinate sources but I cannot recall the last time I actually saw this happen. I think it was at least a year ago
I just tried with Luna, Gemma4, GPT-OSS-120B. All got this correct. (Unsurprisingly.)
I'd guess that the tutor had a brain-fart, and then blamed AI for their own silliness? No matter what the reason, they clearly shouldn't be tutoring.
(I mean, seriously, what on earth?)
In what world is a square not a rectangle?
I don't understand how your wife interrogated the AI to be told a square is not a rectangle.
And how can two tutors disagree on this?
> In what world is a square not a rectangle?
In the world of object-oriented programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle#...
Real squares and rectangles are immutable. You might as well make a rectangle mutable and turn it into a pentagon.
I read their comment as the teacher (who was correct) and a tutor (who used AI) disagreed, not two tutors.
With the amount of blatantly false information I've seen LLMs spew out in response to my very simple questions, I can very easily imagine one would get this basic information wrong somehow, although I did just Google it (as Gemini, and particularly the on-search-result-page version of it, seem to be the absolute worst of the common models in my experience), and it did get the answer right.
What kind of AI is this? ChatGPT says a square is a rectangle. Google search says it.
Most charitably, it was not a story of recent AI usage, but a few years ago when such a mistake would be more believable.
Let me say this in a different way: If some rectangles can also be squares, then this shows that a square is a rectangle. This is not a logical deduction; it is an intuitive one.
LLMs have lots of information, but they have zero reasoning ability. That is why they are so bad at giving answers: they can't reason from one thing to another, but instead everything is a statistically likely result. If using an LLM for learning, you have to make sure to check everything it says or you will take in false info, guaranteed.
LLMs have had a reasoning setting for a while now. The reasoning is what allows them to go through and test each output to see which output/answer ends up aligning with known context the best (whether that be constraints that steer it away from some outputs, or information/hints that steer it towards the desired output).
The problem with the tutor's question is that they're going to AI to answer this question and not asking underlying questions like "what makes a square a square" and "what makes a rectangle a rectangle", then doing their own thinking to determine if a square's qualifications also fit inside the qualifications to be a rectangle.
Heck, even if you just feed the underlying into AI it'll reason the answer in a logical manner:
> In standard geometry, A square is a quadrilateral with 4 equal sides and 4 right angles (90° each). A rectangle is a quadrilateral with 4 right angles. Its opposite sides are equal and parallel, but all four sides do not have to be equal. So the key distinction is: Rectangle: four right angles. Square: four right angles plus four equal sides. > > That means every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square.
Asking LLMs to just give you answers is the real antipattern. But if you remember that the only thing it's good at is finding patterns given context/constraints, it can be an extremely good tool.
Also, I have a feeling the vast majority of the populus is using free versions of Claude or ChatGPT. Thankfully recently ChatGPT Free is GPT-5.6 Luna, but before the response qualities and capabilities of the free chat output were less than stellar.
> teachers have limited bandwidth
Hire more?
For how much money? Subscribing people is 200 dollars a day. Codexr is 20 dollars a month
If they are going to be put out of work by AI then they will be cheap to hire.
If you were unemployeed, what's the minimum rate per day that you'd be willing to work for?
>Students need to understand what AI is and is not.
Do we really understand what AI is and is not? For example we all know AI can hallucinate, but how does that knowledge help us in practice? If I'm leaning something new I would have to fact check everything which would take about as much time as learning from verified sources.
I just watched a youtube about cruise ships. A near-riot broke out during a movie quote quiz because the AI that made the questions confused Casablanca and Gone With The Wind. If it aint ready for quiz night, it aint ready to teach kids.
With all due respect, this example is obsolete anecdata. I doubt the cruise ship was using Astra, for example, or Fable. Or really anything past GPT 3
Ask each of those if they can spell seventeen, and then ask them how many e's are in the word.
They're now over fitted on strawberry has 3 R's. So ask them how many R's are in srrarbrarry. There are, obviously, 3 R's in srrarbrarry too.
Ask a color blind person to spell "red" and "green", then ask them how many red apples are on the table.
LLMs work on tokens. They literally cannot see individual letters. Yet, unlike humans, they can instantly create a tool to solve this task for them and never be stumped by it again.
I'm so tired of this brain-dead gotcha comment.
It is important to understand how this technology works. It isn't magic. Your example is solid. Similar to the Chinese Room.
Do you think your legislators or most users understand tokens and predictions and what is going on? Do you think that those who bombed a school using it know this?
Until frontier models can account for the disparity between what they can do and what the person (or other agent) is asking, we will continue to suffer bad information used like good information.
That tokens cannot count letters like that is not a brain-dead gotcha. Ignoring how humans are using these models is lacking in critical understanding of the real world. People are literally going to die due to humans not understanding how this works (and already have). True brain-dead, and body-dead.
Almost no one is, so I don't get your point.
Its good for kids to be bored and find things to do for themselves. It good for adukts too.
Driving your kids to sports is bad now? Seems like there's a new moral panic every week.