Submitted by lenhoi t3_zw95vx in Futurology
Nixeris t1_j1u9dpc wrote
Seeing a lot of people completely misunderstanding the purpose of education.
You aren't learning to write papers to get better at writing papers. You're learning to write papers because it develops you're communication skills, your critical thinking, and your reading comprehension.
The same way treadmills and weights don't exist purely to make you better at running or lifting weights.
You do the difficult task to make yourself better able to handle the easier ones. You also develop a wider range of skills while doing it manually.
Frankly we need to be more upfront with what education is for. It doesn't matter if you're never going to need to write an English essay as an adult, you're going to have to develop your arguments and read as an adult. You're just doing it on paper so the teacher can evaluate your learning, not because the paper is the end goal.
Sadalfas t1_j1ufidr wrote
Yes, the form of test would have to adapt. Instead of "write an essay that ...," it would be more like "which prompts can you use to resolve the problem(s) of...?"
Edit to clarify:
Got a few replies (and downvotes) that make me want to pull up and clarify here that I mean this in a way in which critical thinking and inventiveness is still front and center in the skills being taught, not a mechanical "process".
There will always be a need for a user/student to know how to get the data they want from whatever the modern tool is, and it will be a form of "prompt", even as that form evolves. Understanding the best way to use the modern tools was my point (as with the calculator analogy and math problems).
WeeDingwall t1_j1ujilc wrote
I'm sorry but this is such a short sighted answer. Prompting will go away very soon as the ML gets better at interpretation.
radicalceleryjuice t1_j1vdyow wrote
Won't prompting simply change? It will still be a garbage in, garbage out situation, no?
That said, I'd be very curious to see any resources about how they expect prompting to evolve. I'm hoping to stay on top of ML services as they evolve.
...but my understanding is that a good understanding of formal logic will help with getting good results, no matter how good the language interpretation becomes. So one of my plans is to put more time into my own formal logic skills. That said, one of the things that blows my mind about chatGPT is the way it will point out false premises in my prompts :)
Sadalfas t1_j1vnp7h wrote
This is exactly my point. A user will still need to get the data they want from whatever the modern tool is, and it will be a form of "prompt", even as that form evolves. Understanding the best way to use the modern tools was my point (as with the calculator analogy).
It's about teaching the student critical thinking and inventiveness to reduce "garbage in" and increase "gold out".
radicalceleryjuice t1_j1vqmwp wrote
Ok, totally agreed. The question is: how many teachers really have those skills themselves?
Sadalfas t1_j1vt7w5 wrote
I think you might be on the right track to focus on formal logic for the most advanced use cases.
Even for the more general population (like in grade school level curricula) teaching effective communication by having the student ask the right questions/prompts, using the results to produce useful follow-up prompts, etc. are skills teachers already have and overlap with what a traditional essay accomplishes.
Cognitive_Spoon t1_j1vvco9 wrote
I disagree with you being downvoted.
I'm on three separate degrees in pedagogy, and I think you make a fair construction of how it might be navigated. One of many ways, to be sure, but not an invalid one.
Nixeris t1_j1ukqyr wrote
That doesn't actually accomplish any of the goals of education. The purpose is to mentally enrich the student, not teach them a process.
Cognitive_Spoon t1_j1vvik1 wrote
That's goofy.
Logic is a process. Math is a process. Historical contextualization and extrapolation is a process.
Education is riddled with processes, because thinking is riddled with processes.
Students don't merely exist in school, they pursue.
Nixeris t1_j1w0tmw wrote
You're just appending the word process to class titles and expecting it to disprove me on it's own. It doesn't.
You don't learn history because knowing the dates when things happened is really important, and you don't learn math because you're going to have to do equations when you're an adult. You learn those subjects because they affect how you learn and think about the world.
Cognitive_Spoon t1_j1w3qgf wrote
You said words in your first paragraph, but they literally have no bearing on this conversation.
Your second paragraph is fine. History is processes, power dynamics, politics, policies and paternity tests.
Math is more than memorization.
It's process. Or rather "skill" education that matters.
You're not wrong, you are just disagreeing from a space of inexpertise.
Educational policy, pedagogy, and programming are my career.
Nixeris t1_j1w8fkt wrote
You don't learn the process because knowing the process is the most important thing you take away from the course. You learn the process because it affects how you learn and interact with the world. You can, and many will, forget the substance of the course, but the longest lasting effect will be the method of learning.
Cognitive_Spoon t1_j1w8vrn wrote
Are you an AI?
Nixeris t1_j1wm2iv wrote
I've given examples, and you're just ignoring them to pretend I'm being absurd.
The process of writing a paper improves your reading comprehension, written communication skills, and critical thinking. However, you're not writing the paper to get better at the process of writing papers. You're writing it to practice those ancillary skills and show to the teacher that you can do it. It's those skills that are the purpose of writing the paper, not the process of writing a paper.
The paper isn't the point, it's the test to see if you've gotten the important parts of the lesson. No more than the ability to answer multiple choice questions is the point of math tests.
You aren't learning these things because they're the most important things to being an adult, but because in learning them you learn and practice ancillary skills that are important to being a functioning member of society.
Cognitive_Spoon t1_j1wr821 wrote
There is no process without skills.
Nixeris t1_j1z05jo wrote
Yes, but that's so basic a statement as to have no bearing on the conversation.
In this case the conversation is about how in education you often aren't doing the process with the end-goal of learning the process. You don't write a paper because the end goal is to teach you to write the best papers (aka, teaching a process to learn the process), you're doing it because it develops additional skills like critical thinking and communication (aka, teaching a process to learn a skill). The same way you don't run on a treadmill to get really good at running on treadmills.
In particular it's about which skills you're learning while doing the process.
Sadalfas t1_j1vn8me wrote
I wasn't suggesting to "teach them a process", but more agreeing with what you had said on focusing on the goal of education.
I'm saying, understanding how to effectively use the modern tools available and having the critical thinking to reach the result you need is one possible evolution of straight essay-writing I see.
Gagarin1961 t1_j1ukvmb wrote
> It doesn’t matter if you’re never going to need to write an English essay as an adult, you’re going to have to develop your arguments and read as an adult. You’re just doing it on paper so the teacher can evaluate your learning, not because the paper is the end goal.
If quality communication as an adult is the goal, then the adults who are use AI will be able to do it faster and better than ones that don’t.
Since communication is the foundation of civilization, the ones who are taught to use it at a young age will have advantages over others.
This is the perfect opportunity to stop wasting so much time on individual spelling, sentence structure, and other writing basics and spend more time on persuasion, critical thinking, and debate.
God knows we know more of that…
Nixeris t1_j1ulds8 wrote
> quality communication as an adult is the goal, then the adults who are use AI will be able to do it faster and better than ones that don’t.
No they won't. That's just teaching them how to get a computer to do the thinking for them, not challenging them to do the thinking themselves.
Let's make this clear.
Writing an essay is not about entertaining the teacher or making the best essay. The essay is a test not the purpose of the lesson. The test is to see if you, in your own words, can formulate arguments and correctly identify concepts from a lesson.
Writing a prompt for ChatGPT may produce a better written essay, but it's completely sidestepping formulating your own thoughts and putting them in your own words. If you do that, you aren't learning or practicing your mental skills, you're just learning how to write a better paper.
The skills you learn by you writing a paper yourself go beyond the ability to write a paper. Creating a prompt and just letting an AI write for you is only teaching you how to write prompts.
Gagarin1961 t1_j1unots wrote
I’m not so sure it will, when people use calculators, they still need to know the meaning of the output for it to be useful.
Either way, the end result will be that the people that use AI will be better at communication, persuasion, and influence.
tanzerdragoon t1_j1utmrn wrote
I don't entirely agree with this point. If one uses AI to think for you, then it's actually the AI thinking and not you. Using the AI, you actually have to be good at those skills already. We had a web dev at work who used an AI writer to make copyright for an email blast and what he submitted to was SO bad, but he was so proud of himself. He didn't see what was wrong because his writing skills were very weak. And I'm no F. Scott Fitzgerald, but it was horrific trying to edit it, how can one not see the mistakes if one does not even understand?
In math, they still teach you the formula first and teachers have you write out your steps before you jump in to use a calculator. There was a fundamental skill and basis training first.
But I can see either way, adaptation to ai learning will be in high school and college will manifest, but I don't see in primary school.
Gagarin1961 t1_j1vpyna wrote
> We had a web dev at work who used an AI writer to make copyright for an email blast and what he submitted to was SO bad, but he was so proud of himself. He didn’t see what was wrong because his writing skills were very weak.
That’s because school failed him at teaching him reading comprehension.
This is what I want schools to teach: how to actually use this tech usefully.
Yes I know some people will use it to think for them, but that’s why we have to start teaching now how to understand what it’s actually outputting.
> In math, they still teach you the formula first and teachers have you write out your steps before you jump in to use a calculator.
That’s what I want for essay writing
> There was a fundamental skill and basis training first.
Why wouldn’t we still teach that?
> But I can see either way, adaptation to ai learning will be in high school and college will manifest, but I don’t see in primary school.
So what? The discussion was using AI in essay writing, and since the vast majority of that happens at the higher level, you would think that that is what most people would be referring to.
Nobody said we shouldn’t teach kids how to write.
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