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- Hacker News
- An apt analogy to me was the one I read that using AI to write is like using a forklift to lift weights at the gym - the point isn't that the weights need to be moved, it's to exercise your body.by mango7283
- I wish we can limit AI in posts such as here, and/or for some creators.
As an example Two Minute Papers used to to be great but these days he's mostly covering AI advances, which to be honest become boring really quickly.
by animal531 - There's a far deeper and longer standing issue here and that's rent-seeking.
We know what works in education. It's phonics and direct insturction, basically. But nobody gets rich that way so you end up buying into a worse system through two steps:
1. Education PhDs need to justify their existence. They do by reineventing what works. This is basically how we came up with sight words to replace phonics, which is largely responsible for destroying literacy. Whoever comes up with these schemes gets to get academic cachet for being a thought leader. They get invited to all the cool conferences and parties; and
2. Rent-seeking edtech companies end up creating solutions for things that aren't really problems. This long predated AI. It suffers from all the normal issues of corruption in government procurement. Politicians and superintendents are enticed ("bribed") to buy solutions that teachers are then mandated to use, forcing students onto devices to work a program with dubious results.
You see this pattern play out in a ton of government R&D. For example, SMR reactors in nuclear power. There's no world that SMR makes sense. Nuclear plants benefit from scale. But behind all this you'll find a bunch of physics academics who pushed this idea to get status, some of whom then get hired by SMR startups and others get involved in government procurement. Everybody is grfiting.
So while I welcome schools not using AI early on, that's barelly scratching the surface. And that begins with teaching literacy and holding students back until they can read sufficiently for their grade level.
by jmyeet
software development is like this too; you can do fine without all the fancy ceremonies and tools as long as you get the basics right, but rent-seeking and consultants run rampant to everyones detriment> But nobody gets rich that way so you end up buying into a worse systemby andrekandre- Mamdani should investigate why NYC spends almost twice as much per student as the city of Zurich, Switzerland (which itself spends an enormous amount on education) but lags behind the U.S. average in reading and math test scores: https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2025/01/29/naep-scores-sho...by rayiner
- NYC has approximately several million more students than the city of Zurich.
And several million more immigrants than the entire country of Switzerland.
by gamblor956 - Isn't Zurich far richer per-capita than NYC? I would think there is more than just what happens in a school that dictates the testing outcomes.by consumer451
- Makes sense. I had to learn how to add / subtract before I could use a calculator. Note: This policy doesn't seem to apply to high schoolby amclennon
- Weird title. Should be:
"New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools"
First sentence is "A new policy announced by the Department of Education bars younger students from using artificial intelligence, but stops short of a moratorium."
Not sure how handfuloflight got "Mamdani Bans AI in NYC Schools" from that. I'm also seeing zero instances of "Mamdani" in the article?
by _DeadFred_ - The dirty secret on NYC schools is that the upper-middle class tends to send their kids to private schools unless they can get their kids into some gifted/talented public schools. The real experimentation on what tools will and will not work is happening there under the watchful eye of wealthy hyper-involved (see: comfy jobs w/ adequate spare time) parents.
I don't know what level of digital tools is best for which types of kids, but the public school system would be prudent in adopting the learnings from the private school system and making sure the best education isn't just available to the rich. The current mayor is mad-effective at his job but does have a habit of doing the ol' wink-wink nod-nod to keep his base happy. This (along with a pointless Waymo ban) sounds like one of those actions.
by pj_mukh - This is in no way a secret…by senordevnyc
- What if the learning from private schools is to have small class sizes, well paid teachers, and a situation where parents have time and resources to spend their kids? It’s hard to compare public versus privateby ridifjfj38
- bigger reason to ban AI in public schools then. AI + neglectful parents is a disaster in the making.by jansport123
- I can see the 2040 study already: “Schoolchildren who did not use AI in primary school show higher outcomes”by summermusic
- I’d bet the opposite. There were some poor researches trying to confirm your guessby kolinko
- a lot of these studies with technology, etc, are concerned with outcomes in primary/secondary(high) school, which, tbf, no one gives a fuck about, as life outcomes are what matters
a great harm in human society is overconfident extrapolation, especially when treating humans as analogous to weather elements
however, there is literature that explores this aspect, but not relative to what we know right now (and if it is a global trait, does it matter at the general population level?)
- It's already beginning. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12232635/by broodbucket
- https://fortune.com/2026/07/21/gen-z-cheating-homework-schoo...
Higher homework scores, but _substantially_ worse test results.
About what you'd expect, right? Friction is important for learning. Make the process too smooth and it slides right off the brain.
by shoopadoop - There are so many things as a kid I did not agree with or understand but was forced to do anyway, and now as an adult am glad. Right down to being forced to wear a hat and sunscreen (in Australia).
If I had ChatGPT as a kid I would have learned nothing.
by Gigachad - Good. The more I use AI the more I feel like it will drag humanity into a local maxima that we'll never be able to escape from.by MisterKent
- Good. Kids need to learn how to think before letting other stuff do it for them.by taybin
- Do they? I mean so much of learning (certainly of school) is along the lines of "this is the way it is, don't worry about first principles just accept this"
If there's learning how to think stuff going on I'm not sure I want the schools doing that, it seems more like the job of parents.
- Even if you're pro-AI, there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point. It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers before moving them to nailguns.
I can't help but think of this Chesterton Quote:
"It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses."
by legitster - Im for this as I use AI in my current college classes to learn things quickly. Also, save money aka not have to buy/read the textbook.
Using AI allows me to take and feed my notes to it and have it create multiple choice quizzes. Same for assignments where my teacher asks us to define terms. So far doing this I am able to retain things quickly and speak intelligently during the next class.
So dont read the textbook, just learn what is needed and graduate. Mandami is definitely right on this as my new way of learning will get me A(s) and B(s) but im thinking i will miss a lot of important pieces of information.
by rps93 - So why I Dont learn how semiconductors work before I do JavaScript? Or assembly code? I can cheat straight to JavaScriptby skeptic_ai
- We typically leave decisions like that up to teachers though, not the mayor. So they can vary what's allowed on different assignments.
- It's also not banning parents from using AI with their kids or showing their kids AI outside of school so I don't know the issue. Does anyone here actually have kids in school and can report on what kind of "AI" these kids are using, because I can almost guarantee they would be using it as a glorified wikipedia at the absolute top end. They aren't going to be doing the kind of stuff people on here are using it for..by Avicebron
- > there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point
Yeah, a bad reason.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-10/are-calculators-affec...
> In a 1997 review of the extent to which calculators were being used in schools, numerous studies were examined that indicated the use of calculators at primary levels had no detrimental effects on students' arithmetic abilities.
> Unfortunately, the research indicated that calculators were still being used for trivial things like checking answers and were making little difference in mathematics education.
> Although teachers indicated their support for the use of calculators across all levels of primary school, there was little evidence that these ideas were being taken up and implemented.
> Parental disapproval of the use of calculators was cited as a possible cause of the limited take-up.
by ytoawwhra92 - Just so we're clear, phones were already banned in classrooms. "Personal" use of AI within a classroom to help someone like a personal calculator or a personal "cheating aid" was already banned.
This bans it from all teaching tools and materials as well.
by pj_mukh - > It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers
When I was young I attended a karate dojo. One interaction that always stayed with me was when someone asked why the guy with a black belt could do the katas differently.
The sensei answered that when learning, your task is to learn to do the katas perfectly. As a black belt, you have amply demonstrated that, so now your task is to be creative and build on the foundations.
I liked that answer, it applies to everything. Learn the basics before you are allowed to question them. After that, you must question them.
by jjav