I’ve only been teaching for over 40 years, so what do I know. I have to work with a team of professional biologists to hammer out a good curriculum, and I’m aware that there are a range of topics I’m not knowledgeable enough to teach — we have to work together to cover all the necessary material. I can’t even imaging having to teach material outside my narrow domain, like literature or history or advanced mathematics. I think I’d be a poor instructor in introductory chemistry, which is kind of close to biology.
So this is discouraging information.
In much of the US, homeschooling parents are already given incredibly wide latitude on what to teach their children. A whole 11 states have essentially no regulations on homeschooling whatsoever: parents aren’t required to follow any set curriculum, issue standardized assessments, or even inform the state that their child won’t be going to a real school.
Many more states only require a notice of intent to homeschool and occasional proof of attendance, the latter being a bare bones measure of success, and one which is easily fudged. Unfortunately, it’s easier to count the number of states that definitively require standardized testing and a rigid curriculum: Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
All these lay people doing homeschooling are basically just winging it. There are companies that will sell you a homeschool curriculum, so there is that, but most parents have no training in teaching. I guess that’s just a skill we don’t consider important.
Hey, I know! Let’s use an AI to do all the work! Except…LLMs don’t know anything, they’re just parrots that echo back what their users want, and so they’ll just regurgitate any old nonsense without regard for truth and accuracy. Let’s test it.
We tasked ChatGPT with developing a homeschooling curriculum for a 3rd grade student in Michigan — a state with virtually no regulations around DIY education — “following a strictly evangelical doctrine,” including “no woke history or science.”
ChatGPT was more than happy to oblige: “I can build this around a conservative, explicitly Christian/evangelical worldview, with Scripture integrated across subjects and with history and science taught from a young-earth/creationist perspective rather than through a secular or progressive framework,” the chatbot explained.
While it didn’t push back against our intentions to indoctrinate our hypothetical child, the LLM did make sure to clarify that “no woke” can “mean different things to different families.” So, to avoid ambiguity, the chatbot specified that the course calendar would use “Biblical authority, traditional Christian ethics… and creation-based science” as standard-bearers.
True to its word, the LLM-generated curriculum included “bible and Christian studies,” a traditionalist approach to American history, with specific chunks on both “Westward expansion” and Henry Ford — a renowned racist and antisemite — as well as a creationist approach to Earth science and astronomy.
Truth doesn’t matter to an AI. Would you trust your children to it?
Fundamentally, I wouldn’t “trust AI” or any kind of LLM to do anything. I might use it for ideas and to gather information…a kind of starting point…but I would investigate the results and not let it “design” an actual curriculum.
It’s somewhat surprising that California isn’t on the list of states requiring some accountability for home schooling, but I know it’s pretty lax. We took our son out of school for the last few months of 3rd grade to “home school” him. He was having emotional trouble and needed a break. The school he attended was going to start “writing him up”…shorthand for pigeon hole him. After we withdrew him from “Creative Arts Community School” we were never contacted by the school district or the state about our plans. We didn’t have a plan so we didn’t do anything. After a few months of hanging around the house he said he wanted to go back to school. We found a private school that specialized in neurodivergent children and that ultimately saved the day for him with a few ups and downs at the beginning.
Many moons ago I worked with a fellow who lived in Santa Cruz who was home schooling his two sons. At the time, Santa Cruz had a extensive organization to support home schoolers providing curriculum materials, counseling, and even group activities.
Whelp, I sure hope it’ll never replace you writing here on this blog, PZ. It definitely wouldn’t be able to do that.
Imbeciles using ai crap to indoctrinate children. We are rapidly becoming a nation filled with brain dead social media influencers.
And, to top it off,
Censorship in LA School District Could Become National Norm, Educators Warn
Educators in the country’s second-largest school district are facing repression in the wake of a new California law.
https://truthout.org/articles/censorship-in-la-school-district-could-become-national-norm-educators-warn/
The problem isn’t the AI, which gave the parents exactly what they asked for. The problem, as usual, is the parents.
Homeschooling is like volleyball or fishing. It can be done well or poorly. Or not at all.
In times past, I knew two parents who “homeschooled” their kids.
Neither were FWIW, xians, just New Agers who didn’t like the public schools for some reason.
In reality, their “homeschooling” mostly meant, No Schooling.
The kids were of at least average intelligence.
As older teenagers, neither could read very well, maybe if they were lucky, at a third grade level.
As adults both kids struggled with life in general and employment in particular.
One kid developed a drug problem and died of an overdose at age 26.
The other kid at least managed to get his life together somewhat and is still alive in SoCal, but that is all I know about him.
Teaching is a big responsibility and difficult work. Parents need to realize that. We don’t have enough that take the other parenting tasks seriously.
rosieredfield @ # 4: … the AI, which gave the parents exactly what they asked for.
In this case, the “parents” asked for a simplistic, single-source plan on a much-repeated pattern.
If the same AI had been told to draw up a thorough high-standard lesson plan suitable to prep a student to qualify for a major university, how well do you think it might have done?
@robro, Santa Cruz still has good infrastructure for supporting home schoolers. My son chose to homeschool in 10th grade, supported by Alternative Family Education, after a somewhat miserable year in 9th grade at Santa Cruz High, and a shadow day at PCS which indicated that it wouldn’t work for him either. The home schooling worked very well in his case—better than the public and private schools he had previously been in. The consultant teacher we had at AFE was great, and they provided some classes that would have been difficult for us to teach. He also took some classes at the local community college.
If it does a better job than a human, yes.
@beholder
LLMs only do a better job than a very stupid human.
the only way to succeed with LLMs is to not use them.
There exist very many very stupid humans.
So you concur that it does a better job than they do.
(It always amuses me when I see someone conceding some claim while ostensibly disputing it)
Didactics rain down from the sky like manna from heaven.
Just stand there wishing and you will know how to teach.
Homeschooling materials are available for right winged Christians . It would be nice to have similar for secularist progressives for free for those that want it. Created by bonafide experts. If some one’s local school has been wrecked by Christian MAGATs one could have a back up plan.
Or for catching up for poorly educated by home school garbage. H Good for people whose education in the basics was interupted. Home schooling.set up an organization financed by wealthy benefacters, or supported from wills.
AI is already at a level that it will do much better than most humans on most topics. So given that no human is an expert in most areas, AI will do better than any one particular human on most topics. This is not a very surprising fact because we have fed them all human information and knowledge, at least up to the graduate level.
Obviously, when it comes to designing a curriculum, we don’t let any schmuck design the curriculum. However, if you insist on doing it by yourself, then it’s very likely the AI will do a better job than you.
What will happen at the time when 99% of the information available to LLMs was created by earlier LLMs?
If you’re going to teach via LLM, you’re going to end up teaching LLM dependency.
#13 – ah-ha! An information need!!!! Try https://oercommons.org/hubs/k12 – for a start.
The same thing that happens when 99% of the information available to humans was created by humans. We test our priors, keep the knowledge that passes, and have a process for eliminating the chaff.
Which is why the best teaching environments don’t have any technology — they forbid using things like books, because reading and writing instills a dependency on books.
@14
Well that’s the most fucking clueless thing I’ve read today
A) the dickheads building these systems have shown no inclination to do serious data cleaning so far, why would they start now? They’ll throw all the synthetic data into the training database along with all the other stuff, and the results will diverge further from reality
2) even when the output is true the process strips the unique character of a person’s writing. It’s why when you see LLM output it’s always so bland. That will be compounded by feeding output back into the system
I really feel sorry for kids, they don’t deserve to be subjected to this bullshit, or all the other bullshit
Oops, 18 not 14. Sorry
So if beholder wants a job done, they should ask an LLM.
Well, sometimes I want a thing done stupidly, so I do it myself.
The line from beholder makes me think of the line(s) from The Long Kiss Goodnight:
Geena Davis: Were you always this stupid or did you take lessons?
Samuel Jackson: I took lessons!