Over the last year, primary and secondary schools across China have been allowed to use AI tools—including chatbots—in their classrooms.
Now, schools in some regions are being mandated to go further). Every primary & secondary school in Beijing, for instance, must now develop an AI course as part of their curriculum or integrate AI tools into existing courses.
Would you back your state’s education leaders if they mandated all public K–12 schools to create and teach a dedicated AI class or integrate AI into other courses?
^ ‘the AI Track,’ the source of the second article, has a pro-U.S. bias and supports AI’s advancement & commercial success.
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Over the last year, primary and secondary schools across China have been allowed to use AI tools—including chatbots—in their classrooms.
Now, schools in some regions are being mandated to go further^(^). Every primary & secondary school in Beijing, for instance, must now develop an AI course as part of their curriculum or integrate AI tools into existing courses.
Would you back your state’s education leaders if they mandated all public K–12 schools to create and teach a dedicated AI class or integrate AI into other courses?
^ ‘the AI Track,’ the source of the second article, has a pro-U.S. bias and supports AI’s advancement & commercial success.
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Yeah seems like a good idea, it is going to be a significant tool as these kids grow up.
I would probably fold it into a more general computer literacy and cyber-security curriculum, the singular focus on AI chat bots specifically seems a little gimmicky and potentially aimed at an international audience.
But kids should certainly have more computer training, particularly since the iPad generation seem to know less about how computers work than boomers.
No.
what would you actually teach?
“this is a chat bot. you can ask it questions and it will answer, but don’t forget that it might be wrong” doesn’t really require a class and everything more specific than that will likely be outdated in two years anyway.
edit: grammar
How about we get students to learn basic finance and interpersonal skills THEN we can move on to AI
I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to introduce the concept at some appropriate point, and discuss what “AI” can and cannot do. Kids will be increasingly using it either way, so some instruction on it may help. A whole AI curriculum or whatever seems like a bit much though.
It’s not a bad idea. Public education needs practical skills like that amongst others.
You prompt AI in English, it’s blindly trained from what random humans write on the internet, and thus the information it consumes is rife with multiple cultural biases across the world. Also if Grok is any indication, as we get closer to AGI, there may be philosophical considerations behind their decision making and analysis.
It sounds like a liberal arts degree with a humanities focus would not only be incredibly useful, but would give us a competitive advantage over countries who eschew that for rigidity.
Hell, maybe we can kick the American ideologies devaluing humanities and glorifying a rigid STEM/manual trades dichotomy to the curb.
I know a group of people who’s taking this on themselves with their kids. My wife and I are part of that group.
In the middle of the school year, my daughter confirmed something she had heard from friends of hers. One of her teachers was using AI to grade the reading assignments. Multiple times children had seen that all of the assignments got graded within seconds. Then somebody realized that it wasn’t just getting graded within seconds but 10 minutes after they needed to be submitted online.
We asked our son who’s older if he knew anything about this and he confirmed that there’s at least three teachers in the school doing it.
We’ve explained to them that in order to properly use AI you need to actually understand the fundamentals. We’ve given them real life examples of how AI can make our jobs easier, but also how they can make them harder or your work flawed.
So they have promised not to use it for actual schoolwork, but we’ve given them some access simply so they can play around with the capabilities. Over time will try to figure out how to allow them to use it for real work.
We can start by calling them LLMs instead of AI. As that’s what they actually are. And no, no I don’t think we need to expose kids to Spicy Spellcheck.
We should ban all generative AI companies from operating in the US
I think general “technology literacy” material should be included in curricula starting in elementary school. It’s like sex-ed, in that it’s something all kids should have education on, but which is often neglected or left explored at too shallow a level by parents.
I’m fine w it so long as the classes use strict objective grading that shows you’re ready for the next level. None of this Pass for showing up nonsense.
Tech literacy isn’t a bad thing but let’s be real here, kids in the US are struggling just to be able to read and do basic math. They’re already struggling with the foundational basics and if they can’t even do things like read at grade level, it won’t matter how much you dump into tech literacy classes.
I mean if we want to not be completely outpaced by China in the hard sciences then yes. Tho rn we’re pursuing the dumbest possible policy of completely closing off public school instruction on ai but also completely deregulating it making it so it will invade your life and you will have very little understanding of it.
But baring an adoption of their economic system I doubt we will really majorly change our approach.
Right after we take care of actual literacy.