The Classroom Only Works for One Kid in the Room
Why Hacker News recommends it
Brought up in nearly every discussion of AI tutors and the future of schooling as the original Digital Aristotle idea.
What it is
CGP Grey argues that a classroom works well only for the one student pitched at the average level, and sketches a future of personalized instruction. It introduces the idea of a Digital Aristotle, a tutor for every learner.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2013 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends tiger10guy · 2013-03 · on “Kids should learn to think”
Related thoughts on education... from CGP Grey: [this video] Also watch Greys favorites vol 4 (playlist on CGP Grey channel). These thoughts from Salman Khan are most relevant here: [LINK]
Recommends mjevans · 2022-05 · on “With plunging enrollment, a ‘seismic hit’ to public schools”
I'd like to revisit a classic CGP Gray video for talking points on this subject: [this video] What roles does (Public) Education fulfill in society and to parents? * A free society and elected government function best when the people who make decisions about the future of that society are properly educated and capable of high level decision making. Public Schools and Education are generally critical (decades to forever) health factors in such societies. * Better educated laborers are able to further the knowledge of intelligent life, and make better things possible. The video talks about how education has traditionally generally worked, how educational videos can be the basis for learning a subje
Recommends moffkalast · 2024-04 · on “Why do we have such terrible evidence on homework effectiveness? (2022)”
The solution isn't to provide multiple approaches in the same classroom, it's to remove the classroom altogether. I keep coming back to CGP Grey's take[0] on the issue, and since he's an ex-teacher it makes him somewhat qualified on the topic. Conceptually the problem is solved, it's one-on-one tutoring that was widely practiced in the ancient world for the aristocracy. The question is how to effectively implement that for the masses. Khan academy has attempted to use GPT 4 as a teacher bot in much this manner (to some success?), but the current gen of language models isn't smart enough nor designed to tackle this problem in a holistic manner. In a decade or two though? Easily. Obviously the
Cites moffkalast · 2023-03 · on “GPT-4”
Reminds me of that idea of a Digital Aristotle by CGP Grey. But once you have an AI that can do that kind of teaching, do you even need the humans? [this video]
Cites christophclarke · 2023-03 · on “Khan Academy integrates GPT-4 as every student’s customized tutor”
This reminds me of CGP Grey’s “Digital Aristotle”, which actually references both Khan Academy and A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer [this video]
Cites 2OEH8eoCRo0 · 2023-06 · on “Scores decline again for 13-year-old students in reading and mathematics”
CGP Grey talked about it. "Digital Aristotle" If you were extremely rich and lucky in the time of Aristotle, you would have Aristotle as a tutor. Why can't everyone have their own personal digital 24/7 tutor? [this video]
Cites moffkalast · 2024-07 · on “The A.I. Bubble is Bursting with Ed Zitron [video]”
If you want to learn how to write, you mainly need to read more, and fixing grammar and punctuation is an automated thing nowadays. If you feel like you're getting expert writing feedback from a high school teacher then you won't be writing any novels any time soon anyway. > we should conduct a moonshot project to build a homeschooling technonanny that uses enough electricity to power the Eastern Seaboard so we can educate our kids without human interaction Actually, unironically yes since you only have to do pretraining once. A model that can then run inference locally on smartphones and is used for many years would amortize its creation cost though the utility it provides in a few years. I