Unfortunately and ironically this has all the marks of AI writing.
> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.
use of "not this — that", em dash, staccato sentences to make a point, unnecessary metaphor, etc
This article seems to be a good argument for a school that's 3/4 project based learning and 1/4 classroom instruction. The author then tries very hard to pretend that Alpha school does not follow that model, and is instead something else - a boogeyman of blitzing through lessons without any opportunity for application or reflection, as opposed to the reality of a mix of classroom instruction and project-based learning to struggle with the concepts learned.
> And some readers may ask: if schools like Alpha accelerate the basics and then give students space to explore—what’s wrong with that?
> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.
The argument, if I'm following it, is that the Alpha model is going to do well, and therefore the model will change to remove the current 3/4 of the curriculum used for exploration, which will make the model worse. But Alpha won't care, because teaching students worse in the name of efficiency is the natural end point. I am not convinced.
I think the article would have done a much better job starting with Asian cram school culture and how AI tutoring is being "fueled by state incentives and parental anxiety", instead of having that as a throwaway thought in the middle of an article otherwise focused on Alpha school.
School isn't just about 'book knowledge'. Homeschooled kids often do well on tests - but they all lack an awareness of the real world because they don't meet republicans or non-christians or whatever is outside of their parents groups. those who promote home schooling are aware of this and make some attempt to provide it but that doesn't compare to the many hours you spend in a classroom with such people and so I can still tell the lack.
i'm curious how these ai schools will be different
This author seems to have completely misunderstood what Alpha School is doing. The student learns at their own pace. They don't move on until they learn it, whether that's quickly or slowly. That is worlds better than the assembly line system we have now, where if a student doesn't learn a concept, they are expected to build on top of that misunderstood concept in the next lesson, and then the entire remainder of their education becomes a wash.
We are living in a world where high schools are graduating students that can't read and don't know their times tables. The critiques of alpha school are reactive inertia for a system that is already badly broken.
I home schooled my kids during the pandemic. It was amazing how quickly we got through the material for the year. We did all of 5th grade math in 3 months of 40 minutes a day. It not just my experience, 1 on 1 tutoring has been shown to be dramatically more effective than classroom instruction.
This article sounds like the usual ideological objections, lots of vague claims that amount to “I don’t like it”.
There is nothing more threatening to a failing institution than a solution that delivers results.
The US education sector is quick to embrace any new fad that sounds good but doesn’t work, building thinking classrooms is the latest. Productive struggle is another.
Yes learning takes time, but it doesn't have to be painfully slow and unproductive.
The education system in US is a disaster and getting worse. The response from schools like the San Francisco school district has been to lower standards and remove higher level material.
I see tremendous potential in Ai tutoring. I use chatgpt to help me learn new material daily. Why should school be any different?
The propaganda name for it is AI. I am not opposed to AI, I think it will have far reaching benefits for all of us. However, people are trying to make as much money from it as possible and so would like to influence how we think of it. If we consider it Intelligence then more people will throw more money at it. But it is not.
When you think about it, what is now gently called AI is more like think by number - TBNI. You take all the current thinking, you search it and compile it. How you get AI should tell you something. Searching. So it tells you what color to paint the square with a 7 on it. That is the good part.
The bad part is that if the drawing is wrong, so is the color. If your paint-by-number kit is titled "A Duck" and the numbers are on a drawing of a dog, then TBNI will not really help you.
As I look around I notice the degree to which we humans use following. You learn to do things by watching others. A map tells you how to go some place. Why go to college? The curious thing to me is that so much of what we follow is wrong already. People follow a well worn path even when they see it leads know where. Why? Because many people are unaware there is an alternative.
I blame our education system for this. The essence is to trust what other people know, not what yourself. Silly educators.
If you are a follower, TBNI will make you redundant, because TBNI will be faster and cheaper.
But you can think if you try. Perhaps the most important thought any person can have is when they experience something and say to themselves "This is stupid". Follow that thought. :-)
This article follows a familiar pattern of essay in the overwritten MFA style that contrasts particularities without ever arguing why one is better than the other. You can do it with anything and create an equally reasonable sounding essay. Here's ChatGPT on why we should eschew air travel for horse and buggy:
"We don’t need another miracle of steel and jet fuel to fling us across the sky at five hundred miles an hour.
We need wheels that creak, hooves that strike the ground with an honesty no turbine can mimic. We need the long road—the smell of manure and lilacs, the way your thighs ache after a day of swaying on a wooden bench.
Because in the air, you don’t hear the frogs tuning their throats in a roadside ditch. You don’t feel the wind peel an apple’s scent from an orchard as you pass.
And maybe—just maybe—you don’t really arrive anywhere at all.
Not the way you do when a horse brings you there, slow enough to see every dragonfly and every dying sunflower bowing in the field."
OP: You need to stop with the LinkedIn short paragraphs that try to reveal insight. It does you no good as a proponent of a good education to write so poorly.
Anyway -
Education is a very slow and difficult thing, because it is paired with the maturing of the individual along with sharing enough concepts to spark connection _but_ not so much as to overwhelm. Adult humans can make the individual judgment that algorithms can't - WIS not INT.
Regarding dysfunctions.
Children can absorb knowledge _very_ fast in the right environment. I'm uncertain how much that replicates across the whole population, but you can see this in the top-flight homeschoolers.
When we were looking for better environments for our kid than the neighborhood school, we realized that private schools have an advantage in that they can select the parents and effectively curate the environment. Most of the issues in the public elementary school were generated by dysfunctional parents combined with certain political choices on classroom management. The second is materially fixable given work - the first is not something a school board can fix. Much of the discourse on education needs to relate to the total educational delivery across family/student quartiles of capacity, rather than trying to cherry pick a student, or a class, or - . You see, it's very hard to teach when certain students have no self control and disrupt the class continually, and there is no facility to remove them from the class for the good of others. And as we all know- 90% of students are above average, and our kids are _definitely_ gifted. So there's no easy political way to solve the environment problem - which happens to be the key drag on education today.
Fluff mainly built around trying to push something which has rich elites (regardless of political bent) believing that school shouldn't spend time teaching the skills they don't use because they don't use them. (And by don't use i mean society applauds them for not using rather than they're incapable)
This schooling by design locks out the possibility of world leading medicians, scientists, mathematicians and economists if it ignores learn by rote. Just because repetition is boring doesn't mean it's not essential, and frankly before the age of 18 is when you're most susceptible to getting benefit from that learning.
Same goes for a lot of the new age and home schooling. It's not that that these models can't work. But they're normally fighting against an education system which has been refined for almost 100+ years in the developed world. Instead, the good ones embrace and extend without extinguishing. Just because it has it's faults (it does) doesn't mean you throw out the baby with the bath water.
Then again kids going to such a school are going to be wealthy and connected which in certain strata in society matters more than efficacy or meritocracy (regardless of what is preached).
This nonsense that ML(AI) will be the ultimate recall always is the worst of fluff. It's right behind "terminator". ML systems are at best a great tool on hand for experts because query and verify to them is faster than lookup, then reference and then query is to do manually. That's the point.
And no, not a single ML system has proven reliable outside of a lab context in raw isolated offline fact verification...
I'm quite worried by this post. After reading the first paragraph it is obvious that this is AI generated, or at least heavily edited by AI. Read some of the other comments on this post for examples of how this is obvious.
The author is a professor in Computer Science at Yale. As well as an ex-research at Microsoft and IBM. You would think this person has the necessary writing skills to write this article themselves. There is no excuse to use AI for writing this. It makes it much harder to read. And always leaves me wondering if I don't understand the point the author is trying to make or if there wasn't one to begin with.
Overall I'm just annoyed by how often I see people use genAI to write stuff for them. Do they think people won't realize it is generated by AI? Do they just not care? Or has it become socially acceptable to write emails, articles, and memos with AI? Just give me the f***g prompt. Then at least I don't have to deal with reading the AI slop.
Let alone how ironic it is to write an article that talks about AI in education, with AI.
PS: I'm not trying to attack the author. This is becoming a widespread issue and I don't want to single him out.
I don’t believe in god, but this kind of thinking feels like playing god.
It is really hard to guess what is the right way, everyone has a different idea.
Effort and resources seems like the biggest missing piece in practice.
In almost everything more effort and resources seem to be able to overcome a lot of bad decisions and mistakes but there is not much hope if there isn’t enough effort.
My experience is that some people who learn too fast don't seem to always fully synthesize their knowledge to resolve internal contradictions. Sometimes when you talk to such people, it feels almost like they can guess what you're trying to say; they can predict the next best word like an LLM; this makes them highly intelligent by some standard. However, unlike LLMs which are generalists, such people tend to steer away from conversations which are slightly outside of their main area of competence; in such situations, they will often defer their thinking to 'experts', even when it goes against what seems like basic common sense.
Sometimes if you force them into such conversations, you can uncover some surprising blind spots where they don't understand very basic things. I once had this experience when I was talking to a guy I worked with in crypto space who had a PhD in mathematics; smarter than me in many ways. But one time we were having a discussion and he just couldn't understand my argument about basic price and demand dynamics, he couldn't accept my argument that the Bitcoin blockchain isn't actually scalable, that the main reason the network doesn't get congested and grind to a halt is because when the Bitcoin transaction volume is high, block miners increase the transaction fee as a way to drive down demand for transactions. He couldn't gasp the role of market incentives and could not accept the fact that the Bitcoin blockchain itself can't physically process more than about 4 transactions per second.
24 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 47.9 ms ] threadI definitely recommend it for those who enjoy thinking about what life is like for people of different perceived "intelligence" levels.
> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.
use of "not this — that", em dash, staccato sentences to make a point, unnecessary metaphor, etc
I stopped reading at this point.
At the very least it’s an interesting experiment—still unclear if or how well this sort of thing will succeed.
> And some readers may ask: if schools like Alpha accelerate the basics and then give students space to explore—what’s wrong with that?
> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.
The argument, if I'm following it, is that the Alpha model is going to do well, and therefore the model will change to remove the current 3/4 of the curriculum used for exploration, which will make the model worse. But Alpha won't care, because teaching students worse in the name of efficiency is the natural end point. I am not convinced.
I think the article would have done a much better job starting with Asian cram school culture and how AI tutoring is being "fueled by state incentives and parental anxiety", instead of having that as a throwaway thought in the middle of an article otherwise focused on Alpha school.
i'm curious how these ai schools will be different
We are living in a world where high schools are graduating students that can't read and don't know their times tables. The critiques of alpha school are reactive inertia for a system that is already badly broken.
- Spaced repetitions
- Active recall
This article sounds like the usual ideological objections, lots of vague claims that amount to “I don’t like it”.
There is nothing more threatening to a failing institution than a solution that delivers results.
The US education sector is quick to embrace any new fad that sounds good but doesn’t work, building thinking classrooms is the latest. Productive struggle is another.
Yes learning takes time, but it doesn't have to be painfully slow and unproductive.
The education system in US is a disaster and getting worse. The response from schools like the San Francisco school district has been to lower standards and remove higher level material.
I see tremendous potential in Ai tutoring. I use chatgpt to help me learn new material daily. Why should school be any different?
When you think about it, what is now gently called AI is more like think by number - TBNI. You take all the current thinking, you search it and compile it. How you get AI should tell you something. Searching. So it tells you what color to paint the square with a 7 on it. That is the good part.
The bad part is that if the drawing is wrong, so is the color. If your paint-by-number kit is titled "A Duck" and the numbers are on a drawing of a dog, then TBNI will not really help you.
As I look around I notice the degree to which we humans use following. You learn to do things by watching others. A map tells you how to go some place. Why go to college? The curious thing to me is that so much of what we follow is wrong already. People follow a well worn path even when they see it leads know where. Why? Because many people are unaware there is an alternative.
I blame our education system for this. The essence is to trust what other people know, not what yourself. Silly educators.
If you are a follower, TBNI will make you redundant, because TBNI will be faster and cheaper.
But you can think if you try. Perhaps the most important thought any person can have is when they experience something and say to themselves "This is stupid". Follow that thought. :-)
"We don’t need another miracle of steel and jet fuel to fling us across the sky at five hundred miles an hour. We need wheels that creak, hooves that strike the ground with an honesty no turbine can mimic. We need the long road—the smell of manure and lilacs, the way your thighs ache after a day of swaying on a wooden bench.
Because in the air, you don’t hear the frogs tuning their throats in a roadside ditch. You don’t feel the wind peel an apple’s scent from an orchard as you pass. And maybe—just maybe—you don’t really arrive anywhere at all. Not the way you do when a horse brings you there, slow enough to see every dragonfly and every dying sunflower bowing in the field."
Ahh..the iconic and obnoxious ChatGPT marker. Half the fiction I read these days has this BP rising phrase.
Anyway -
Education is a very slow and difficult thing, because it is paired with the maturing of the individual along with sharing enough concepts to spark connection _but_ not so much as to overwhelm. Adult humans can make the individual judgment that algorithms can't - WIS not INT.
Regarding dysfunctions.
Children can absorb knowledge _very_ fast in the right environment. I'm uncertain how much that replicates across the whole population, but you can see this in the top-flight homeschoolers.
When we were looking for better environments for our kid than the neighborhood school, we realized that private schools have an advantage in that they can select the parents and effectively curate the environment. Most of the issues in the public elementary school were generated by dysfunctional parents combined with certain political choices on classroom management. The second is materially fixable given work - the first is not something a school board can fix. Much of the discourse on education needs to relate to the total educational delivery across family/student quartiles of capacity, rather than trying to cherry pick a student, or a class, or - . You see, it's very hard to teach when certain students have no self control and disrupt the class continually, and there is no facility to remove them from the class for the good of others. And as we all know- 90% of students are above average, and our kids are _definitely_ gifted. So there's no easy political way to solve the environment problem - which happens to be the key drag on education today.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
This schooling by design locks out the possibility of world leading medicians, scientists, mathematicians and economists if it ignores learn by rote. Just because repetition is boring doesn't mean it's not essential, and frankly before the age of 18 is when you're most susceptible to getting benefit from that learning.
Same goes for a lot of the new age and home schooling. It's not that that these models can't work. But they're normally fighting against an education system which has been refined for almost 100+ years in the developed world. Instead, the good ones embrace and extend without extinguishing. Just because it has it's faults (it does) doesn't mean you throw out the baby with the bath water.
Then again kids going to such a school are going to be wealthy and connected which in certain strata in society matters more than efficacy or meritocracy (regardless of what is preached).
This nonsense that ML(AI) will be the ultimate recall always is the worst of fluff. It's right behind "terminator". ML systems are at best a great tool on hand for experts because query and verify to them is faster than lookup, then reference and then query is to do manually. That's the point. And no, not a single ML system has proven reliable outside of a lab context in raw isolated offline fact verification...
The author is a professor in Computer Science at Yale. As well as an ex-research at Microsoft and IBM. You would think this person has the necessary writing skills to write this article themselves. There is no excuse to use AI for writing this. It makes it much harder to read. And always leaves me wondering if I don't understand the point the author is trying to make or if there wasn't one to begin with.
Overall I'm just annoyed by how often I see people use genAI to write stuff for them. Do they think people won't realize it is generated by AI? Do they just not care? Or has it become socially acceptable to write emails, articles, and memos with AI? Just give me the f***g prompt. Then at least I don't have to deal with reading the AI slop.
Let alone how ironic it is to write an article that talks about AI in education, with AI.
PS: I'm not trying to attack the author. This is becoming a widespread issue and I don't want to single him out.
This article is so blatantly written by chatgpt
Didn't read further — that's an AI-generated article. Shame!
It is really hard to guess what is the right way, everyone has a different idea.
Effort and resources seems like the biggest missing piece in practice.
In almost everything more effort and resources seem to be able to overcome a lot of bad decisions and mistakes but there is not much hope if there isn’t enough effort.
Sometimes if you force them into such conversations, you can uncover some surprising blind spots where they don't understand very basic things. I once had this experience when I was talking to a guy I worked with in crypto space who had a PhD in mathematics; smarter than me in many ways. But one time we were having a discussion and he just couldn't understand my argument about basic price and demand dynamics, he couldn't accept my argument that the Bitcoin blockchain isn't actually scalable, that the main reason the network doesn't get congested and grind to a halt is because when the Bitcoin transaction volume is high, block miners increase the transaction fee as a way to drive down demand for transactions. He couldn't gasp the role of market incentives and could not accept the fact that the Bitcoin blockchain itself can't physically process more than about 4 transactions per second.