had dinner last night with a couple of kids from Texas and their assessment is that the education system is completely fucked. it's all teachers using ChatGPT to make lessons that kids complete using ChatGPT and then teachers grade the work using ChatGPT. you couldn't undermine a society more effectively if you set out to do it on purpose.

@peter The reason this is happening is ChatGPT is a perfect fit to what the education systems has demanded all along, which is busywork for the sake of busywork, lengthy writings that hold no meaning, time-consuming assignments that serve no purpose.

LLMs are *great* for this! It's not that they've fundamentally messed up the system that was, it's that their presence is shining a spotlight on how shitty it's always been.

@ariarhythmic @peter Actually good point. Schools have to be made more fun too, and teach why learning things is important.
@Azarilh @ariarhythmic @peter I ran into a surprising manifestation of this when I was in high school in the 2010s, which I assume happened due to some shift in guidelines. Suddenly everything was about critical thinking! Critical thinking is a good skill yes. But nobody even bothered to explain what it was. How it works. How you go about training it. They just expected everyone to have it from the off. And while I may or may not have it, can you explain to me how the fuck you define it? I was a very confused autist.
@x0 @Azarilh @peter In the context of a school trying and failing to get with the times, "critical thinking" is a buzzword, just as meaningless as most of the labor they force you to perform.