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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
(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.)
A friend of mine put his kid into a school called Alpha [1]. It has no teachers, only guides (?), who are well paid grads but not formally teachers. Kids go in in the morning, do two hours of computer study with an AI program, and the guide only steps in if the kid has a question or doubt the system cannot answer.
Then there's recess and afternoon is all taken up with "Life Skills" classes such as entrepreneurship and the likes.
Kids are tested weekly and progress through grades at will. For example, his kid would officially be in 3rd grade, but she's doing 3rd reading, 5th grade math, and 4th grade writing. She can easily test 3rd grade topics now.
I am ambiguous about this model. Love the "learn as much as you want" even if it means learning 2, 3 grades ahead, but the no-teacher rule and so much computer use seems a little strange. Also if the kid is not extremely self-motivated, they will be left by the side of the road by the school.
I have found for many young kids lack of studiousness is not that they are not self-motivated. It is that whatever is being taught is worse than boring to them. The lack of motivation in schools comes from a lack of interest or too slow of pacing.
By the time they get out of primary school most have had the curiosity that drives motivation beat out of them.
I'd have just sat there for hours trying to trick ChatGPT into giving bomb making advice, and then disrupted the others by sharing.
There have been many variations on this idea of "letting kids learn on their own". The basic issue is the one you highlight, which is that it works if the student is very self motivated. Most students aren't. Or rather, they're highly motivated to do other things.
Most children are naturally curios. The challenge is to make them curios about the things you want them to learn, and make that more interesting than finding out how to make bombs or what the consequences of sharing that with the class will be
I got the benefits of letting kids go at their own pace etc. at a fraction of the cost but with a bit of (mostly fun) effort by home educating my kids. Tutors for two subjects (three in exam terms as English language and literature are separate GCSEs), both Oxford graduates in those subjects. No AI but lots of books and other resources.
Most kids are motivated given the right environment. Enjoying learning is natural.
The AI element of what you describe does not appeal to me. The weekly testing and assignment to grades sounds a bit rigid too.
Considering how much one to one human tutoring 40k an year could buy that does not sound like good value.
Alpha shows the results they do because they charge exorbitant rates (up to $75,000 / year depending on region) to staff the school with multiple individualized tutors per student.
It is a for-profit product which is sold to parents and state-level customers more than it is a school.
1. I have 0 problem with the "for-profit" product if the kids are well-educated.
2. I would challenge the "multiple individualized tutors" claim, as a parent with a kid actually studying there says there is no tutoring, only answering questions on the content or the software being used.
In terms of 3rd level accession and standardised testing I'd imagine they boast great statistics, and that the students are self-evident in communicating a degree of confidence and holistic education beyond their traditionally educated peers.
However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.
To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.
N.B. Public (read:Private) schools in the UK are about £30k a year. Boarding schools hit about 50k in the UK/Ireland. 'New Age' or International schools for the children of diplomats and HNW ex-pats like Nord Anglia or similar go from about €/£20k upwards. 40k a year isn't outrageous in context, even outside of America.
> However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.
This keeps coming up every time, and it's always pointed out that there is scant evidence supporting this view at a large scale.
Every motivated parent I know who homeschooled his kid didn't deal with these problems.
And plenty of those who went to a traditional school did. They aren't even outliers. I'm sure anyone who went to a regular school can think of kids in their class who exhibited the problems you mentioned.
No doubt, plenty of homeschooled kids do as well. Just as you have a distribution for regular schooled kids, you'll get a distribution for homeschooled kids. Claims that the distributions for the latter are skewed in the "wrong" direction are never presented with evidence.
> To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.
I went to a regular school, and none of what you say applied to me. The curriculum/instruction came first, and learned little of the former. I'm sure I'll find classmates who'll say the opposite. This sounds like a classic case of post-hoc attributions.
As a parent of two teenagers in public magnet HS (one of which is top 10 in the US) I still say homeschooling is by far the best and what my wife and I would have done if it was an option.
Home school is best, private school if you can, public school if you must.
Its a weird stereotype of home education that people with no, or limited, experience have of it. It is far better preparation for the "real world" than schools are.
Then I think you probably learned the wrong lessons.
The lesson you should have learned would be that we should tear down the "brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs." We only tolerate these things as "normal" because people go through their lives not actively trying to tear them down and break them.
> Then I think you probably learned the wrong lessons.
> The lesson you should have learned would be that we should tear down the "brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs." We only tolerate these things as "normal" because people go through their lives not actively trying to tear them down and break them.
I was a product of an environment like that (magnet school with a lot of unstructured time and good access to resources), and it didn’t take me very long to run into the Binary Authoritarian Figures’ version of “you and what army?”, and they were largely correct.
There are ways to undermine parts of the establishment, sometimes even at scale, but the process is not always obvious or easy to access.
> So you gave up when it got hard? That’s kind of what I read out of that.
That’s a very uncharitable reading.
I have made my mark in the world by exploiting the Achilles’ heels of “authority figures” (which is usually just some form of a lack of empathy). I have caused a few to fall, I’ve made others reform, and I’m just an annoyance to many others. I have trained others to do the same.
That said, I could get whacked out of existence figuratively or literally if I crossed the wrong person or group.
There are others like me, but (as I mentioned before) we aren’t always easy to find.
I know the above may seem grandiose, but I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about these “authority figures” since I was a kid. I’ve done something about it, but I also didn’t choose to bang my head against a wall and call it progress.
> However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.
Having been to a school like that, I agree with you. I had to learn those lessons quickly.
I largely opted out of being in the middle of that world, but I am still adjacent to it due to its ubiquitousness.
A good friend of mine works for them. It’s a weird combination of (1) probably the long-range future and (2) absolutely not going to use my kid as a test subject.
If you believe, as I do, that half of students only achieve half of their academic potential, then experiments like this are some of the most valuable work we could do in society.
But again, let me know how it goes in 25 years and my children can enroll my grandkids.
this is a classic confounder problem. I'm assuming the vast majority of parents who can afford 40k annual for their kids are relatively well off, have a lot of other disposable income, and the kid is never really lacking for any needs. put them in a public school and it's likely they'll turn out equally ahead for their grade
socioeconomic status (SES) is very often a huge confounder when it comes to anything from health issues, educational outcomes, and many other things. rich kids do better - the SES of the parents of Nobel Prize winners [0], young athletes [1], etc are all indicators of this
I’m very conceptually interested in AI assisted individual learning; I’ve managed to get into a lot of topics that I would have had a hard time approaching without an LLM helping. I really like having AI rephrase concepts usually visualizations and analogies that resonate with me personally. That said, I think there is a lot of sketchiness around Alpha Schools in particular: https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/special-repor...
AI could either help or ruin American education. But the Department of Education is being shutdown. Many parents are relatively absent. And functionally all tech companies, and especially startups, are rapacious in pursuit of education funding.
I think the most likely outcome is AI makes American education worse, not because if the technology, but because of the “leaders” building and implementimg it.
Not sure the US Department of Education did much that would influence this either way, except if the AI was being used to correct income-disparity effects on education.
It doesn't mandate curriculums, choose technology, anything like that? Only recommendations.
They might have been able to monitor its effects but they wouldn't have been able to direct its use or non-use; that's not what they did.
Essentially it was/is an anti-discrimination organisation, making sure that states gave an education regardless of wealth/race/status.
Slightly creepy, seems harmless now but future without supervision you don't know what they're teaching or what is going on. I would agree it's a double egged sword.
I'm all for saving money where you can, but these models really aren't great for learning because they love giving you answers and it's so easy to get an answer, but the process to get to the answer is how you actually learn. Unless you put guardrails in place to actually learn, I don't think this advice is good.
Students have always had the curriculum and standard study material, it was always possible to study alone, but the teacher mostly provides an interactive gap-bridging layer, and the classroom setting provides some level of obligation, I could be wrong but I don't know why AI can't fulfill the interaction layer part.
Sunk-cost, social pressure and obligation are probably the most salient points for educational success in a classroom setting with a teacher of median-skill versus an AI trained on the same corpus.
The sad reality is that many of the most senior professors and lecturers in top universities are their for their research rather than teaching ability, and that the success of the elite institutions is somewhat self-selecting as regards their cachet and filtering done by their admissions process (i.e. Ivy League institutions do not offer athletic scholarships).
Some teachers do genuinely make a difference, and maybe that's good enough, but unfortunately there are many more who struggled to add value to the original material, and I don't really think this is a unique experience.
Of all the teachers I have ever had, at school and university, I can think of only three who struggled to add value to the original material. One was in the middle of a nervous breakdown (of a kind that genuinely would not have been out of place in the John Hughes movies of the day, but that contributed to him passing the following summer); the other two were in the middle of significant crises of different forms.
So that's about 0.75%.
The rest were either competent, good or amazing.
(Then again, one of the remainder was internationally famous for being a (self-acknowledged) media whore and while I know he added value it wasn't always to the subject at hand)
2.5% I meant to write there. And I know this because I just found that 2.5% elsewhere that I meant to write 0.75%.
School is now distant enough for me that I have reached the brain fog age where I cannot be commenting on internet things intermittently while writing documents…
I’ve found LLMs to be very good at teaching. Better than I expected.
You have to tell it what you want out of the session. A kid could just type in the question and get the answer, but that’s not tutoring.
When I use them for learning I tell it my goal, summarize my current status, and then tell it to teach me incrementally with a quiz after each step. You can get fancy and have it reach back into history to throw in extra refresher questions.
It uses very few tokens compared to a coding session so you can use the highest model for this and the usage is negligible. Using the top model available to you is important to keep things accurate. I wouldn’t have trusted this back in the GPT 4 or Sonnet days, but with Opus, Astra, or Fable it’s great.
For longer sessions set up a directory and have it keep notes about your progress, problem points, and what was covered in the past.
disagree- i used it for the last few years of coursework preparing for exams. If you give it context (i'm studying for an exam, do not give hints unless asked, your objective is to help my understanding) it is incredibly helpful. This isn't advice, it's a company going out of business.
I have recently realised that people actually don't know how to prompt.
They use AI "raw" and don't understand how the question can have a drastic impact on the result, let alone using skills or system prompts.
Learning new topics or skills is a very good example, I had the same experience as you with Claude when I learned a new language.
Which isn’t surprising at all if you turn off your adblocker and look at how these AI chat products are marketed to the general public. They’re presented as all-knowing oracles that can deliver exactly what you want with only the vaguest and briefest of prompts.
Maybe some argue it's ASI but for me AGI requires that the AI understand what you're trying to ask rather than require you to carefully engineer a prompt.
If you're starting a fresh session the AI has no context at all beyond your prompt (and the generic system prompt). It isn't psychic, it can't know if you want a straight answer, an elaborate explanation or an interactive teaching lesson. You have to actually say what you want
I'm not a huge fan of prompt engineering or elaborate skills that are longer than a couple sentences. But you have to give the AI context. The more context the better
"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"
If a random person comes up and asks you a malformed question how do you answer? What's worse if what if the question is not actually malformed in some contexts and because you're a wizard that has massive amount of contextual information there are plenty of right answers for the 'wrong' question you just asked.
In schools classrooms tend to avoid unlimited exploration as it would take unlimited time. On your AI prompt the next thing you ask could be anything, anything at all. Just exactly how is the AI supposed to know if you're an idiot?
Continuing the great tradition of claiming that any machine, and especially any AI, unless it takes over literally everything, is worthless. Or in the words of Pablo Picasso:
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (he was not joking by the way)
Of course, if computers DO threaten to take over literally everything, then people are even more scared and react aggressively, as demonstrated in this 1939 article describing IBM's vocoders:
"The Pedro Peril" (the first AI that actually talked back was nicknamed Pedro, and described as "the latest and most fearful gadget from IBM", the journalist's conclusion was to suggest Pedro be deported as he would spread propaganda and maybe even become a dictator) (unsigned Washington Post editorial, 1939)
It really depends on how you are using AI. If you simply use it to get the answers to homework you won't really learn. If you use it to figure out the topics you need to learn, and to identify/close gaps in your understanding then it is a very useful tool for learning.
Depends heavily on the tutee. If it’s someone highly motivated looking for some guidance like you, I could see it working really well. If it’s a kid who would rather be scrolling through Instagram and needs an authority figure to keep them on track, it’s not going to work.
If the kid would rather be scrolling instagram then solve the underlying problem. They will not have a good life if they will only do anything constructive when forced to by an authority figure.
I find it very easy to engage in a Socratic dialog with the AI. If I ask it, it will actually quiz me and carry on a tutoring session. And it doesn't mind if I ask dumb questions.
yes, similar experience... you can ask the same question in 10 different ways until you understand it and AI doesn't care
I've walked away from colleagues trying to explain things similarly because if you're not getting it after a few attempts you're going to hit a wall of their ability to explain, their patience, time, etc
I don't know if I agree, if I ask a physics question it will show me the process to get to the answer, and it's really nice to have something to talk to with infinite patience to dig down into steps you don't understand. I learned a ton about implementing machine learning from using AI models. Obviously that takes a level of curiosity and effort on the learners part, but with a pretty minimal system prompt I think you'd get a pretty great tutoring system.
They rule for maths. I had an extremely good experience going from high school trig through multivariable calc with them over a year. Best math teacher I ever had.
I think the difference is between someone like you who wants to learn and a teenager who has to learn.
I used to be a tutor, and the kids who wanted to get ahead were people who more needed someone to give them hints as they learned. The ones who needed to get the grade were a lot more reticent and needed a lot more attention and prodding.
I don't think AI as it currently exists is a good choice for those folks.
My daughter worked on learning for various classes by building her own plugin and skills for tutoring that uses various techniques of teaching without revealing answers, giving advice on homework questions without disclosure, etc. She overlaid with the personality of her stern gymnastics coach. It was surprisingly effective and I was pretty impressed at 11 she had the sense to not go straight to the answers. I think the “oh the kids” hand wringing is always overblown with kids - it’s the adults that don’t adapt well.
The ChatGPT web app, though apparently not the desktop app, does have a study mode where it will not give you the answer but will help you reason through the problem like the world's most knowledgeable, most attentive teacher.
I've been using chatgpt to tutor my son to improve his writing skills. It actually works quite well and the lessons adapt to his skill level. I seeded it with the curriculum and marking guidelines for his school year. Each lesson is timeboxed to 30 minutes and he stops if the lesson goes over time. I then feed this back into chatgpt and it adapts the lessons appropriately. It's helped quite a bit with a definite improvement in his writing skills. He actually wants to do this instead of school as he feels he gets a lot more out of it!
One thing that I've noticed as I've gotten older is that the introduction of calculus has slowly moved to younger and younger students. I suspect the tools are partly responsible for this. Less time on basic math and algebra.
When I first started calculus, I was furious at being taught Newtonian Physics and some bits of chemistry without calculus. It's a stupid bunch of equations you have to learn, which Newton worked out from calculus. I'm glad people are getting it more often together now, but also just a bit jealous at the same time.
A calculator is a tool that replaced the slide-rule or Abacus - no one contended the Abacus replaced teaching or teachers. Ditto an iPad which is effectively just a fancy calculator in this context.
Similarly Youtube didn't replace teachers - it afforded remote learning and correspondence courses a new medium for transmission, recording, and playback of teaching.
More to the point none of those were trained on a corpus containing the history of human pedagogy, were capable of inference, or of generating dynamic learning resources based on best-practice models with inherent self-correction and pedagogical reinforcement mechanisms.
This line of reasoning makes sense, but also I would say that a lot of technologists who are interested in education realize that they have to design something that wouldn't just give the answers away because that's not the point of learning. That seems like it can be pretty difficult to accomplish with LLMs because I bet if a student keeps pestering them, they will give up the answer or give a clue that makes the problem way too obvious.
So usually the claims about replacing tutors like in this article come from a place where they usually give a caveat that maybe for highly motivated and ambitious students, they can figure out how to accelerate their learning with AI. But then that undermines the whole argument of transforming education if it wouldn't work with students who are average or below-average in their academic achievement.
I just tried ChatGPT on a simple find an error in the proof question today and it completely butchered it ignoring the main constraint that two variables a and b were natural numbers. It said, "a and b might not be natural numbers" and then went on to produce a very elaborate, completely wrong answer.
It's more like the cost of living crisis in Australia means that despite a likely oversupply of tutors working second jobs, people can't actually afford to pay tutors.
AI tutors will absolutely be worse, not better, but they may also be only a fraction of the price.
Learning from an LLM is nearly impossible because it has no opinions on how to structure the content.
It's great at giving you the illusion that you're learning though.
If you know an outline of the material and want to structure it your own way (ex, explain attention to me using Haskell notation) it's really great. But otherwise, human notes win.
So you’re saying if I pointed an LLM, say GPT 5.6 Sol, at a PDF copy of a textbook and asked it questions about something i’m stuck on and don’t understand, it wouldn’t be able to teach me anything?
learning is not a passive activity. likewise an llm can be used in a passive or active fashion.
Why is having your LLM one-shot a 200 page textbook a prerequisite to learning? That doesn't follow. If you use an LLM more like a tutor and less like a book, you can get an enormous amount of value for 1/50 the cost. Monthly GPT plus membership is half the cost of a bay area hourly tutor rate, and infinitely patient and available 24/7
Okay I was a professor for a bit. Few things I found
- LLMs cannot motivate a person to learn because they aren't people
- Learning requires rewiring your brain; you need to try and read content without explanations of every question you might have. Struggling is required for learning
- LLMs cannot generate structured content on long scales. I have tried this many times. Your average TA can easily write a calculus textbook.
- LLMs are RLHFd to just agree with you. Learning requires disagreement and tutoring requires assuredness
This would be good advice except that students are no better at getting information from AI than they are from getting it from books, botes, or professors. If you know what to ask, AI will give a lot, but if you don't ...
It's actually worse, because if you know what to ask, the books and professors will give you information you can generally take to be reasonably reliable; and if you don't know what to ask, you'll either not find the information in books or potentially be guided towards a better question by professors. With LLMs, you can be given incorrect information in either case, but especially in the latter case with way higher frequency than you would with books or professors.
I'd compare tutors to personal trainers. They're not doing anything special other than making sure you're using the equipment properly and providing accountability so you don't lose motivation and give up.
There is a lot to be gained from 1-1 in person tutoring. Can't read the article so don't know their specific gripe. But often when learning a kid needs redirecting, reassurance, or other emotional support. Getting this from AI seems like giving up humanity and connections for the sake of silicon valley educational 'betterment' which has always been suspect.
It is shocking how quickly many people are to dismiss the benefits of human interaction and connection since they aren't quantifiable.
If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?
> If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?
You will never get the chance to sit and talk with your now-elderly tutor, in the future, and tell them how much they helped you, or pay their deeper contribution forward by tutoring someone else.
Your AI tutor also doesn't know a job you should apply for, or a local group you could join for your other hobby they now know a lot about, or… or…
I mean the list of intangibles goes on and on, doesn't it? But here at HN people like to disrupt.
Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/W15Hg
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.
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.
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
What kind of AI is this? ChatGPT says a square is a rectangle. Google search says it.
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?
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.
Let me say this in a different way: If some rectangles can also be squares, then this intuitively shows that a square is a rectangle.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.)
Its good for kids to be bored and find things to do for themselves. It good for adukts too.
> 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.
A friend of mine put his kid into a school called Alpha [1]. It has no teachers, only guides (?), who are well paid grads but not formally teachers. Kids go in in the morning, do two hours of computer study with an AI program, and the guide only steps in if the kid has a question or doubt the system cannot answer.
Then there's recess and afternoon is all taken up with "Life Skills" classes such as entrepreneurship and the likes.
Kids are tested weekly and progress through grades at will. For example, his kid would officially be in 3rd grade, but she's doing 3rd reading, 5th grade math, and 4th grade writing. She can easily test 3rd grade topics now.
I am ambiguous about this model. Love the "learn as much as you want" even if it means learning 2, 3 grades ahead, but the no-teacher rule and so much computer use seems a little strange. Also if the kid is not extremely self-motivated, they will be left by the side of the road by the school.
[1] - https://alpha.school/
Edit: It's 40k a year.
I have found for many young kids lack of studiousness is not that they are not self-motivated. It is that whatever is being taught is worse than boring to them. The lack of motivation in schools comes from a lack of interest or too slow of pacing.
By the time they get out of primary school most have had the curiosity that drives motivation beat out of them.
I'd have just sat there for hours trying to trick ChatGPT into giving bomb making advice, and then disrupted the others by sharing.
There have been many variations on this idea of "letting kids learn on their own". The basic issue is the one you highlight, which is that it works if the student is very self motivated. Most students aren't. Or rather, they're highly motivated to do other things.
Most children are naturally curios. The challenge is to make them curios about the things you want them to learn, and make that more interesting than finding out how to make bombs or what the consequences of sharing that with the class will be
I got the benefits of letting kids go at their own pace etc. at a fraction of the cost but with a bit of (mostly fun) effort by home educating my kids. Tutors for two subjects (three in exam terms as English language and literature are separate GCSEs), both Oxford graduates in those subjects. No AI but lots of books and other resources.
Most kids are motivated given the right environment. Enjoying learning is natural.
The AI element of what you describe does not appeal to me. The weekly testing and assignment to grades sounds a bit rigid too.
Considering how much one to one human tutoring 40k an year could buy that does not sound like good value.
I would love to home school my future (not yet born) kids, how did you get started? Any tips? Recommendations? Etc.
Alpha shows the results they do because they charge exorbitant rates (up to $75,000 / year depending on region) to staff the school with multiple individualized tutors per student.
It is a for-profit product which is sold to parents and state-level customers more than it is a school.
1. I have 0 problem with the "for-profit" product if the kids are well-educated. 2. I would challenge the "multiple individualized tutors" claim, as a parent with a kid actually studying there says there is no tutoring, only answering questions on the content or the software being used.
My cousin uses Alpha. I fully endorse Alpha and its methods! Go Alpha!
In terms of 3rd level accession and standardised testing I'd imagine they boast great statistics, and that the students are self-evident in communicating a degree of confidence and holistic education beyond their traditionally educated peers.
However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.
To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.
N.B. Public (read:Private) schools in the UK are about £30k a year. Boarding schools hit about 50k in the UK/Ireland. 'New Age' or International schools for the children of diplomats and HNW ex-pats like Nord Anglia or similar go from about €/£20k upwards. 40k a year isn't outrageous in context, even outside of America.
> However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.
This keeps coming up every time, and it's always pointed out that there is scant evidence supporting this view at a large scale.
Every motivated parent I know who homeschooled his kid didn't deal with these problems.
And plenty of those who went to a traditional school did. They aren't even outliers. I'm sure anyone who went to a regular school can think of kids in their class who exhibited the problems you mentioned.
No doubt, plenty of homeschooled kids do as well. Just as you have a distribution for regular schooled kids, you'll get a distribution for homeschooled kids. Claims that the distributions for the latter are skewed in the "wrong" direction are never presented with evidence.
> To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.
I went to a regular school, and none of what you say applied to me. The curriculum/instruction came first, and learned little of the former. I'm sure I'll find classmates who'll say the opposite. This sounds like a classic case of post-hoc attributions.
As a parent of two teenagers in public magnet HS (one of which is top 10 in the US) I still say homeschooling is by far the best and what my wife and I would have done if it was an option.
Home school is best, private school if you can, public school if you must.
Its a weird stereotype of home education that people with no, or limited, experience have of it. It is far better preparation for the "real world" than schools are.
Then I think you probably learned the wrong lessons.
The lesson you should have learned would be that we should tear down the "brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs." We only tolerate these things as "normal" because people go through their lives not actively trying to tear them down and break them.
> Then I think you probably learned the wrong lessons.
> The lesson you should have learned would be that we should tear down the "brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs." We only tolerate these things as "normal" because people go through their lives not actively trying to tear them down and break them.
I was a product of an environment like that (magnet school with a lot of unstructured time and good access to resources), and it didn’t take me very long to run into the Binary Authoritarian Figures’ version of “you and what army?”, and they were largely correct.
There are ways to undermine parts of the establishment, sometimes even at scale, but the process is not always obvious or easy to access.
So you gave up when it got hard? That’s kind of what I read out of that.
> So you gave up when it got hard? That’s kind of what I read out of that.
That’s a very uncharitable reading.
I have made my mark in the world by exploiting the Achilles’ heels of “authority figures” (which is usually just some form of a lack of empathy). I have caused a few to fall, I’ve made others reform, and I’m just an annoyance to many others. I have trained others to do the same.
That said, I could get whacked out of existence figuratively or literally if I crossed the wrong person or group.
There are others like me, but (as I mentioned before) we aren’t always easy to find.
I know the above may seem grandiose, but I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about these “authority figures” since I was a kid. I’ve done something about it, but I also didn’t choose to bang my head against a wall and call it progress.
> However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.
Having been to a school like that, I agree with you. I had to learn those lessons quickly.
I largely opted out of being in the middle of that world, but I am still adjacent to it due to its ubiquitousness.
A good friend of mine works for them. It’s a weird combination of (1) probably the long-range future and (2) absolutely not going to use my kid as a test subject.
If you believe, as I do, that half of students only achieve half of their academic potential, then experiments like this are some of the most valuable work we could do in society.
But again, let me know how it goes in 25 years and my children can enroll my grandkids.
this is a classic confounder problem. I'm assuming the vast majority of parents who can afford 40k annual for their kids are relatively well off, have a lot of other disposable income, and the kid is never really lacking for any needs. put them in a public school and it's likely they'll turn out equally ahead for their grade
socioeconomic status (SES) is very often a huge confounder when it comes to anything from health issues, educational outcomes, and many other things. rich kids do better - the SES of the parents of Nobel Prize winners [0], young athletes [1], etc are all indicators of this
[0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/nobel-prize-winners-far-...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14668...
I’m very conceptually interested in AI assisted individual learning; I’ve managed to get into a lot of topics that I would have had a hard time approaching without an LLM helping. I really like having AI rephrase concepts usually visualizations and analogies that resonate with me personally. That said, I think there is a lot of sketchiness around Alpha Schools in particular: https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/special-repor...
Sounds like a good way to f**k up your kid
Literally can't be worse than most public school experiences lol
It can be worse. The prolonged interaction with AI means that your paying 40k a year to make your child an Ipad kid
If this is your actual objection to the concept, it's clear you are overlooking how screen-oriented public schools are these days.
Many schools have done away with textbooks and kids use chromebooks.
That is a bad idea, but at least they primarily interact with other kids and teachers
AI could either help or ruin American education. But the Department of Education is being shutdown. Many parents are relatively absent. And functionally all tech companies, and especially startups, are rapacious in pursuit of education funding.
I think the most likely outcome is AI makes American education worse, not because if the technology, but because of the “leaders” building and implementimg it.
Not sure the US Department of Education did much that would influence this either way, except if the AI was being used to correct income-disparity effects on education.
It doesn't mandate curriculums, choose technology, anything like that? Only recommendations.
They might have been able to monitor its effects but they wouldn't have been able to direct its use or non-use; that's not what they did.
Essentially it was/is an anti-discrimination organisation, making sure that states gave an education regardless of wealth/race/status.
Don't worry "A1" will solve it.
If you don't understand, here's Trump's secretary of education explaining how it'll make our children excel: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xsRUk0dMJu4
I'm sure she learned the correct term just in time for Trump to try to change it to "super-intelligence" or whatever the fuck he's doing now.
Slightly creepy, seems harmless now but future without supervision you don't know what they're teaching or what is going on. I would agree it's a double egged sword.
I'm all for saving money where you can, but these models really aren't great for learning because they love giving you answers and it's so easy to get an answer, but the process to get to the answer is how you actually learn. Unless you put guardrails in place to actually learn, I don't think this advice is good.
Students have always had the curriculum and standard study material, it was always possible to study alone, but the teacher mostly provides an interactive gap-bridging layer, and the classroom setting provides some level of obligation, I could be wrong but I don't know why AI can't fulfill the interaction layer part.
Sunk-cost, social pressure and obligation are probably the most salient points for educational success in a classroom setting with a teacher of median-skill versus an AI trained on the same corpus.
The sad reality is that many of the most senior professors and lecturers in top universities are their for their research rather than teaching ability, and that the success of the elite institutions is somewhat self-selecting as regards their cachet and filtering done by their admissions process (i.e. Ivy League institutions do not offer athletic scholarships).
This is such a terrible implied indictment of the schools you attended that I feel sad for you.
Some teachers do genuinely make a difference, and maybe that's good enough, but unfortunately there are many more who struggled to add value to the original material, and I don't really think this is a unique experience.
Of all the teachers I have ever had, at school and university, I can think of only three who struggled to add value to the original material. One was in the middle of a nervous breakdown (of a kind that genuinely would not have been out of place in the John Hughes movies of the day, but that contributed to him passing the following summer); the other two were in the middle of significant crises of different forms.
So that's about 0.75%.
The rest were either competent, good or amazing.
(Then again, one of the remainder was internationally famous for being a (self-acknowledged) media whore and while I know he added value it wasn't always to the subject at hand)
2.5% I meant to write there. And I know this because I just found that 2.5% elsewhere that I meant to write 0.75%.
School is now distant enough for me that I have reached the brain fog age where I cannot be commenting on internet things intermittently while writing documents…
I’ve found LLMs to be very good at teaching. Better than I expected.
You have to tell it what you want out of the session. A kid could just type in the question and get the answer, but that’s not tutoring.
When I use them for learning I tell it my goal, summarize my current status, and then tell it to teach me incrementally with a quiz after each step. You can get fancy and have it reach back into history to throw in extra refresher questions.
It uses very few tokens compared to a coding session so you can use the highest model for this and the usage is negligible. Using the top model available to you is important to keep things accurate. I wouldn’t have trusted this back in the GPT 4 or Sonnet days, but with Opus, Astra, or Fable it’s great.
For longer sessions set up a directory and have it keep notes about your progress, problem points, and what was covered in the past.
You can make shells around the AI experience that make sure this happens, and you'll have to provide some form of oversight.
disagree- i used it for the last few years of coursework preparing for exams. If you give it context (i'm studying for an exam, do not give hints unless asked, your objective is to help my understanding) it is incredibly helpful. This isn't advice, it's a company going out of business.
I have recently realised that people actually don't know how to prompt. They use AI "raw" and don't understand how the question can have a drastic impact on the result, let alone using skills or system prompts.
Learning new topics or skills is a very good example, I had the same experience as you with Claude when I learned a new language.
Which isn’t surprising at all if you turn off your adblocker and look at how these AI chat products are marketed to the general public. They’re presented as all-knowing oracles that can deliver exactly what you want with only the vaguest and briefest of prompts.
Maybe some argue it's ASI but for me AGI requires that the AI understand what you're trying to ask rather than require you to carefully engineer a prompt.
If you're starting a fresh session the AI has no context at all beyond your prompt (and the generic system prompt). It isn't psychic, it can't know if you want a straight answer, an elaborate explanation or an interactive teaching lesson. You have to actually say what you want
I'm not a huge fan of prompt engineering or elaborate skills that are longer than a couple sentences. But you have to give the AI context. The more context the better
"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"
If a random person comes up and asks you a malformed question how do you answer? What's worse if what if the question is not actually malformed in some contexts and because you're a wizard that has massive amount of contextual information there are plenty of right answers for the 'wrong' question you just asked.
In schools classrooms tend to avoid unlimited exploration as it would take unlimited time. On your AI prompt the next thing you ask could be anything, anything at all. Just exactly how is the AI supposed to know if you're an idiot?
Continuing the great tradition of claiming that any machine, and especially any AI, unless it takes over literally everything, is worthless. Or in the words of Pablo Picasso:
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (he was not joking by the way)
Of course, if computers DO threaten to take over literally everything, then people are even more scared and react aggressively, as demonstrated in this 1939 article describing IBM's vocoders:
"The Pedro Peril" (the first AI that actually talked back was nicknamed Pedro, and described as "the latest and most fearful gadget from IBM", the journalist's conclusion was to suggest Pedro be deported as he would spread propaganda and maybe even become a dictator) (unsigned Washington Post editorial, 1939)
Here's Pedro in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAyrmm7vv0
It really depends on how you are using AI. If you simply use it to get the answers to homework you won't really learn. If you use it to figure out the topics you need to learn, and to identify/close gaps in your understanding then it is a very useful tool for learning.
Depends heavily on the tutee. If it’s someone highly motivated looking for some guidance like you, I could see it working really well. If it’s a kid who would rather be scrolling through Instagram and needs an authority figure to keep them on track, it’s not going to work.
If the kid would rather be scrolling instagram then solve the underlying problem. They will not have a good life if they will only do anything constructive when forced to by an authority figure.
I agree with you and not the OP.
I find it very easy to engage in a Socratic dialog with the AI. If I ask it, it will actually quiz me and carry on a tutoring session. And it doesn't mind if I ask dumb questions.
yes, similar experience... you can ask the same question in 10 different ways until you understand it and AI doesn't care
I've walked away from colleagues trying to explain things similarly because if you're not getting it after a few attempts you're going to hit a wall of their ability to explain, their patience, time, etc
As a teacher, this is obvious. But when you ask a student 'do you want to learn?' they don't actually understand the question.
I don't know if I agree, if I ask a physics question it will show me the process to get to the answer, and it's really nice to have something to talk to with infinite patience to dig down into steps you don't understand. I learned a ton about implementing machine learning from using AI models. Obviously that takes a level of curiosity and effort on the learners part, but with a pretty minimal system prompt I think you'd get a pretty great tutoring system.
They rule for maths. I had an extremely good experience going from high school trig through multivariable calc with them over a year. Best math teacher I ever had.
I think the difference is between someone like you who wants to learn and a teenager who has to learn.
I used to be a tutor, and the kids who wanted to get ahead were people who more needed someone to give them hints as they learned. The ones who needed to get the grade were a lot more reticent and needed a lot more attention and prodding.
I don't think AI as it currently exists is a good choice for those folks.
It comes down to the same issue that all AI comes down to really.
If there’s proper oversight (tutor teaches the student and reviews knowledge while the student uses the AI to study or test themselves) that’s fine.
If it’s just the AI then a student isn’t going to know what they don’t even know to ask.
This can also work with books or adequate material someone is basing their learning on.
My daughter worked on learning for various classes by building her own plugin and skills for tutoring that uses various techniques of teaching without revealing answers, giving advice on homework questions without disclosure, etc. She overlaid with the personality of her stern gymnastics coach. It was surprisingly effective and I was pretty impressed at 11 she had the sense to not go straight to the answers. I think the “oh the kids” hand wringing is always overblown with kids - it’s the adults that don’t adapt well.
The ChatGPT web app, though apparently not the desktop app, does have a study mode where it will not give you the answer but will help you reason through the problem like the world's most knowledgeable, most attentive teacher.
I've been using chatgpt to tutor my son to improve his writing skills. It actually works quite well and the lessons adapt to his skill level. I seeded it with the curriculum and marking guidelines for his school year. Each lesson is timeboxed to 30 minutes and he stops if the lesson goes over time. I then feed this back into chatgpt and it adapts the lessons appropriately. It's helped quite a bit with a definite improvement in his writing skills. He actually wants to do this instead of school as he feels he gets a lot more out of it!
A calculator, Youtube and iPad tried to replace teachers. They all failed but this time it's different.
One thing that I've noticed as I've gotten older is that the introduction of calculus has slowly moved to younger and younger students. I suspect the tools are partly responsible for this. Less time on basic math and algebra.
When I first started calculus, I was furious at being taught Newtonian Physics and some bits of chemistry without calculus. It's a stupid bunch of equations you have to learn, which Newton worked out from calculus. I'm glad people are getting it more often together now, but also just a bit jealous at the same time.
A calculator is a tool that replaced the slide-rule or Abacus - no one contended the Abacus replaced teaching or teachers. Ditto an iPad which is effectively just a fancy calculator in this context.
Similarly Youtube didn't replace teachers - it afforded remote learning and correspondence courses a new medium for transmission, recording, and playback of teaching.
More to the point none of those were trained on a corpus containing the history of human pedagogy, were capable of inference, or of generating dynamic learning resources based on best-practice models with inherent self-correction and pedagogical reinforcement mechanisms.
This time around, AI being able to do student homework means that AI is replacing students not teachers.
This line of reasoning makes sense, but also I would say that a lot of technologists who are interested in education realize that they have to design something that wouldn't just give the answers away because that's not the point of learning. That seems like it can be pretty difficult to accomplish with LLMs because I bet if a student keeps pestering them, they will give up the answer or give a clue that makes the problem way too obvious.
So usually the claims about replacing tutors like in this article come from a place where they usually give a caveat that maybe for highly motivated and ambitious students, they can figure out how to accelerate their learning with AI. But then that undermines the whole argument of transforming education if it wouldn't work with students who are average or below-average in their academic achievement.
I've begun to wonder what our obligation is as the last generation of humans to educate ourselves and grow up without AI.
I just tried ChatGPT on a simple find an error in the proof question today and it completely butchered it ignoring the main constraint that two variables a and b were natural numbers. It said, "a and b might not be natural numbers" and then went on to produce a very elaborate, completely wrong answer.
Are you paying for ChatGPT? OpenAI is very bad at communicating that their free models are not what "AI in 2026" is about.
I’m learning French and I’ve tried both AI and a remote tutor from Cameroon.
The tutor from Cameroon is much better.
She tells me when I’m getting the basics wrong and designs lessons to go back and fix the basics.
AI loves to tell me how great I am and do lessons at the frontier of what I understand to make me feel good about how much progress I’m making.
Sounds like they didn't really have good tutors at the company.
It's more like the cost of living crisis in Australia means that despite a likely oversupply of tutors working second jobs, people can't actually afford to pay tutors.
AI tutors will absolutely be worse, not better, but they may also be only a fraction of the price.
Learning from an LLM is nearly impossible because it has no opinions on how to structure the content.
It's great at giving you the illusion that you're learning though.
If you know an outline of the material and want to structure it your own way (ex, explain attention to me using Haskell notation) it's really great. But otherwise, human notes win.
So you’re saying if I pointed an LLM, say GPT 5.6 Sol, at a PDF copy of a textbook and asked it questions about something i’m stuck on and don’t understand, it wouldn’t be able to teach me anything?
learning is not a passive activity. likewise an llm can be used in a passive or active fashion.
Only if you already could read the pdf yourself. Otherwise you're learning without structure. Think CS undergrad vs script-kiddie
That is a ridiculous take. It was trained on human notes. It very much has an opinion on how to structure specific content for teaching.
Okay, please ask an LLM to produce a 200 page intro book to Abstract Algebra. Even Astra high can barely write 30 pages coherently.
Humans have LOOONG contexts
Why is having your LLM one-shot a 200 page textbook a prerequisite to learning? That doesn't follow. If you use an LLM more like a tutor and less like a book, you can get an enormous amount of value for 1/50 the cost. Monthly GPT plus membership is half the cost of a bay area hourly tutor rate, and infinitely patient and available 24/7
Okay I was a professor for a bit. Few things I found
- LLMs cannot motivate a person to learn because they aren't people
- Learning requires rewiring your brain; you need to try and read content without explanations of every question you might have. Struggling is required for learning
- LLMs cannot generate structured content on long scales. I have tried this many times. Your average TA can easily write a calculus textbook.
- LLMs are RLHFd to just agree with you. Learning requires disagreement and tutoring requires assuredness
> Okay, please ask an LLM to produce a 200 page intro book to Abstract Algebra.
If you're giving it prompts like that, you've shot yourself in the foot.
This would be good advice except that students are no better at getting information from AI than they are from getting it from books, botes, or professors. If you know what to ask, AI will give a lot, but if you don't ...
It's actually worse, because if you know what to ask, the books and professors will give you information you can generally take to be reasonably reliable; and if you don't know what to ask, you'll either not find the information in books or potentially be guided towards a better question by professors. With LLMs, you can be given incorrect information in either case, but especially in the latter case with way higher frequency than you would with books or professors.
I'd compare tutors to personal trainers. They're not doing anything special other than making sure you're using the equipment properly and providing accountability so you don't lose motivation and give up.
I guess in the universe of all possible opinions, this is certainly an opinion you can choose to hold.
There is a lot to be gained from 1-1 in person tutoring. Can't read the article so don't know their specific gripe. But often when learning a kid needs redirecting, reassurance, or other emotional support. Getting this from AI seems like giving up humanity and connections for the sake of silicon valley educational 'betterment' which has always been suspect.
It is shocking how quickly many people are to dismiss the benefits of human interaction and connection since they aren't quantifiable.
If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?
> If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?
You will never get the chance to sit and talk with your now-elderly tutor, in the future, and tell them how much they helped you, or pay their deeper contribution forward by tutoring someone else.
Your AI tutor also doesn't know a job you should apply for, or a local group you could join for your other hobby they now know a lot about, or… or…
I mean the list of intangibles goes on and on, doesn't it? But here at HN people like to disrupt.