Re: why do kids even not trust themselves?

[Brian <http://www.cs..edu/~b>]

Grades are evil.  Once you're giving grades, the grades become the purpose
of the activity, instead of learning.  I just finished watching a movie
(Radical, free on Amazon Prime) about a Mexican teacher (in Mexico, I
mean, not Jaime Escalante) who told his class that they, not he, would
decide what they learn about, and when kids asked how they were supposed
to get As, he just gave them all As for the year, right on the spot.  And
then, of course, they were free to learn.

 From the article, it doesn't seem as if any of those senate kids had the
courage to think about education without grades.  And once you have
grades, of course you have cheating -- technology or no technology.  Of
course it could be the NPR reporter who didn't have the courage to take a
critique of grades seriously when kids did propose one.  But if you take
grades for granted, then of course you have to have rules about using
technology.  People think this arises only because AI is such a scary
technology, but in schools they have rules about when kids are and aren't
allowed to use calculators.

The kids who made an analogy with social media have a point.  Kids should
be able to expect that when adults give them a technology, the purpose of
the technology is benign.  (There's nothing wrong with giving kids
technology that' s dangerous; kids can kill themselves with drills or
bandsaws, but those technologies are useful, and kids are perfectly
capable of protecting themselves while using a dangerous but benign
technology.)  But the entire purpose of social media is antisocial (to
coin a phrase).  It's like drugs, designed to be addictive, and also
designed to bring out the worst in people.  Now adults are starting to
invent rules against kids on social media, although I guess they forget
that there were always such rules, which the social media companies
(Facebook in particular) made and then didn't enforce.  I don't think such
rules are a good solution, not least because social media are harmful to
adults who use them as well.  Given the general sleaziness of the AI
purveyors, kids have reason to suspect that AI might also turn out to be
socially harmful.

There's some evidence that tobacco is even more deadly for kids than for
adults, because it interferes with the building of the neural connections
in the developing brain.  So I guess there can be, in principle, good
reasons for rules specifically restricting children.  But surely
abolishing tobacco altogether would be an even better solution.

Of course you're asking the wrong person, because I believe that it's time
to stop teaching arithmetic in elementary school, and none of my high
school math teacher friends agree with me about that.  (Nor do my
elementary school math teacher friends, but you might imagine their
opinions to be self-interested.)  If AI can write better than people (a
still-unsettled question) then it's time to stop teaching writing, instead
of restricting kids' access to AI.  You may recall that at LS, back when
computers in schools were still new and scary, there were English teachers
who wanted to ban the use of the computer in writing because it corrected
kids' spelling.  (Luckily, the state of the art in spelling checking
software back then was that the spell checker only flagged misspelled
words, rather than inserting proposed corrections.  So that was deemed
okay.)

If we didn't give grades, then a teacher telling kids that it's okay to
use AI on this assignment but not on that one would be uncontroversial,
and would be respected by kids, because in the absence of grades they have
no motivation to break the rules of a game, especially if the rules are
obviously sensible for some particular game -- such as, say, the game of
learning how to write a five-paragraph essay.

I should add that schools are really creative about inventing ways other
than grades to make kids ashamed and miserable, and those ways should be
abolished also.

 > On Jul 30, 2026, at 5:25 PM, Robert <http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert> wrote:
 > https://www.npr.org/2026/07/30/nx-s1-5853571/students-set-ai-policy
 > 
 > I just finished listening to this.  Am I wrong to think that, in this
 > simulation, kids are just working to censor themselves and submit to
 > hiearchical structures and the status quo?
 > 
 > Maybe I'm just nervous about where things are headed.