Item — HN Reader

> What evidence or product behavior would you need to trust something like this with a student?

I would need the product to not exist. I don't want this anywhere near a child. I want humans instructing humans, teaching empathy, connection, and - most importantly - learning to learn.

Anything short of that is just building Brave New World. Electroshock the kids if they reach for forbidden knowledge.

I'm sorry to be so negative since I'm sure you worked hard on this but I find all products in this category to be 100% reprehensible.

"Computer-assisted learning. What an insult, to have the computer teach the human."

- Russ Ackoff

7 comments

This problem has been around a long time. Like many other HN users, years ago in primary school I became a problem for my teachers because the curriculum was too easy for me.

The school dealt with it by sitting me in front of a big box of color-coded dossiers called the SRA Reading Laboratory [1, 2] and telling me "read these at your own pace". The boxes looked just like this: https://sites.google.com/view/objects-of-school-days-past/sr... and may well have been kicking around since the 1960s.

The trouble was that "at your own pace" was code for leaving me alone in front of a box. I don't recall the reading being either interesting or hard, but it solved the problem for my teachers, since I wasn't the type to act out in class. The real lessons I got out of it were lessons in isolation and drudgery.

Looking back, I badly needed contact with an adult who could teach me things. That didn't happen—not then, and not much in later school years either. Was it the schools' fault? They simply didn't have the resources to give me the human instruction I needed.

Surely all agree that children need human contact, empathy, connection, meaningful teaching. But it doesn't help children if we hold to those principles without facing how resource-constrained this problem is. If we do that, then many children end up with nothing, or next to nothing, as happened to me long ago.

Years later, when I read a little history, older novels, and the like, I learned how the nobility had educated their children: not just with dedicated personal tutors but different ones for different subjects. That's what one would do if one could afford entirely human, entirely interactive instruction, and of course it was only available to the 0.0001%. When I read those passages I felt envy and shame at not having what I would (to this day) call a real education, and those feelings have never entirely gone away.

My point with this anecdote is: I don't think I would have been worse off if they had sat me in front of a computer instead of a box of boring readings produced by education researchers. And if the computer had had software that could adapt to me and my interests, so much the better. At least I would have learned things, even though I still would have suffered from lack of human connection that, at that age, I was unaware how much I needed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Research_Associates

[2] https://hackeducation.com/2015/03/19/sra

>Look back, what I clearly and badly needed was contact with an adult who could teach me things. That didn't happen, and in fact happened very little in my later school years as well. Was it the schools' fault? They simply didn't have the resources to give me the human contact I needed.

When I was in school I remember thinking, when the futuristic utopia we envisioned in the 2000s arrives, a great deal of people will teach. It will be normal for professionals in all fields to spend some portion of their time teaching. How could it be otherwise, in a civilization which intends to preserve its knowledge and wisdom?

I remember asking my math teacher for applications and she mumbled a non-answer with some embarrassment. It was only years later that I realized, well my god, she's never stepped foot outside of a school in her entire life, no wonder she doesn't know about applications. It would have been nice, I think, to have had some contact with folks who had!

(Later still, I realized that I had reinvented the father from first principles...)

I appreciate your honesty! I agree that having a talented human teacher for every student would be ideal.

Many of our schools just don't have the teacher headcount to deliver meaningful instruction to their students. Some schools (one non-profit in Africa, for instance) have to choose between having no teacher or having Bloomy.

Are you putting forward that you'd prefer the former? No judgment if so, just trying to understand your framework here.

>Some schools have to choose between having no teacher or having Bloomy.

Right. I remember in high school, when I learned about Anki, being amazed by it. I remember thinking, well, we could replace most of the time I'm spending here, so inefficiently, with a few minutes of Anki per day. Wouldn't that be nice!

Took me a while to realize, well, learning isn't exactly the main point of school. If it were, they might invest a little more effort into making sure people actually remember what they learn! (Ebbinghaus isn't exactly cutting edge stuff.)

So I remember thinking, rather cynically, well what we're doing here could be replaced with an app! (For context this was in the 2000s.) Not that I thought education should be just an app, obviously, but rather, my complaint was that what I was getting was strictly inferior to one.

I had hoped that the advent of AI would open up fully personalized learning tracks, but instead what we seem to have gotten is technology being used to surveil children all day (a bit of an unpleasant thing to train them for, no?), and to ensure they are conforming even more tightly to someone else's ideas about how they ought to be spending their time.

To clarify, I think that someone else telling me what I'm supposed to be interested in[0] (with threat of punishment no less) is deeply offensive to the basic fact of being an organism, but how inefficiently it's being done is a second insult on top of the first one.

That being said, I welcome innovation in this space.

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[0] I later discovered Education On The Dalton Plan in my school library, being apparently the first person in the school's existence to borrow it. The main idea of the book being that if the child directs his/her own learning, they're liable to actually learn something.

My school was a Dalton school, at least ostensibly, but most of the ideas in the book were illegal in my country. (And new laws passed while I was there squeezed it even further!) Turns out what I was after had been tried, over a century ago, but the government decided it was simply too offensive that the average person should be allowed to decide how they're going to spend their time -- at such an early age, no less!

Yes—and the whole hypothesis here is that teaching could be more efficient than it currently is!

I would want to solve the problem way upstream. Obviously I want children to receive education.

I would also say that looking at the problem like it's teacher headcount that's the issue is assuming a specific education model. If there is only 1 teacher and 300 students, you can't meaningfully do a lecture-style one-way transmission of information. That's outdated anyway and not what the students need.

I like that you're touching on a bit of Horizon 3 education here! I agree that the model is antiquated and is long overdue for an upgrade.

You bet. Like I wrote to 'dang I'm really not trying to hate on what you're doing, just offering my very candid take on products like this. I care very much about education and I'm happy to see someone trying to do something about it. In that sense I applaud your efforts and hope that Bloomy leads to some good outcomes for somebody. I simply feel that more AI is not the answer.

If there is really no teacher around, the premise is 7 year old kids will show up to teacher-less classrooms and then hop on a computer for a few hours (a whole day?) and willingly sit through hours of tutoring? Rather than just leaving and having recess all day?

Ha, free recess all day sounds nice :)

The more accurate way to describe these situations is overwhelmed teachers with overflowing classrooms where students are left to their own (rather than schools fully absent of an adult).

Recommended Bloomy usage is ~30 mins per core subject. So certainly not the whole day. I have my own very strong misgivings about screen time for kids.

So the idea in this situation is individualized instruction of skills that can adapt live to a student, in a concentrated and limited period of tech time. Hopefully this creates a better outcome than the status quo.

As ai replaces more and more jobs, there should be plenty of humans available to teach. Even if the teachers are ai assisted themselves.

This is a very interesting point I've heard from one other very smart person in this space. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

Just because it's computer-assisted doesn't mean the computer is doing the teaching (any more than saying a gun killed someone). The people behind it are the teachers, and the computer-assisting is a way to amplify that teacher's reach (like a YouTube video).

Great point. The responsibility and consequences of the tech (both bad and good) rest upon the humans who designed it.

[flagged]

Your GP comment was borderline against the site guidelines, since you basically went straight to shallow dismissal, flamebait, and generic ideological battle. I didn't respond with a moderation comment because I understand this topic brings up strong feelings and there's a lot to say on all sides.

Your reply here, though, is flat-out against the site guidelines and it's not ok to post like that to HN, least of all in someone's launch thread (whether it's a YC startup or not).

No more of this please. You're welcome to make your substantive points thoughtfully, but if you'd first review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site more to heart, we'd appreciate it.

Edit: your previous comment was a personal attack as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981467. Please stop this.

> your previous comment was a personal attack as well:

Brother, I meant what I wrote.

That said, I'll cool off for a bit. I'm not here to rain on anyone's parade but as you said, products like this stir extremely strong feelings on my end. I find the framing offensive, exploitative, and dehumanizing.

Personal attacks aren't ok whether you meant what you wrote or not.

I get that you feel strongly about this - probably most of us share these feelings in some form; I know I do. We just need to talk about the topic thoughtfully and respectfully, and not assume that someone with different views doesn't care about kids (for example) or doesn't share the same concerns.

Let's put it this way: I appreciate the thoughtful component of your comments - we just need you to cool off on the attacking component.

Clearly we have different definitions of what constitutes an attack, that said, I know you're fighting an eternal uphill battle on HN so I'll rest my case.

I will say that I find some of this kind of moderation very confusing. I feel that I often see folks going way harder than anything I've said today and there's no moderation hand-slaps visible. Possibly the sensitivity is greater here since it's a Launch HN thread, so I appreciate that. But please take my feedback for what it's worth and reflect on it a bit.

> very confusing. I feel that I often see folks going way harder than anything I've said today and there's no moderation hand-slaps visible.

You're quite right and of course it's confusing. But it has a simple, unsatisfying explanation: we can't read everything that gets posted here, let alone moderate it all. There's far too much for us to read even 10% of what gets posted here.

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Btw, I'm going to try an experiment and respond to your GP comment with a non-moderation reply, just because I find the topic interesting, and also in the hope of communicating what I said above: the thoughtful component of the conversation is fine. (No obligation to reply of course.)

What's your take on Anki?

I've personally both had and seen great success with the Anki approach for specific terms (e.g., vocab flash cards). Spaced repetition is built into Bloomy based on similar principles. A little harder to get right as you're now spacing out skills/concepts rather than just word/definition/context. Something we hope to fine tune over time.

This position is so extreme, you'd have to have called Reader Rabbit "electroshocking kids" as well.

LLM assisted education =/=> no empathy is taught human-to-human

I have a slightly different perspective based on how I've observed schools use Bloomy. Focused use of Bloomy has allowed teachers to deliver higher-touch support to students who need it most (it also helps that our system identifies common learning patterns so teachers can conduct small-group instruction).

Human empathy is not optional, but rather required. Furthermore humans need to make the connection between the academic skill that's being taught and the real world application or relevance of that skill.

So LLM-assisted education has the potential to help humans be MORE empathetic and deliver the higher-leverage aspects of education only humans can do, while freeing them up from some of the inefficient many-to-one skill instruction for discrete concepts.

(If I'm reading it correctly then "=/=>" means "does not imply", i.e. you and jrflo are agreeing.)

I misread this -- yep I agree with the original statement!

So you are against a child learning by himself with a book?

I love self-learning. I read a lot of books as a kid (at one point my dad even got mad at me because I was ignoring him while reading yet another book).

At the same time, I believe -- and have seen firsthand as a teacher -- that many students need instruction to learn certain concepts. Even if they don't need instruction, they need a framework or structure to learn within. (One of the big challenges I had to solve early on during my TFA time was classroom behavioral management -- it doesn't matter how good your pedagogy is if your kids won't listen to you).

Great teaching involves modeling a new skill or concept, providing some amount of training wheels, and then seeing it through to independent mastery. Is there a lot that a student can learn on their own simply by reading? Absolutely. Kids should read more books.