A friend of mine put his kid into a school called Alpha [1]. It has no teachers, only guides (?), who are well paid grads but not formally teachers. Kids go in in the morning, do two hours of computer study with an AI program, and the guide only steps in if the kid has a question or doubt the system cannot answer.
Then there's recess and afternoon is all taken up with "Life Skills" classes such as entrepreneurship and the likes.
Kids are tested weekly and progress through grades at will. For example, his kid would officially be in 3rd grade, but she's doing 3rd reading, 5th grade math, and 4th grade writing. She can easily test 3rd grade topics now.
I am ambiguous about this model. Love the "learn as much as you want" even if it means learning 2, 3 grades ahead, but the no-teacher rule and so much computer use seems a little strange. Also if the kid is not extremely self-motivated, they will be left by the side of the road by the school.
In terms of 3rd level accession and standardised testing I'd imagine they boast great statistics, and that the students are self-evident in communicating a degree of confidence and holistic education beyond their traditionally educated peers.
However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.
To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.
N.B. Public (read:Private) schools in the UK are about £30k a year. Boarding schools hit about 50k in the UK/Ireland. 'New Age' or International schools for the children of diplomats and HNW ex-pats like Nord Anglia or similar go from about €/£20k upwards. 40k a year isn't outrageous in context, even outside of America.
A good friend of mine works for them. It’s a weird combination of (1) probably the long-range future and (2) absolutely not going to use my kid as a test subject.
If you believe, as I do, that half of students only achieve half of their academic potential, then experiments like this are some of the most valuable work we could do in society.
But again, let me know how it goes in 25 years and my children can enroll my grandkids.
I’m very conceptually interested in AI assisted individual learning; I’ve managed to get into a lot of topics that I would have had a hard time approaching without an LLM helping. I really like having AI rephrase concepts usually visualizations and analogies that resonate with me personally. That said, I think there is a lot of sketchiness around Alpha Schools in particular: https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/special-repor...
Alpha shows the results they do because they charge exorbitant rates (up to $75,000 / year depending on region) to staff the school with multiple individualized tutors per student.
It is a for-profit product which is sold to parents and state-level customers more than it is a school.
1. I have 0 problem with the "for-profit" product if the kids are well-educated.
2. I would challenge the "multiple individualized tutors" claim, as a parent with a kid actually studying there says there is no tutoring, only answering questions on the content or the software being used.
Slightly creepy, seems harmless now but future without supervision you don't know what they're teaching or what is going on. I would agree it's a double egged sword.
AI could either help or ruin American education. But the Department of Education is being shutdown. Many parents are relatively absent. And functionally all tech companies, and especially startups, are rapacious in pursuit of education funding.
I think the most likely outcome is AI makes American education worse, not because if the technology, but because of the “leaders” building and implementimg it.
This isn't binary, teachers have limited bandwidth and supplementing real teaching with AI supported research can work.
Students need to understand what AI is and is not.
Something got lost as we transitioned from parents telling their kids to 'go play and do not come back until dinner is ready' to us handholding & driving our kids from one social/sport activity to the next.
While it causes fights with my kids, I blank refuse to do certain things for them (fix their internet connection, repair a toy or bike) I'll give them the tools and they know to ask when they get stuck.
The act of learning through failure is a dying art these days. It's 'teach to the test', stressed out teachers, parents having too much to do compounded by taking on second, third jobs in this economy.
Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.
As a parent I agree with you, but watching other kids get a leg up because their parents continue to jump in and save them. And your own get the double harsh reality of learning failure and then being punished for it through loss of placement and status. It's tragedy of the commons since everyone must pass no one can fail.
> Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.
The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
In PBL the teacher adopts a constructivist approach - supporting, guiding, and monitoring the learning process as opposed to delivering a defined curriculum via lectures or seminars.
Agentic AI is arguably a better fit for this as it can scale infinitely to monitor student progress, offer timely feedback on design choices, and adjust difficulty dynamically based on how the student interacts with the problem.
Your main contention is one I'd broadly agree with - that use of Agentic AI for tutoring abdicates intellectual agency, allowing the AI to perform the critical synthesis and analysis that the student should be doing themselves for learning to occur.
The solution, however, is clear: guardrail the AI to promote core pedagogical principles rather than replace learner cognition by mandating things like instructional friction and the strategic fading of AI support as students build competence.
As explored in the paper I link below, by balancing proactive scaffolding with necessary and beneficial cognitive challenges, AI can preserve the productive struggle essential to effective learning.
(A final thought: have a look at the current field of companies who specialise in turning training materials into engaging interactive experiences for the likes of Compliance and Security training. This is a corporate field now being automated and democratised for use by the average student in Academic pursuits in an on-demand fashion. Appropriate AI tutoring is basically the same concept.)
I'm all for saving money where you can, but these models really aren't great for learning because they love giving you answers and it's so easy to get an answer, but the process to get to the answer is how you actually learn. Unless you put guardrails in place to actually learn, I don't think this advice is good.
I’ve found LLMs to be very good at teaching. Better than I expected.
You have to tell it what you want out of the session. A kid could just type in the question and get the answer, but that’s not tutoring.
When I use them for learning I tell it my goal, summarize my current status, and then tell it to teach me incrementally with a quiz after each step. You can get fancy and have it reach back into history to throw in extra refresher questions.
It uses very few tokens compared to a coding session so you can use the highest model for this and the usage is negligible. Using the top model available to you is important to keep things accurate. I wouldn’t have trusted this back in the GPT 4 or Sonnet days, but with Opus, Astra, or Fable it’s great.
For longer sessions set up a directory and have it keep notes about your progress, problem points, and what was covered in the past.
Students have always had the curriculum and standard study material, it was always possible to study alone, but the teacher mostly provides an interactive gap-bridging layer, and the classroom setting provides some level of obligation, I could be wrong but I don't know why AI can't fulfill the interaction layer part.
Sunk-cost, social pressure and obligation are probably the most salient points for educational success in a classroom setting with a teacher of median-skill versus an AI trained on the same corpus.
The sad reality is that many of the most senior professors and lecturers in top universities are their for their research rather than teaching ability, and that the success of the elite institutions is somewhat self-selecting as regards their cachet and filtering done by their admissions process (i.e. Ivy League institutions do not offer athletic scholarships).
disagree- i used it for the last few years of coursework preparing for exams. If you give it context (i'm studying for an exam, do not give hints unless asked, your objective is to help my understanding) it is incredibly helpful. This isn't advice, it's a company going out of business.
It really depends on how you are using AI. If you simply use it to get the answers to homework you won't really learn. If you use it to figure out the topics you need to learn, and to identify/close gaps in your understanding then it is a very useful tool for learning.
I have recently realised that people actually don't know how to prompt.
They use AI "raw" and don't understand how the question can have a drastic impact on the result, let alone using skills or system prompts.
Learning new topics or skills is a very good example, I had the same experience as you with Claude when I learned a new language.
Which isn’t surprising at all if you turn off your adblocker and look at how these AI chat products are marketed to the general public. They’re presented as all-knowing oracles that can deliver exactly what you want with only the vaguest and briefest of prompts.
Maybe some argue it's ASI but for me AGI requires that the AI understand what you're trying to ask rather than require you to carefully engineer a prompt.
"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"
If a random person comes up and asks you a malformed question how do you answer? What's worse if what if the question is not actually malformed in some contexts and because you're a wizard that has massive amount of contextual information there are plenty of right answers for the 'wrong' question you just asked.
In schools classrooms tend to avoid unlimited exploration as it would take unlimited time. On your AI prompt the next thing you ask could be anything, anything at all. Just exactly how is the AI supposed to know if you're an idiot?
Depends heavily on the tutee. If it’s someone highly motivated looking for some guidance like you, I could see it working really well. If it’s a kid who would rather be scrolling through Instagram and needs an authority figure to keep them on track, it’s not going to work.
I find it very easy to engage in a Socratic dialog with the AI. If I ask it, it will actually quiz me and carry on a tutoring session. And it doesn't mind if I ask dumb questions.
yes, similar experience... you can ask the same question in 10 different ways until you understand it and AI doesn't care
I've walked away from colleagues trying to explain things similarly because if you're not getting it after a few attempts you're going to hit a wall of their ability to explain, their patience, time, etc
I don't know if I agree, if I ask a physics question it will show me the process to get to the answer, and it's really nice to have something to talk to with infinite patience to dig down into steps you don't understand. I learned a ton about implementing machine learning from using AI models. Obviously that takes a level of curiosity and effort on the learners part, but with a pretty minimal system prompt I think you'd get a pretty great tutoring system.
They rule for maths. I had an extremely good experience going from high school trig through multivariable calc with them over a year. Best math teacher I ever had.
I think the difference is between someone like you who wants to learn and a teenager who has to learn.
I used to be a tutor, and the kids who wanted to get ahead were people who more needed someone to give them hints as they learned. The ones who needed to get the grade were a lot more reticent and needed a lot more attention and prodding.
I don't think AI as it currently exists is a good choice for those folks.
My daughter worked on learning for various classes by building her own plugin and skills for tutoring that uses various techniques of teaching without revealing answers, giving advice on homework questions without disclosure, etc. She overlaid with the personality of her stern gymnastics coach. It was surprisingly effective and I was pretty impressed at 11 she had the sense to not go straight to the answers. I think the “oh the kids” hand wringing is always overblown with kids - it’s the adults that don’t adapt well.
The ChatGPT web app, though apparently not the desktop app, does have a study mode where it will not give you the answer but will help you reason through the problem like the world's most knowledgeable, most attentive teacher.
Learning from an LLM is nearly impossible because it has no opinions on how to structure the content.
It's great at giving you the illusion that you're learning though.
If you know an outline of the material and want to structure it your own way (ex, explain attention to me using Haskell notation) it's really great. But otherwise, human notes win.
A calculator is a tool that replaced the slide-rule or Abacus - no one contended the Abacus replaced teaching or teachers. Ditto an iPad which is effectively just a fancy calculator in this context.
Similarly Youtube didn't replace teachers - it afforded remote learning and correspondence courses a new medium for transmission, recording, and playback of teaching.
More to the point none of those were trained on a corpus containing the history of human pedagogy, were capable of inference, or of generating dynamic learning resources based on best-practice models with inherent self-correction and pedagogical reinforcement mechanisms.
This would be good advice except that students are no better at getting information from AI than they are from getting it from books, botes, or professors. If you know what to ask, AI will give a lot, but if you don't ...
There is a lot to be gained from 1-1 in person tutoring. Can't read the article so don't know their specific gripe. But often when learning a kid needs redirecting, reassurance, or other emotional support. Getting this from AI seems like giving up humanity and connections for the sake of silicon valley educational 'betterment' which has always been suspect.
It is shocking how quickly many people are to dismiss the benefits of human interaction and connection since they aren't quantifiable.
If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?
A friend of mine put his kid into a school called Alpha [1]. It has no teachers, only guides (?), who are well paid grads but not formally teachers. Kids go in in the morning, do two hours of computer study with an AI program, and the guide only steps in if the kid has a question or doubt the system cannot answer.
Then there's recess and afternoon is all taken up with "Life Skills" classes such as entrepreneurship and the likes.
Kids are tested weekly and progress through grades at will. For example, his kid would officially be in 3rd grade, but she's doing 3rd reading, 5th grade math, and 4th grade writing. She can easily test 3rd grade topics now.
I am ambiguous about this model. Love the "learn as much as you want" even if it means learning 2, 3 grades ahead, but the no-teacher rule and so much computer use seems a little strange. Also if the kid is not extremely self-motivated, they will be left by the side of the road by the school.
[1] - https://alpha.school/
Edit: It's 40k a year.
In terms of 3rd level accession and standardised testing I'd imagine they boast great statistics, and that the students are self-evident in communicating a degree of confidence and holistic education beyond their traditionally educated peers.
However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.
To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.
N.B. Public (read:Private) schools in the UK are about £30k a year. Boarding schools hit about 50k in the UK/Ireland. 'New Age' or International schools for the children of diplomats and HNW ex-pats like Nord Anglia or similar go from about €/£20k upwards. 40k a year isn't outrageous in context, even outside of America.
A good friend of mine works for them. It’s a weird combination of (1) probably the long-range future and (2) absolutely not going to use my kid as a test subject.
If you believe, as I do, that half of students only achieve half of their academic potential, then experiments like this are some of the most valuable work we could do in society.
But again, let me know how it goes in 25 years and my children can enroll my grandkids.
I’m very conceptually interested in AI assisted individual learning; I’ve managed to get into a lot of topics that I would have had a hard time approaching without an LLM helping. I really like having AI rephrase concepts usually visualizations and analogies that resonate with me personally. That said, I think there is a lot of sketchiness around Alpha Schools in particular: https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/special-repor...
Alpha shows the results they do because they charge exorbitant rates (up to $75,000 / year depending on region) to staff the school with multiple individualized tutors per student.
It is a for-profit product which is sold to parents and state-level customers more than it is a school.
1. I have 0 problem with the "for-profit" product if the kids are well-educated. 2. I would challenge the "multiple individualized tutors" claim, as a parent with a kid actually studying there says there is no tutoring, only answering questions on the content or the software being used.
My cousin uses Alpha. I fully endorse Alpha and its methods! Go Alpha!
Sounds like a good way to f**k up your kid
Slightly creepy, seems harmless now but future without supervision you don't know what they're teaching or what is going on. I would agree it's a double egged sword.
[dead]
AI could either help or ruin American education. But the Department of Education is being shutdown. Many parents are relatively absent. And functionally all tech companies, and especially startups, are rapacious in pursuit of education funding.
I think the most likely outcome is AI makes American education worse, not because if the technology, but because of the “leaders” building and implementimg it.
This isn't binary, teachers have limited bandwidth and supplementing real teaching with AI supported research can work.
Students need to understand what AI is and is not.
Something got lost as we transitioned from parents telling their kids to 'go play and do not come back until dinner is ready' to us handholding & driving our kids from one social/sport activity to the next.
While it causes fights with my kids, I blank refuse to do certain things for them (fix their internet connection, repair a toy or bike) I'll give them the tools and they know to ask when they get stuck.
The act of learning through failure is a dying art these days. It's 'teach to the test', stressed out teachers, parents having too much to do compounded by taking on second, third jobs in this economy.
Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.
As a parent I agree with you, but watching other kids get a leg up because their parents continue to jump in and save them. And your own get the double harsh reality of learning failure and then being punished for it through loss of placement and status. It's tragedy of the commons since everyone must pass no one can fail.
> Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.
The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
You're basically describing the established pedagogical field of Problem Based Learning, which is around as long as personal computing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem-based_learning
In PBL the teacher adopts a constructivist approach - supporting, guiding, and monitoring the learning process as opposed to delivering a defined curriculum via lectures or seminars.
Agentic AI is arguably a better fit for this as it can scale infinitely to monitor student progress, offer timely feedback on design choices, and adjust difficulty dynamically based on how the student interacts with the problem.
Your main contention is one I'd broadly agree with - that use of Agentic AI for tutoring abdicates intellectual agency, allowing the AI to perform the critical synthesis and analysis that the student should be doing themselves for learning to occur.
The solution, however, is clear: guardrail the AI to promote core pedagogical principles rather than replace learner cognition by mandating things like instructional friction and the strategic fading of AI support as students build competence.
As explored in the paper I link below, by balancing proactive scaffolding with necessary and beneficial cognitive challenges, AI can preserve the productive struggle essential to effective learning.
https://arxiv.org/html/2606.04543v1
(A final thought: have a look at the current field of companies who specialise in turning training materials into engaging interactive experiences for the likes of Compliance and Security training. This is a corporate field now being automated and democratised for use by the average student in Academic pursuits in an on-demand fashion. Appropriate AI tutoring is basically the same concept.)
> teachers have limited bandwidth
Hire more?
I'm all for saving money where you can, but these models really aren't great for learning because they love giving you answers and it's so easy to get an answer, but the process to get to the answer is how you actually learn. Unless you put guardrails in place to actually learn, I don't think this advice is good.
I’ve found LLMs to be very good at teaching. Better than I expected.
You have to tell it what you want out of the session. A kid could just type in the question and get the answer, but that’s not tutoring.
When I use them for learning I tell it my goal, summarize my current status, and then tell it to teach me incrementally with a quiz after each step. You can get fancy and have it reach back into history to throw in extra refresher questions.
It uses very few tokens compared to a coding session so you can use the highest model for this and the usage is negligible. Using the top model available to you is important to keep things accurate. I wouldn’t have trusted this back in the GPT 4 or Sonnet days, but with Opus, Astra, or Fable it’s great.
For longer sessions set up a directory and have it keep notes about your progress, problem points, and what was covered in the past.
Students have always had the curriculum and standard study material, it was always possible to study alone, but the teacher mostly provides an interactive gap-bridging layer, and the classroom setting provides some level of obligation, I could be wrong but I don't know why AI can't fulfill the interaction layer part.
Sunk-cost, social pressure and obligation are probably the most salient points for educational success in a classroom setting with a teacher of median-skill versus an AI trained on the same corpus.
The sad reality is that many of the most senior professors and lecturers in top universities are their for their research rather than teaching ability, and that the success of the elite institutions is somewhat self-selecting as regards their cachet and filtering done by their admissions process (i.e. Ivy League institutions do not offer athletic scholarships).
disagree- i used it for the last few years of coursework preparing for exams. If you give it context (i'm studying for an exam, do not give hints unless asked, your objective is to help my understanding) it is incredibly helpful. This isn't advice, it's a company going out of business.
It really depends on how you are using AI. If you simply use it to get the answers to homework you won't really learn. If you use it to figure out the topics you need to learn, and to identify/close gaps in your understanding then it is a very useful tool for learning.
I have recently realised that people actually don't know how to prompt. They use AI "raw" and don't understand how the question can have a drastic impact on the result, let alone using skills or system prompts.
Learning new topics or skills is a very good example, I had the same experience as you with Claude when I learned a new language.
Which isn’t surprising at all if you turn off your adblocker and look at how these AI chat products are marketed to the general public. They’re presented as all-knowing oracles that can deliver exactly what you want with only the vaguest and briefest of prompts.
Maybe some argue it's ASI but for me AGI requires that the AI understand what you're trying to ask rather than require you to carefully engineer a prompt.
"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"
If a random person comes up and asks you a malformed question how do you answer? What's worse if what if the question is not actually malformed in some contexts and because you're a wizard that has massive amount of contextual information there are plenty of right answers for the 'wrong' question you just asked.
In schools classrooms tend to avoid unlimited exploration as it would take unlimited time. On your AI prompt the next thing you ask could be anything, anything at all. Just exactly how is the AI supposed to know if you're an idiot?
Depends heavily on the tutee. If it’s someone highly motivated looking for some guidance like you, I could see it working really well. If it’s a kid who would rather be scrolling through Instagram and needs an authority figure to keep them on track, it’s not going to work.
I agree with you and not the OP.
I find it very easy to engage in a Socratic dialog with the AI. If I ask it, it will actually quiz me and carry on a tutoring session. And it doesn't mind if I ask dumb questions.
yes, similar experience... you can ask the same question in 10 different ways until you understand it and AI doesn't care
I've walked away from colleagues trying to explain things similarly because if you're not getting it after a few attempts you're going to hit a wall of their ability to explain, their patience, time, etc
As a teacher, this is obvious. But when you ask a student 'do you want to learn?' they don't actually understand the question.
I don't know if I agree, if I ask a physics question it will show me the process to get to the answer, and it's really nice to have something to talk to with infinite patience to dig down into steps you don't understand. I learned a ton about implementing machine learning from using AI models. Obviously that takes a level of curiosity and effort on the learners part, but with a pretty minimal system prompt I think you'd get a pretty great tutoring system.
They rule for maths. I had an extremely good experience going from high school trig through multivariable calc with them over a year. Best math teacher I ever had.
I think the difference is between someone like you who wants to learn and a teenager who has to learn.
I used to be a tutor, and the kids who wanted to get ahead were people who more needed someone to give them hints as they learned. The ones who needed to get the grade were a lot more reticent and needed a lot more attention and prodding.
I don't think AI as it currently exists is a good choice for those folks.
It comes down to the same issue that all AI comes down to really.
If there’s proper oversight (tutor teaches the student and reviews knowledge while the student uses the AI to study or test themselves) that’s fine.
If it’s just the AI then a student isn’t going to know what they don’t even know to ask.
This can also work with books or adequate material someone is basing their learning on.
My daughter worked on learning for various classes by building her own plugin and skills for tutoring that uses various techniques of teaching without revealing answers, giving advice on homework questions without disclosure, etc. She overlaid with the personality of her stern gymnastics coach. It was surprisingly effective and I was pretty impressed at 11 she had the sense to not go straight to the answers. I think the “oh the kids” hand wringing is always overblown with kids - it’s the adults that don’t adapt well.
The ChatGPT web app, though apparently not the desktop app, does have a study mode where it will not give you the answer but will help you reason through the problem like the world's most knowledgeable, most attentive teacher.
Learning from an LLM is nearly impossible because it has no opinions on how to structure the content.
It's great at giving you the illusion that you're learning though.
If you know an outline of the material and want to structure it your own way (ex, explain attention to me using Haskell notation) it's really great. But otherwise, human notes win.
That is a ridiculous take. It was trained on human notes. It very much has an opinion on how to structure specific content for teaching.
A calculator, Youtube and iPad tried to replace teachers. They all failed but this time it's different.
A calculator is a tool that replaced the slide-rule or Abacus - no one contended the Abacus replaced teaching or teachers. Ditto an iPad which is effectively just a fancy calculator in this context.
Similarly Youtube didn't replace teachers - it afforded remote learning and correspondence courses a new medium for transmission, recording, and playback of teaching.
More to the point none of those were trained on a corpus containing the history of human pedagogy, were capable of inference, or of generating dynamic learning resources based on best-practice models with inherent self-correction and pedagogical reinforcement mechanisms.
This time around, AI being able to do student homework means that AI is replacing students not teachers.
Sounds like they didn't really have good tutors at the company.
This would be good advice except that students are no better at getting information from AI than they are from getting it from books, botes, or professors. If you know what to ask, AI will give a lot, but if you don't ...
There is a lot to be gained from 1-1 in person tutoring. Can't read the article so don't know their specific gripe. But often when learning a kid needs redirecting, reassurance, or other emotional support. Getting this from AI seems like giving up humanity and connections for the sake of silicon valley educational 'betterment' which has always been suspect.
It is shocking how quickly many people are to dismiss the benefits of human interaction and connection since they aren't quantifiable.
If you have a regular tutor and replace it with an AI, how many times do you think you'd accidentally meet your AI in town getting coffee and have a nice chat?
Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/W15Hg