“We’re sending kids to school to memorize facts that ChatGPT can retrieve in under a second.”
:blobcatfacepalm: Yeah worst of all, gym classes are making them run a mile that Uber can cover in less than a minute
Oct 9, 2026, 10:56 AM@stux there is power in self reliance
Oct 9, 2026, 11:14 AM
@lanodan @stux when I was in middle school I didn’t understand the point of memorizing the multiplication tables, and I didn’t do it; I thought the point of education was to gain understanding, and I already understood multiplication, and nobody said anything about mixing in some training to build skills in addition to understanding. After my “gap decade” I went back to college to study physics, during which I noticed that memorization would have helped a lot
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@lanodan @stux But at the same time, a lot of my experience as a student was of being required to memorize and execute procedures by hand under time pressure in a way that clearly exceeds what is beneficial to understanding or to skills needed for real-world applications. We’ve been writing tables of integrals and special function values for centuries, exactly because that level of memorization is excessive
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@lanodan @stux I would never use an LLM to “retrieve” a fact, but I do think our schools greatly overemphasize memorization, and I consider that a failing of the system. But I can’t really blame former students for seeing memorization as the goal - for seeing what it does to be its purpose. I found it especially disheartening to see, as a graduate TA, just how pervasively the system interferes with building understanding and mastery
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@lanodan @stux I’m in the U.S., I gather it’s not the same everywhere. My sense of it here is that the long-term conservative project of undermining education has been replacing trusting the expertise of teachers with requiring teachers to “teach to the test”, which means having students memorize trivial rather than building understanding or mastery
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Oct 9, 2026, 9:01 PM@ShadSterling @lanodan @stux this might be a "conservative" project (i'm not experienced enough to say for sure), but the most recent major attempt to fix/improve this was backed by the Democrats (and definitely got blamed on them when they did it poorly)
i'm referring to the attempt at rolling out "common core" math curriculum reforms
as i was explaining to some other people just recently, the *implementation* of this went *so* poorly that a significant number of "silly valley new money" conservative chinese americans that my parents know managed to take this grievance, get sucked in by the later transphobic disinformation about "boys in girls toilets" (which my father had to remind them that in their childhoods in china there likely _were no_ gendered toilets) and "they're transing their genders!", and voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party
Oct 9, 2026, 9:24 PM@ShadSterling @lanodan @stux i'm not convinced that compulsory education can or even should be fixed, but i _am_ interested in how new ways of sharing information could work
especially since, if the metric *were* to be things such as fact memorization or physical activity, schools aren't good at that *either*
@r @lanodan @stux the Democratic Party is a conservative party. I don’t think it was when I was a child, but it’s been slowly drifting that way for decades.
AIUI before compulsory education literacy rates were abysmally low, and after it got well above 90%; lately the conservative project to revert to only the rich being literate has been reducing it - in part by making the metrics about memorization
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@r @lanodan @stux What I would like to see includes restoring the value of compulsory k-12 education, and overhauling colleges in several ways, and empowering lifelong learning for all ages, including freeing people up to pursue new ways of doing whatever interests them. In short, to transform our economy from maximizing extraction to maximizing empowerment. Which will take decades of electing officials who want to do that
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Oct 10, 2026, 12:15 AM@ShadSterling @lanodan @stux when i was dealing with considering running away from home as a teen (i've subsequently had to turn the relationship with my parents off and on again a few times), i certainly *did not* appreciate the knowledge that the state could and was socially encouraged to deploy their monopoly on violence to make things compulsory. i was getting enough pressure as it was from "intergenerational trauma" and didn't need more
my parents got most of their education before it was made compulsory, as did most of my extended family who are _barely_ "book learning" educated or literate
so i'm not convinced that "compulsory" can be made to fit with "self-determination"
Oct 10, 2026, 12:22 AM@ShadSterling @lanodan @stux the only idea i've heard so far which i *do* actually like is:
> society has decided that it is more beneficial in the long term for young people to spend a number of years working solely for the benefit of themselves, rather than working to benefit/enrich someone else (whether in some literal mines or as pawns in a hype/slop/addiction factory)
i can possibly agree with an idea like that being compulsory, but it wouldn't necessarily look like a "school" anymore
Oct 10, 2026, 5:16 AMOct 10, 2026, 10:17 AM@lanodan @ShadSterling @stux yeah, i can see that working
there seem to be a lot of similar-looking ideas going around, especially for primary-school-age education. (mild take: i would count "unschooling" and much of the USA backlash against public education (especially post-2020) as having fundamentally similar goals, even if it _results_ in something misguided)
if we continue to have/want a state which does """a lot""" of governing, it might also be useful for it to get involved in training educators and regulating their professional standards (apparently some of my US experiences are "horrifying")
Oct 10, 2026, 10:22 AM
Oct 10, 2026, 10:43 AM
@stux s/ChatGPT/Wikipedia/, this didn't start today :)
@landelare No but it’s getting a lot worse 😉 rapidly
@landelare @stux These are not at all the same.
Use of an encyclopedia is an incredibly valuable academic and personal learning skill. The trash talk about Wikipedia was all olds shitting on youngs under the belief that something hardbound and written by old white guys and full of their biases was more proper and authoritative, not about learning methodology.
@dalias
They had issues with it being editable by anyone, who wasn't necessarily qualified. We physics students still used it like, personally I read the article then read the references and put the references in my bibliography but not the Wikipedia article.
@econads @landelare @stux There's a difference in the talking point they use to attack it and what their actual issue is. "Anyone can edit it" did not actually mean "it might contain errors or misinformation because of a recent edit that was misinformed or malicious". It meant "the wrong type of people" are involved in the writing. Yes, in that sense.
@econads @landelare @stux This is exactly the same reason the same people who were yelling at kids "don't trust what you read on the internet" are now trusting every piece of propaganda and slop in their Facebook feeds.
Then, "on the internet" meant queer anarchist hackers. Now it means "right wing disinformation machines".
@dalias [ citation needed ]
@stux people who think school is just about memorising a long list of facts missed the whole point of school
@ASprinkleofSage @stux Tell that to my history teacher (in the 60s/70s)!
@PaulNickson @ASprinkleofSage @stux School missed the whole point of school.
Contrary to traditionalists' claims, rote memorization does not "train" the brain in a useful way that transfers. In fact, it can detract from higher-order thinking, not to mention how it wastes limited instructional time. And much of what kids are forced to commit to memory in a bunch-o'-facts curriculum is soon forgotten: https://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/fuhgeddaboudit/
Where A.I. does prove harmful is in bypassing thinking, reading, researching, and writing. That's where the gym-class analogy makes sense.
@alfiekohn I'm amused by how everyone in this thread artfully calibrates the discussion to their own individual comfort level.
@stux :masto_lol:
Very apt analogy!
@stux yeah we should give them practical skills that AI won't be able to do, like using their tiny fingers to polish the inside of shell casings
@stux *might or might not correctly retrieve*
Also we were given exams which forced us to work things out and show the workings. A right answer was a tiny part of the mark. We were allowed to bring cheat sheets even, because we can always look things up IRL but we still would have to know how to use the values and formulas.
@stux I recently went for a walk only to arrive right back at home. Turns out I could've simply stayed home and saved myself a good 30 minutes of time!
@stux
I'm not going to take seriously the opinions of someone who thinks you go to school to "memorise facts"
@stux "facts"
Oct 9, 2026, 12:48 PM@stux while memorization does happen at school, "we're sending kids to school to memorize facts" is such a frustratingly limited view of actual education that it makes me ill just to read it
@stux or 1.6 kilometres. rote learning is important. music and art classes should be funded so kids can play instruments and be creative.
stop promoting guber. guber's intention was to put taxi cabs out of business then raise prices. also, guber wants to destroy mass transit.
guber pays no taxes.
schlepp.
@stux This assumes that the LLM pulls up "Facts" as opposed to some halucination.
Oct 9, 2026, 1:45 PM@stux I can make more money on my video game than I could ever make in real life. :P
Ignorance and laziness have no limits, they never had…
The only tools we actually need is common sense, fact checking and critical thinking…
Domain knowledge you gather along the way. Experience is what it is called…
Oct 9, 2026, 2:08 PM@stux JFC we are doomed
This is your #source ? I ask because the text continues beyond that quoted statement.
@jerrej Nop, a screenshot from another comment somewhere
Not Twitter at least 😉 so copy of a copy etc
So no source tracing and no attribution makes the originally quoted statement kind of pointless and void, unless you just want to hook onto something that is supposedly on everyone's mind already? It wasn't on my mind at least. The historians of the future are doomed.
@stux 😆
Oct 9, 2026, 2:17 PM@stux there's also something wrong with your school if all the kids do is memorizing shit. Just sayin'...
@stux think of all the food they have to eat? We could simply throw that in the trash too.
@stux "... that ChatGPT can plagerize, lie about, and generally just make shit up, but in under a second! Whoa!" Personally, this just tells me that we can start teaching philosophy to kids at a much earlier age. Have them memorize lines from a play, etc. Basically, we can teach these kids whatever we want now, and it can be the good stuff. It's getting our local school boards in line that's the issue. My local is having issues with enrollment of all things. This whole system needs an enema.
@stux I’m here for the nails hitting heads.
@stux I realize this is not the point of the post but I've been saying for years that gym class should teach day-to-day physical stuff like riding bikes safely, lifting heavy things, using tools like shovels without wrecking your back, etc
Not to say sports an such should not be part of the curriculum ofc, but more emphasis on practical stuff would be a great thing by my count.
@stux Aside from multiplication tables and maybe poetry and drama, I don't think US schools have actually required rote memorization in generations, aside from a few reactionary teachers trying to make a stupid point.
Even in the 80s, we were being taught how to use Boolean logic in digital catalog searches and how to use scientific calculators.
@stux Actually it can't retrieve those facts in under a second. Oftentimes you get "Thinking..." or something like it for a while, and then a response. And the response may be wrong.
@stux sadly chatgpt learns false information the internet and tells falsehoods
@stux This is EXACTLY the problem with so-called AI getting anywhere near the education system.
Learning and knowledge are not just the accumulation of the tokens we use to represent facts. They are a whole-body *practice* that is integral to an individual functioning as part of the human collective. And if we don't *practice* that, we have nothing, exactly the same as not moving and feeding and using our bodies ends up with us ... not being able to move and use our bodies so well at all.
@stux In a world full of useful idiots Körperkultur trumps learning to use your brain.
@stux Amazing how quickly some people went from "It's important that you learn the method, not just the solution" to "lol let's just trust the brute-force stochastic auto complete" ...
i mean - why have schools at all?
who needs to read, when you can just ask AI anything, and it will make something up for you to believe?
and i used to LOVE hallucinating!
@stux By the way, correct learning isn't about memorizing but more about understanding. You could memorize entire pages from your science book but its all useless if you don't understand any of it
I'm sorry that the first sentence sounded like AI-generated text by the way