Education has become too obsessed with testing and measuring. AIs consume massive amounts of information correlating, looking for patterns to make predictions. It is the foundation of the scientific method. We bore children to death distilling dry facts devoid of art. I used to enjoy primary readers with beautiful art and popular children stories. Now they have been replaced with sterile photographs and brain dead sentences that cannot even be called prose. Kids need to be encouraged to predict, create, and test their beliefs.
Every chapter of a book should pose a question that excites the imagination, and then surprise us with interesting answers as we turn the pages that challenge our assumptions. Modern CGI films overwhelm our senses leaving us craving another hit of dopamine, but thry do not engage our imagination. It is the monster in the closet or under our bed that makes for great drama, and books should open windows. The thing I hate most about teaching in Korea are the classroom windows covered with signs, and brain dead ESL books fed in two page morsels to students who dread turning the page because they know what they will find.
The problem with AI is you get the answer without the joy of the journey, and you miss the beauty and growth that comes with the journey. Our brains weigh words the same way an AI does, but unless it does the heavy lifting it will atrophy. A good story teller knows what facts and details are important. It takes practice. We need to teach kids to enjoy listening and telling stories to develop empathy. That means paying quality authors and artists to inspire them, not billions on AI to bankrupt those authors and write mind numbing textbooks.
Agree with everything (almost). Well said and you should make your own blog post and expand on this. I, along with many others have been pounding the pulpit in essays and speeches the last decades, hitting the same points you are making. It's almost a kind of "back to basics" (satire and pun intended). Learning needn't be expensive or systematic. But infused with the will to learn, by the learner, it must be. I'll have to return to Brautigan's Jesse James poem. The one thing I'd argue in your comment is that we don't predict like machines, we don't weigh words devoid of context. Our experiential knowledge is paramount and important. Sure, they try to train a machine to provide that but it fails outside of very strict boundries. I believe in the coming years, we'll find a lot more happening in our brain that what our paltry metaphors and beliefs in "processing", "weights", "memory", "storage" provide. Have you read this? Epstein like all good neuropsychologists, is humble enough to know that we aren't yet even nearing the fundamentals of how the brain, how knowing and consciousness works. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer
Education has become too obsessed with testing and measuring. AIs consume massive amounts of information correlating, looking for patterns to make predictions. It is the foundation of the scientific method. We bore children to death distilling dry facts devoid of art. I used to enjoy primary readers with beautiful art and popular children stories. Now they have been replaced with sterile photographs and brain dead sentences that cannot even be called prose. Kids need to be encouraged to predict, create, and test their beliefs.
Every chapter of a book should pose a question that excites the imagination, and then surprise us with interesting answers as we turn the pages that challenge our assumptions. Modern CGI films overwhelm our senses leaving us craving another hit of dopamine, but thry do not engage our imagination. It is the monster in the closet or under our bed that makes for great drama, and books should open windows. The thing I hate most about teaching in Korea are the classroom windows covered with signs, and brain dead ESL books fed in two page morsels to students who dread turning the page because they know what they will find.
The problem with AI is you get the answer without the joy of the journey, and you miss the beauty and growth that comes with the journey. Our brains weigh words the same way an AI does, but unless it does the heavy lifting it will atrophy. A good story teller knows what facts and details are important. It takes practice. We need to teach kids to enjoy listening and telling stories to develop empathy. That means paying quality authors and artists to inspire them, not billions on AI to bankrupt those authors and write mind numbing textbooks.
Agree with everything (almost). Well said and you should make your own blog post and expand on this. I, along with many others have been pounding the pulpit in essays and speeches the last decades, hitting the same points you are making. It's almost a kind of "back to basics" (satire and pun intended). Learning needn't be expensive or systematic. But infused with the will to learn, by the learner, it must be. I'll have to return to Brautigan's Jesse James poem. The one thing I'd argue in your comment is that we don't predict like machines, we don't weigh words devoid of context. Our experiential knowledge is paramount and important. Sure, they try to train a machine to provide that but it fails outside of very strict boundries. I believe in the coming years, we'll find a lot more happening in our brain that what our paltry metaphors and beliefs in "processing", "weights", "memory", "storage" provide. Have you read this? Epstein like all good neuropsychologists, is humble enough to know that we aren't yet even nearing the fundamentals of how the brain, how knowing and consciousness works. https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer