cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31251815
I asked teachers to tell me how AI has changed how they teach.
The response from teachers and university professors was overwhelming. In my entire career, I’ve rarely gotten so many email responses to a single article, and I have never gotten so many thoughtful and comprehensive responses.
One thing is clear: teachers are not OK.
They describe trying to grade “hybrid essays half written by students and half written by robots,” trying to teach Spanish to kids who don’t know the meaning of the words they’re trying to teach them in English, and students who use AI in the middle of conversation. They describe spending hours grading papers that took their students seconds to generate: “I’ve been thinking more and more about how much time I am almost certainly spending grading and writing feedback for papers that were not even written by the student,” one teacher told me. “That sure feels like bullshit.”
The more fundamental problem is that the capitalist indoctrination system has never been ok. Schools have never been about diversity, critical thinking, and education but rather conformity, privilege, and indoctrination. The system of grading and filtering students based on tests, essays, etc. is counter to the purported goal of education. Schools are just just pre-prisons for kids while parents waste their lives serving capital.
schools are extremely useful for the economy because in the last 200 years, contributing to economy was much more efficient if the kids got some education. That is why the education was often revolving around practical skills such as math, reading comprehension or natural sciences.