This can be the way things are taught, who are the teachers, what a school day would look like, where classes are taught, what things what look like, etc.
Ideally: Ms. Frizzle.
More realistically, I think increasing the number of field trips would help students see things in action.
They don’t need to be big: just a quick walk to the park, bakery, pharmacist, firehall, clinic, anything really. Just little half day trips every week or two.
You’re so right about Ms. Frizzle. She’d be the perfect teacher in a Solarpunk world.
Agreed about the frequent field trips. It’s more important to get out than people think, plus it helps people realize learning isn’t just for in the classroom.
Get rid of the “classroom.” Not opposed to indoor spaces, but those spaces shouldn’t be mindless boxes with rigid productivity deadlines.
Democratic schools in which students have autonomy and can collectively make decisions along with the teachers. The education should have a focus on learning for enrichment and teaching critical thinking skills over making productive workers like we have now.
Year round schooling with a rotating schedule, multiple teachers for each classroom, nix the benchmark testing altogether and rely on the teachers keeping each other accountable to get accountable assessments of each student, give student government more and more democratic responsibility and control to participate in the writing of their curriculum and what they learn about, toss anyone touting parents rights into a blender in public and use the puree as fertilizer for the communal garden.
Something like the Forest Schools and outdoor schools/daycares now. Students outdoors and engaging with the real world and each other nearly all the time. Nothing stripped to dry and abstract isolated bits (and boring) but always learning concepts in context and seeing how they interact.
No assessment, no obligatory school time beyond teaching kids how to read well and basic maths. School could be a building where explanations of different topics are offered to interested people of no matter what age - of course you would have curriculum guides to help you find out where best to start, but you can just go and sit in the lessons.
I don’t think reading and maths needs to be obligatory. Kids will pick it up naturally through their own curiosity when trying to learn about something more advanced.
What you are describing is pretty close to a university. Which makes sense because universities are places of learning, unlike schools which are prisons of disciplining and the goal isn’t to learn but to memorize minutia for about a month before moving to the next topic.
Avenues Online
Students are all around the world and attend virtual classrooms starting in kindergarten, so long as they have an adult at home to assist them. By third grade, they are able to get to the classroom themselves and navigate the coursework. Classes are both synchronous and asynchronous depending on timezone, and students are physically all over the world. Foreign languages start at 1st grade and have a Mandarin and Spanish option. Students are taught to be global, tech-literate citizens from the start. Teachers are located all over the world; one homeroom teacher was in Mexico, their Spanish teacher went back and forth from Peru to California, and their Mandarin teacher moves between New York and Taipei. Likewise, students come from all over the world, and are allowed to choose what they want to be called and their gender identity is respected. Teachers likewise identify their preferred pronouns in their title.
The only requirement is a computer with webcam and camera; strong internet connection, a web browser, and the only closed-source software is Zoom which is utilized in all instruction. Our children use Debian and have only ever known ThinkPads with Debian. The other downside is that the school uses a Google suite for email and office application, but that is something we learned to be okay with for not letting them be abused by the American public school system.
We relocated to a low cost of living country on the equator, so this allowed us to supplement their online education with extracurricular activities on the local economy, like personal swimming lessons, football (soccer), and we get Fridays off so that is museum day or go do a day trip to the jungle. The kids also get cultural exposure through just living in another completely foreign environment to their culture. There are individual projects every month that involve going out to the community, and the kids have a garden that they are documenting and maintaining for their semester project.
The kids have their own workspaces in the house. Imagine what a /r/battlestations setup would look like for an eight year old with legos, a chalkboard, and mechanical keyboard.
There may be other programs as well; we started in another school before moving to Avenues Online because it had more resources available, but there are other strong institutions that deliver entirely virtually. The only thing when navigating the plethora of online programs is do research and ask questions so that you don’t end up stuck in a fascist Christian program. The interview is two-way; during our kids screening, they were asking them questions to make sure that our world views aligned and that we aren’t bringing baggage to the program (I don’t remember the questions, but some involved dinosaurs and maybe evolution); likewise, during the interview, we asked pointed questions to make sure that this isn’t some kind of new-age holistic antivaxxing white supremacist program. Because they are out there; other schools answered our difficult questions with uncertainty or “that’s something we leave to the parents to decide,” while Avenues was very direct in their positions.
The universities that AON graduates attend are prestigious schools and feature predominantly on the website; this is setting up your kids to be global, tech-literate, multilingual adults; not KJV-memorized people getting into Tennessee Bible College of Jesus.
Kids would have a dedicated virtual tutor. An AI with infinite patience and no judgemental comments. It would be aware of the community-agreed minimal curriculum, would have explicit privacy limits and collaborate with the parents. (Kahn academy already has several pieces of that)
Most workplaces would have an open daycare that allow the kids who are old enough to accompany the adults.
The virtual tutor would double as a lawyer to ensure this does not lead to child labor.
It would be considered part of your work to explain it to interested children. Turning one down without good reason would be treated as a professional fault.
Replace consumer marketing with curiousity marketing: instead of pushing for desire to own, push for desire to know.
I don’t think we need AI. Without the need to constantly work the tutor can just be one of the child’s parents. This would work better because children naturally respect and want to emulate their parents. The tutor doesn’t even need to know everything and just teach how to analyze situations and find knowledge.
But I agree that kids should be included in workspaces to teach them about necessary (or interesting) jobs.
Overall I think the best way is to allow kids to find their own best ways to learn.
I do think it is valuable to separate knowledge-seeking (where it is good to have access to a knowledge not limited by the parents) and emotional support. Being able to learn without fearing being judged and evaluated, that’s valuable. Also as a parent, I do know that my reserve of patience is not infinite and I am happy that my kid finds sources of knowledge that are independent of me and my biases. Then we discuss things.
Overall I think the best way is to allow kids to find their own best ways to learn.
As someone who finished high school at the beginning of the internet, I can guarantee that access to free information unencumbered by the limitations of adults around me (including my loving knowledgeable parents) was essential. To me a virtual AI tutor is just a mean to make this accessible earlier. My kid still has trouble reading long and complicated text, and I rather have a smart tutor proposing him audio content than random youtubers.
knowledge will obviously come from other sources too. When kids socialize with others they will learn things naturally, and discussion should absolutely be encouraged. However AI produces a lot of problems. AIs have bias based on the information they learn, they require resources to build and maintain and cannot discuss information accurately. I just don’t see what AI adds over just interacting with other people.
Solarpunk societies, like all post-capitalist societies, are build on strong human relations, replacing one of the avenues of creating them with an hallucinating rock (exaggeration I know) just seems weird.
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Also, teaching kids is not a dull or hard job that has to be automatized away. A lot of people actually love doing it so much that they even put up with the horrible limitations and shortcomings of the current education system. Just make sure they are adequately equipped and rewarded and I’m sure we need no AI. Just a really good library system.
Oh teaching kids once in a while is fine and fun, but providing all the info they want at the pace they need when they need it is another thing. I love teaching things to my kid but there are times when it is dull, there are times when it is hard. It is doable, but being able to open the floodgates of knowledge when there is a demand is a huge boost to what they can learn effortlessly.
A lot of people actually love doing it so much that they even put up with the horrible limitations and shortcomings of the current education system
Currently we find enough such dedicated people to do that for ~30 kids at a time. Even for a good teacher that’s ridiculously inefficient.
Just a really good library system.
As a knowledge-thirsty kid who grew up before the internet, and who spent a lot of time in libraries and bookshops, having to go back to the bottleneck of books and outdated shelves is something I wish to no one.
My kid has the same problem as I did: he has basic questions (is the sun heavier than earth), that quickly lead to advance subjects (oh so black holes are the heaviest objects out there?) then into research subjects (wasn’t the big bang densest than black holes? How did it get apart?). Whatever subject you are into, you quickly outgrow your resources if you go deep enough. AIs (today, I dare not imagine in 5-10 years) are able to take an advanced research paper and make an ELI5.
Me? When I was in junior high, like many geeky kids I was into space conquest. I had weird looks from the school librarian when I was asking about a book that could tell me about the harnessable energy sources on other planets. “Just try the encyclopedia”. At high school a friend had internet access, I was quickly reading NASA studies from programs that were not even mentioned in a single book at my school.
Solarpunk utopias are not energy-poor utopias. Quite the contrary. They are what happens once we have decorrelated CO2 emissions and energy use.
When I was a kid, my parents brought me weekly at the town’s library, and about monthly at the city’s bookstore. There is some margin before a computer usage comes close in terms of CO2 emissions.
Most AI companies “offset” their carbon footprint. I guess a part of that accounting is greenwashing but some are doing that directly with solar panels. I would argue that in such a case, their energy usage is irrelevant. And I trust that they probably do what they claim because it does save them a lot of money to do so.
Also “a lot of energy” is really debatable. Even if they used power directly from the US grid, the Llama 2 models (which fuel a democratization of LLMs like none before) have emitted about the same as one international flight for their training, that needs to be done only once and that is now free for everyone to use. There are not a lot of fields that have such an impact for such a low footprint. One international conference bringing people from many countries would have 10x that footprint already.
I guess you can decorrelate CO2 emissions, but in turn will have to put up with similar disadvantages caused by mining pollution, solar panel production, etc. Sometimes it seems that the proponents of an energy rich future still dream of having a free lunch and eating their cake too because ‘renewables’, but these technologies need resources and infrastructure as well, which an energy hungry population might not be able to provide in a sustainable way (can’t burn the forest faster than it grows back, can’t cover the entire surface of the earth with solar panels).
Sometimes it feels that people living in the fossil fuels world have a hard time understanding that the fossil fuel maths is not universal. A fossil fuel world requires extraction per kWh (energy) used, a post-fossil world requires extraction per kW (power) installed. Once your solar panel installed, whether they produce or not does not change the environmental impact. Actually one could argue that not producing energy is what causes waste and environmental impact. Also, panels are highly intermittent. At noon you will likely have a spike of free energy. Yep, that’s a free lunch with a cake and cherry at the top.
can’t cover the entire surface of the earth with solar panels
A portion of the Sahara or of any ocean would be enough for several times the current world consumption. And if we start deploying in space (we have the tech for btw, yes including microwave transmission, tested over long enough distance) there is basically no limit before Kardashev II.
Things my kid learnt through “socializing and learning things naturally”:
- everything you can’t explain is either caused by aliens or ghosts
- you will burn in hell if you don’t go to church on sunday
- you can read the future on the palms of the hands
- kids who accept to take the school bus routinely die
AIs have bias based on the information they learn, they require resources to build and maintain and cannot discuss information accurately.
Nonwhithstanding the fact that we are talking about future tech and that the pace at which AI is advancing right now is crazy, even today, on these metrics, I think they do better than we do as a society without them.
- Bias: we all have, but unlike us, AIs are fixing these problems at an incredible pace
- Accuracy: Truthfullness is the metric everyone is trying to improve now and already huge successes in a few months. I am willing to bet that you will find more mistakes in the books at the local library than asking a decent LLM. On all subjects that are part of the curriculum until high school, I am willing to bet that it is more reliable than the average human teacher.
- Discussion: It is extremely good at conversation, something that non-living repositories (books, videos) are incapable of.
- Resources to build and maintain: You need to build the model once. I am not sure what maintenance you are talking about. Decent models now run on personal computers or even phones. Even the training costs is negligible compared to producing physical textbooks (and renewing them every year!)
The examples you provide are negatively biased. You don’t know all of the normal and useful things they learn because they don’t stand out. Also two of those examples (Church and school busses) come from current cultural biases, something a solarpunk society would hopefully mitigate.
I think AI is not suited for discussion. It might be good at conversation but discussion isn’t just conversation. Discussion requires understanding of others to a degree I don’t think AI can achieve.
I concede my point about resources, but will add that the model will get outdated and will need retraining every once in a while.
Textbooks are bad. I agree. I just think they should be replaced with a human that knows what they are talking about and the topics that are learnt are things that the kid actually wants to know instead of what people think they should know.
Also I can’t help but notice you ignored one of my core arguments: that solarpunk societies are about strong human connections and replacing one of the main sources of these connections is a bad idea.
I also think that the process of finding information is as important as the actual information. If all of your questions are answered just by typing it into the computer then you never learn the importance of checking information accuracy, accounting for bias and other very useful skills.
AI allows you to shortcut to the information you seek which means you never learn how to actually think for yourself.
Also I can’t help but notice you ignored one of my core arguments: that solarpunk societies are about strong human connections and replacing one of the main sources of these connections is a bad idea.
I’ll address that one first then
I have had people tell me that we should not automate cashiers because it removes human connections. I believe that humans want human connections and that if you remove the obligation to get something out of these connections, they will become richer and more meaningful. I sometime feel I am tricking my kid to trigger their interest in “useful” things. I’d rather play with him than force his to rewrite the same word with good pretty round letters a hundred times.
When you remove painful obligations from a human connection, you may sever some that you were forcing yourself into, but you also give room to much more of them. If teaching was accounted for, I would spend more time showing my kid what I really love in life, places that make me feel at peace, events that make me feel alive, techniques that I find interesting despite their practical uselessness.
Human are social animals. We make social connections and may even die for it. Don’t worry, removing an obligation will not remove the need for more meaningful ones.
Now for the rest:
Why do you assume that a society that manages to mitigate biases that are extremely central to our current problems in social relations would have a hard time mitigating bias in AIs training dataset?
Discussion requires understanding of others to a degree I don’t think AI can achieve.
Look at what AI mentors do today, right now. Ask them follow up questions, ask them what you don’t understand. Several conversations with GPT-4 (which is the best right now but trailed by more open models) convinced me otherwise. Even if you may argue that such models currently are not as good as a human tutor, I find it hard to argue that it does not beat the “conversation” of a class of 30 with a lone teacher.
I also think that the process of finding information is as important as the actual information. If all of your questions are answered just by typing it into the computer then you never learn the importance of checking information accuracy, accounting for bias and other very useful skills.
True in all day and age and on every media. Had to teach it to several kids in my family as school seems to do a pretty poor job at it. Interestingly enough, something that LLMs can teach well as well despite being (currently) pretty poor at it.
Okay, I agree. LLMs might be useful for education. But they should not replace practical experience.
I just am skeptical to everyone that says we should replace something with AI, because most of the time these decisions seem to be motivated by profit and aren’t actually better.
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Freedom to learn instead of forced studying. Non authoritarian but instead based on consent, it would be the teachers main job to awaken the interest of the children and to help them find and improve their talents, so the children would then be enabled to do self determined learning and studying because they actually want to and not because they are forced to.
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Diversity instead of uniformity. No grades and no compulsory subjects but instead individual tutoring of every child/student, based on their personal interests and talents.
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Classes taking place outside and in places that are relevant for the topic being studied is the norm
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Green Schools - https://www.greenschool.org/
