Nothing strange nor new: the average teacher is reactionary even at top universities, generally incapable of evolving, much like the stereotypical average vegetable seller.
We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills.
The result on a large scale is that we have an increasingly incompetent population on average, with teaching staff competing to see who can revert the most to the past and refusing to see that the more they do this, the worse the incompetent graduates they produce.
The computer, desktop, FLOSS, is the quintessential epistemological tool of the present, just as paper was in the past. The world changes, and those who fall behind are selected out by history; come to terms with that. Not only, those who lag behind ensure that few push forward an evolution for their own interest, which typically conflicts with that of the majority.
> Nothing strange nor new: the average teacher is reactionary even at top universities, generally incapable of evolving
It feels to me like teaching has always been bandwidth constrained and providing 1:1 feedback to students have always been a bottleneck. I believe that AI agents are the true gateway to fixing that limitation and education should be embracing AI agents to increase bandwidth of 1:1 teacher student interaction.
I worry that everytime I talk to a teacher about how they're adapting to AI, it's almost as if they are trying to figure out how they can continue to use the same teaching techniques that they had seen their teachers practice decades ago.
Printed books are expensive and they should be. We already have paper equivalents that allow highlighting, rewriting, annotating, sharing notes - recyclable materials in all ways superior to paper that can be reused by multiple students - these are things we should be embracing instead of going back to one time use printed materials that are heavy to carry around, take up space in a room and will need to be disposed of soon.
If current technology is creating an issue for teachers - teachers need to pivot, not block current technology.
Society typically cares about work getting done and not much about how it got done - for some reason, teachers are so deep into the weeds of the "how", that they seem to forget that if the way to mend roads since 1926 have been to learn how to measure out, mix and lay asphalt patches by hand, in 2026 when there are robots that do that perfectly everytime, they should be teaching humans to complement those robots or do something else entirely.
> We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills
Is your intuition that the EU will continue down it's path of technical irrevelance? If so, what are the top 5 reasons this is happening?
1:1 teaching is the old tutor method, still the most efficient way to transfer knowledge today, and also the least scalable. LLMs, on the other hand, are a kind of implementation of the Library of Babel or Conrad Gessner's Bibliotheca Universalis (~1545), that is, the way to "tear books apart" (here more generally any text written by humans) in order to then allow extracting only the shred of information we are looking for each time. The idea of seeing them as auto-teachers is therefore very interesting!
I imagine more of a school (not just university) where the frontal lecture has disappeared, replaced by lessons like FLOSS movies projects: the teacher writes the plot, there are narrators, visual content as needed, updated and refined over time. This implies:
- Learners go at their own pace; the brightest will finish sooner and use the time to learn other things, instead of chafing at the bit during class; the less brilliant but still capable ones can succeed with more time instead of wasting time following lectures they don't understand because they lack previous elements they can't acquire in time, lesson by lesson.
- Unfortunately, also less plurality of information, but this is compensated by the fact that the lesson is not by the assigned teacher, but by third parties, a separate FLOSS project indeed, so it is the individual teacher available 1:1 / 1:few in the time freed from frontal lectures who provides plurality.
- Sociality among students remains in a different form: one studies for oneself, tests what has been learned among peers and teachers themselves in lessons that are "presentations" by individual learners to a "class" of learners and teachers, and interaction in this setting reveals gaps and consolidates, shares, and inspires knowledge because this is the only resource that grows with use and is lost otherwise.
This obviously implies substantial digitalization that brings efficiency, documentary culture, the learning organization, and the measurement of learning/results far superior to the measurement of in-person conformity that we know well even at work, where the manager wants conformity, not talent, praises conformity not substantial innovation, creating many imitators cf. https://fs.blog/experts-vs-imitators/
Of course, it is a school where the teacher does research and substantial work instead of repeating the same old stuff every year, and many don't like this. After all, most people don't like to innovate. Improving what exists, yes, but venturing into unknown lands is something most oppose, both the common people who fear change and the ruling class who fear losing their acquired status. In the past, ruling classes sent their many children to explore, and if it went wrong, there were others. Today there is practically no more substantial innovation. People want to deny it, but it has always happened in history, the more it is denied, the more it happens through the interested hands of a few against the interest of the many, and the result is a changing of the guard among those in charge and consequent wars to create a new common people. We should have understood and solved this long ago, but it seems not...
We continue to teach children (at least in the EU) to write by hand, to do calculations manually throughout their entire schooling, when in real life, aside from the occasional scrap note, all writing is done on computers and calculations are done by machine as well. And, of course, no one teaches these latter skills.
The result on a large scale is that we have an increasingly incompetent population on average, with teaching staff competing to see who can revert the most to the past and refusing to see that the more they do this, the worse the incompetent graduates they produce.
The computer, desktop, FLOSS, is the quintessential epistemological tool of the present, just as paper was in the past. The world changes, and those who fall behind are selected out by history; come to terms with that. Not only, those who lag behind ensure that few push forward an evolution for their own interest, which typically conflicts with that of the majority.