> The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.

I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece, and I think that AI could have a role as a teaching aid. It's infinitely patient and it's able to adapt to a student's needs better than a textbook. Still, I hate the idea of students being encouraged to entirely offload their cognitive work onto an online service rather than think for themselves. The point of making fifth graders write essays, make art, design presentations, etc isn't the end product, it's that they now have the experience of having done the assignment. I would rather see students get taught how to think creatively, analyze a piece of writing, coherently explain an opinion, or draw a picture on their own, instead of giving this up in exchange for the nebulous skill of being "AI native" (aka being able to ask a computer to produce work for you).

[1] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/g...

The coyote is already running beyond the cliff so indoctrinating kids won't save them from an AI winter 6-18 months away.

I guess like with phones we'll all have to pretend it's not obvious for ten years until we have overwhelming scientific evidence, then wait another ten for US policy makers to start talking about making a committee to design a study to develop a plan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pohXWbMrXZI

When I was younger, to solve a problem, we had to memorize a large amount of information. Or know someone who does. Or visit libraries and pray they have a book on what you need.

Then came the internet. All of that memorizing was replaced by web searches. You just focus on solving the problem, figuring out what you don't know and searching for that.

Now, it feels like we're automating the searching, connecting the dots and most of the problem solving. We focus on the high level problem description, verification of the results.

I wonder what they'd be adding to this curriculum.

Now, it feels like we're even offloading

The best results I read about on here using LLM's have to do with prompt mastery I think.

Of course, they probably plan to do to education what iPads did to education: deskill children. Apple successfully abliterated the concept of a file from a generation of students by making them do their computing in a straitjacket. I can only imagine how an AI-first or AI-only educational curriculum could make kids even worse at using computers.

But are NSF grants really necessary for this? To what degree is this funneling taxpayer money to buy ChatGPT subscriptions and advertise to students by getting them to use AI in the classroom?

This makes me glad that the crappy chromebooks given to kids at my daughter's school aren't used.

Almost.

How about funding something useful ? Like real literacy as in reading books ? That will help kids out far better than "AI literacy".

The owners of these systems do not even use the technologies that they are creating.

The deskilling programme will continue, until morale improves.

Writing exercises that children produce in school are immediately thrown into the trash after being graded and reviewed. The product is supposed to be better educated children, not better written papers.

After all, it's nigh magical stuff. A machine that talks to you in common language and is almost always right. If you weren't already prepared for it, you would trust it implicitly. When Wikipedia first came onto the scene, people behaved this way there too. They would believe it was entirely correct. But at some point there was a concerted effort in pedagogy to say things like "You can't cite a Wikipedia article" and that one simply-remembered rule allowed for children to be forced to treat it as an aggregator.

Naturally, setting up a fund for this is nearly always a bad structure. Earmarked funds have a bad habit of ending up being written to be primarily a vehicle to transfer money to pet constituencies. Teachers unions and so on are always advocating for these because that's what funds the complex ecosystem of teacher educators, the certification and curriculum development programs, and so on. This is just social welfare by a different means. Funds should be flexibly used to meet some outcome. Earmarked funds have a habit of ratcheting up. When there is no need for programs, they continue to exist, and bleed money from the actual work product of education - informed students.

I get why these articles are always written in this style but I really would appreciate some better news media. Students hate a lot of things. Their opinion is mostly moot as to whether a subject is a good thing to learn or not. And all this polemic style of "shoehorn" and so on is completely unnecessary, and just makes me treat this whole thing in the realm of some partisan Twitter post.

But the one thing I did appreciate is a link to the text of the bill.