Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

AI has upended large parts of the education system. What to do? Back to basics. Decide what is important to learn and teach that.

Teachers give an assignment. Students use one of these chattering bots to write the answer. Task done. No learning, but the task is done so move on. This is an indictment of the school, teacher, and the education system.

What to do?

There was a time in America when high school students took typing as a course. Some high schools taught four years of typing (I never took typing as a class, but somehow managed to learn approximately where to put my hands and bang out 80 or 90 words a minute). A critical skill to learn was how to position a piece of paper in the typewriter machine so that there was a one-inch margin at the top and bottom of the page and at the right and left of the text. Another critical skill was how to use correction paste or tape and correct mistakes. The teacher knew these critical skills; the students needed to know them. Hence, lots of instruction and practice until the students mastered the skills.

The margin and correction on paper in a typewriter are no longer critical skills. No one teaches them and no one learns them. Times change, technology changes, and education changes. The same is true for calculating square roots of numbers long hand and looking up sine, cosine, etc. in tables and interpolating. Those aren’t critical skills any longer.

Computer programming: students need to learn how to create a loop control structure in the syntax of a language. Practice, practice, and practice through programming assignments. Well, sorry folks, but that is no longer a critical skill. For the life of me, I don’t know how to loop in a bash shell, but I do know to ask a chattering bot how and get a working piece of code (feel the vibe?).

The typing teacher is gone. The programming teacher is … well, is it too early or too late to say that teacher is gone as well?

What are the teachers supposed to teach? And how? Back to basics (funny how things seem to always go back to basics). What are the requirements? (back to that question) What are the critical skills right now? Answer that right now. Create assignments to practice that right now.

And one more thing: some students really don’t need to be students in this or that school. They already have critical skills and should be out creating new businesses and industries. Let them go without requiring a school first.