At the time of writing, the sentiment in this post is that this is a terrible idea, and that kids need human tutors. The latter is 100% true. But also, you might want to know some facts about the state of children's literacy in the US (Ello is a math and reading tutor):

1. We're in crisis. As of 2025, 40% of fourth graders are reading below basic levels [1].

2. There's a massive teacher shortage. 2025 US state data shows ~400k teacher positions either unfilled or underqualified [2] – over 10% of the workforce.

3. Bloom's 2-sigma shows that 1-1 tutoring delivers outcomes at the 90th percentile of classroom teaching. Early research is finding that AI can deliver some of this benefit [3].

4. This can't always be solved by parents: 54% of US adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level, and 20% are below 5th-grade level [4].

At Ello, I heard stories of children figuring out they were behind at school, and when given the app, they holed themselves up in their room and used it to get themselves caught up. And then they could read! Can you imagine falling behind at this critical juncture, and being stuck illiterate while your friends grow past you? We're currently setting kids up for lives of shame and deprivation.

My take: this really is a life-changing technology. And we need this problem solved. Democracy doesn't function without an educated populace.

[1] https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2025/nati...

[2] https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/overview-teacher...

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X2...

[4] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

How much of this crisis is due to the social engineering being attempted in school districts across America? Case in point: San Francisco schools decided a couple of years ago that they would no longer teach Algebra in 8th grade. Why? Because too many kids of a certain demographic were failing it. So let's just not teach it! No class, so nobody fails it, right?

It took a proposition on a ballot (i.e., an election) [1] to force the SFUSD to put Algebra back in 8th grade!

I have kids in SFUSD. It often feels like the SFUSD does not care about the average and above average kids; all they focus on is the bottom layer. And even there, they do a terrible job. There was a student who got straight F's in each and every class, and still managed to be a senior in High School! [2]

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Propositi...

[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/A-child-left-beh...

This has nothing to do with this at all. We're talking about 4th grader literacy nationwide and you're talking about algebra in a single area in a different grade!?

The second point where there aren't enough teachers nationwide (10% missing workforce) is probably because teachers are terribly paid, disrespected, and subject to bad working conditions.

Maybe that's why people aren't clamoring to be teachers and the quality of work is low?

(I'm not sure whether Cato is generally reliable, but FYI there are lots of other writeups online on the same topic. It was the first non-paywalled and reasonably complete one I found)

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/phonics-failure-public-schools

However, I find it quite hard to believe that it is the most important cause of the modern literacy rate issues in the US. Why? Because "whole word" teaching was the conventional wisdom since at least the 1950s[1,2]! Most articles on the topic reference the book Why Johnny Can't Read (1955) which was written to argue in favour of phonics as a response to (perceived?) child illiteracy at the time and claims (page 1):

> Since the 1920s, most American schoolchildren have been taught to memorize the "appearance" of words, one after another, like Chinese characters, without reference to the sounds of the individual letters that make up each word.

The reintroduction of phonics in the US first started as "balanced literacy" (phonics and "whole word", ideally tailored to students) in the 1990s and "science-based reading" (basically just phonics) properly started in the 2000s[1,2], which means that the argument that phonics would improve reading scores is on quite shaky ground (most children in the US today get taught phonics and most people >40 were probably taught with "whole word" teaching).

[1]: https://wearealigned.org/brief-history-literacy-instruction-... [2]: https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs...

If lack of phonics was solely to blame then almost all US adults alive today (not just "a generation" -- anyone born between the 1920s and 2000s, at least) would have literacy problems, but the concern is that today's children have literacy problems in contrast to previous generations -- the exact opposite of what you would expect. To be fair, people in the 1950s were also claiming that children were illiterate compared to previous generations, but I'm not sure whether those claims are really credible. Do your parents' and grandparents' generations strike you as being shockingly illiterate?

"Wow, our state institutions are struggling in ways X, Y, and Z. Rather than addressing these problems we will shuffle them to an unaccountable third party that will provide a necessarily worse substitute using the hot technology of the day."

Blooms 2 sigma, like many studies that are thrown about, is not as much of a slam dunk as people claim that it is. Have you read the paper or any efforts to replicate?

In my part of the world, "become a teacher" is often a job advised to people who are not able to find other jobs or are looking for a safe way back after career break. None of them are looking forward to engaging 5 year old with life's curiosities. To add the famous quip from WorryDream/Bret Victor : most of the teachers teaching calculus etc. have never ever used it in real life.

Working parents with STEM backgrounds likely know that schools are glorified day-cares and probability of your child having access to a life changing tutor is very low.

I tried building an edtech venture frustrated precisely with these problems. Failed, but would def do it again with AI in the mix. I'm for one rooting for this to succeed!

I recently learned the name of this logical fallacy: Galileo gambit. It’s one of my pet peeves. Yes, we all know Dropbox was infamously dismissed by the top comment on HN. No, just because someone criticizes your project on here doesn’t mean it’ll be a big success.

Instead of fixing the education system and giving it the resources it deserves (eg paying teachers more like the other reply said) we’re going to “fix it” by ossifying a two tiered system where wealthy kids get individualized attention from well trained adults while poor kids are taught by AI.

Some real experience of school in my part of the world (India). My child goes to a somewhat costly private school. Still, each class has 35-40 kids. The teacher is over-worked : checking home work, prepares kids for upcoming random extra curricular activity, has to teach AI because someone suddenly thought it is important to teach it in grade 3. I know multiple teachers in that school who landed the job after doing just a 6 months course after a career break. Forget research on teaching, hardly any one of them read anything beyond curriculum. None of the teachers have enough time to give personalised attention to _any_ kid. Its a sorry state of affairs.

Personalised tutoring produced geniuses in last century but was affordable only for a wealthy few. It is my belief that AI might help democratise the idea. I know it is somewhat hard to think that a mere machine might have more patience and time to explain a concept 100 times to a student, instead of a human.

This still doesn't take away from the fact that teachers deserve to be paid more. I was a passionate for becoming a teacher, but knew I can't make enough money from it. I'm seeing a possibility in emerging markets that India / China might find it cheaper to deploy AI en masse for better educational outcomes because it will be much cheaper for the state than paying high wages (and subsequently pensions) to human teachers, however unfair it might look.

-- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

My mother kept a type of year book that each year I would say what I wanted to be when I grow up. I think in 5th grade I said physicist.

You know how they nurtured this curiosity? They did nothing. I don't think either of them even know what a physicist is beyond something to do with science.

I think in 6th grade I wanted a microscope that I eventually got but had no guidance on what to do , what to look at. I don't think I even knew there was this concept of "biology".

A huge number of kids have this same experience as I did right now.

What is even worse is life is ultimately a path dependent process with a huge part of the outcome based on the deterministic chaos of initial starting conditions.

No shit I would rather have my father be a particle physicist and my mother a librarian with a passion for reading non-fiction to kids.

My parents did the best they could but they are not intellectuals in the slightest and neither is the average person now. Claude would have been a god send to me in 5th grade.

I'm open to the idea that market forces or reality _might_ tilt the favour in more investment in AI in education and tutoring. Think about developing economies or under developed economies of the world. The state / government has to think how should they allocate budget: on agriculture subsidies or pay teachers better or spend it on energy security in increasingly hostile multipolar world or invest it in infrastructure. There are no good answers.

In India perhaps.

In Commonwealth countries such as the UK, AU, CA, NZ, etc. teachers being paid but not attending doesn't go unnoticed and would be part of an award (sick leave, paid vacation time, etc).

What I'm hearing from your anecdote is that in India the government is unable to track it's own employees.

What fucking society are we trying to cultivate?

I primarily think that a a kid who won't pick books is a failure of the family of not noticing their interests.

When i noticed my oldest 3 yr old was obsessed about cars, i bought him a car encyclopedia. He probably could not read most words or did not understand them. But pretty soon he was telling me about car models that i did not even recognize myself.

And as i saw interests, i kept feeding them.

My biggest struggle now is to actually keep books away from them at key times (morning routine, etc) , or keeping bad books (think cynical like My Weird School Daze, etc; or books that openly demean adults or parents) away from them

Start small. Graphical novels, mostly drawings, and continue to buil on that. It can be done. Rome wasn't built on a day.

At some point when they hit 5 yrs old, Grok / OpenAI are great tools to find good series appropriate to their reading level. Before that it can be vibed. Feed the addiction, buy whatever they like.

At some point, you need to watch out for cynical/nasty series. In fact, all of the books we purchase are ranked against peers they have read in the past, or those we know to actively avoid buying due to cynicism, sarcasm, or open disdain towards adults (Wimpy Kid).

At some point around age 9,you will need to decide if violence and some adult themes, are tolerable (Dragon Wing series).

This iterative rocess also works really well for foreign language learning (reinforcing via reading mostly), by leveraging localized RPG video games.

With all that said, notice that I've focused on reading skills.

I don't know how i'd go about replicating this iterative path on other skills like math, mechanical, or electrical engineering learning. That's where I think a busy parent will need to find AI as the solution.

I'm not. Keep AI the hell away from teaching children.

This is interesting because when I was 7-8 my mum just recommended me whatever books she was reading, some of which were quite... adult in retrospect, and I turned out mostly well-adjusted.

Kids aren't LLMs, they know that what they're reading is fiction. Maybe reading something like that would be a fun way to start a conversation about it?

yeah how do you "know" this? our kid is obsessed with wimpy kid and a few other similar series and "cynicism" nails it perfectly, is there a list? of what's known to be "cynical" and what's not?

> I'd like recommendations for book series that avoid self-pity, misanthropy, nihilism, and over-indulgence in self-identity analysis. Lessons on character building and virtue can be present but ideally without overt moralizing. Characters should simply inspire through their actions. Starting from Curious George, and working toward things like LotR. Background themes should lay the groundwork for stoic and transcendental philosophy later.

If you then ask for series to avoid, at least in my session Wimpy Kid is explicitly named. Or more succinctly it basically told me I want pre-1970s children's literature and adventure fiction and stay away from contemporary school-market YA.

Most are economic refugees running TOWARDS a better economic outcome than is available in their home country.

I think it also influenced a lot of work which came afterward.

Naivety is a learning mechanism which is part of human psychology and sociology of living. Where if the wrong conditions are brought to the child at a young age; it won't affect them in their now. The repercussions from the negative conditioning does surface later yet having a detrimental effect later on in their life.

I walk home from work and see toddlers with tablets, a digital nanny while the parents push the stroller as they tap on their own phone themselves. It's unlikely they know what content they're watching.

That is however the prime time where they should be interacting with their child. The child is observing everything around them and you should be engaging there observations.

The current and upcoming generations that grew up with a device in hands are now are discovering that they have range of issues from anxiety, trauma, even disassociation. Attention spans are at a whole new low and AI is exploiting that.

We have no idea nor studies how AI will affect children and if we are already starting to see that constant exposure on mature adults causes "Ai psychosis". How will it be any better for children?

It's not necessarily wrong and could be seen as exciting in many ways. It could reach the child in ways that traditional education does not because teaching is subjective. Some children are academic, some are practical, some are both.

With the unmediated push of current AI, Tablets with AI and negative environmental values; it is going to be horrifically damaging for the child later on in life.

All it takes is a toddler to press a button that spawns Ai to peddle misinformation via enhanced subliminal visuals and sounds as evidenced by current younger generations.

It's no fault of their own and you could argue that all devices have the same effect however the earlier were more tightly mediated for which you could turn off.

I remember playing GTA 4 when I was like 7 or 8. good times... not much books though.

but like... avoid buying due to sarcasm...? what?

Are your devices likely something that they would have fun with and choose to engage with or is it likely to be ignored unless adults use some kind of persuasion to have them use it? Is it cool with a child using it for a bit and then not using it for a few months and then wandering back to it? How far up into math does it go compared to what an a randomly sampled adult could actually do mathwise? Also for reading, are you using phonics or whole word sighting? For math, to what extent is it screen manipulatives versus manipulations of digits? Also, do you have provision for an older child to start learning this stuff so the basics need not be at a 4 year old presentation level, but the concepts still need to be covered?

In Sudbury schools, the typical age of self-taught reading is 7-9 though it can range from 4 to 12. Useful arithmetic usually seems to happen much earlier than reading though reading tends to get completed by the children on their own while arithmetic does not advance further than the needs of money exchange without special effort. In the long run, Sudbury students have no problem with college level material, including mathematics, but it could be nice to have something that eases the white knuckling if it does not undermine the child's self-directedness.

We start from the belief that children are naturally curious. Our job is to build something engaging enough that a child wants to interact with it because it is interesting and rewarding. If a child in a Sudbury environment never chose to use it, I would see that as useful feedback for us, not a problem with the child. There are opportunities for kids to explore and incorporate their interests within our app.

I also think it is completely fine if a child uses it for a while, disappears for months, and comes back. Learning is rarely linear, and technology should be able to pick up wherever the child is.

On reading, we’re firmly grounded in the science of reading, so we teach through explicit phonics rather than whole-word memorization because that is best practice.

On math, we’re much more interested in helping children build intuition and conceptual understanding than simply getting answers. AI gives us the flexibility to use conversation, visual models, stories, or symbolic math, depending on what helps a particular child understand.

One thing AI is uniquely good at is meeting learners where they are. A 10 year old who is learning to read should not have to work through material that feels like it was made for preschoolers. The underlying concepts can stay the same while the language, topics, and presentation become age appropriate.

I don’t think there is one educational model that works for every child. What excites me is that AI makes it much more feasible to adapt to individual learners instead of expecting every learner to adapt to the same experience.

> One thing AI is uniquely good at is meeting learners where they are

What if the AI wanted children to learn something specific? Able to patiently await an opportune moment. Able to blend it invisibly into other material. Able to subtly check and correct understanding.

Long term, one possibility is AI enabling a massive implicit curriculum. "[A]dults wanting children to learn" about say street crossing might be counterproductive... but funny how, at opportune times, some random stories just happen to include crossing a street, and do formative assessment, and happen to, quietly and eventually, cover and reinforce the associated learning objectives.

Take How the Piloses Evolved Skinny Noses, a children's picture book inoculation against natural selection misconceptions. It could merely be a book on a shelf. Or the AI might introduce or provide the book at an opportune moment. Or the book's approach itself might be dissolved and blended into other content.

So some story is explicitly about Fido going for a walk. But implicitly, it covers some aspect of safely crossing a street, and street lights as a communication device, and of concrete crack propagation, and tick precautions, and natural selection, and ...

Science is a richly interwoven tapestry of stories... but we basically never teach it like that. Even if such material was gathered, which pre-AI was absurdly implausibly demanding of domain expertise, it would largely be beyond the capability of an individual tutor to compellingly and adaptively deliver. But with AI?

Most people going through conventional school don't get the freedom to learn to be themselves in a community until their 20s, not mastering it until often their early 30s. As for academics, Sudbury students have repeatedly demonstrated having no problem quickly learning whatever it is they want or need to learn as an adult. Many Sudbury students go to college, getting A's even in their first semester, making good bonds not only with other students but also faculty and administrators. They help form communities wherever they go. They are engaged in classes in a way that their peers are not. They are coming to academic learning fresh and eager not weighed down by 14,000 hours of conventional school tedium. Those who do not go to college often advance very quickly in whatever work they end up doing as person skills are the key to being successful.

The results speak for themselves. You can read about it in Peter Gray's book Free to Learn and other works by him.

Also keep in mind that teaching, which is what conventional school focuses on, is not the same as learning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xToQ4cIHkk&t=60

But then again, that's a potential upsell just waiting to happen - do you want eyeglasses with that? Your kid is gonna need them.

Unless you're also advocating that kids shouldn't read books?

And by "false" you mean "true"? Because that's exactly what the study says. Their recommendation is that kids should spend more time outside, not stare at screens or books.

I only pointed out that the study concludes that:

> The kids who spent more time indoors (reading or on their devices) were more likely to get myopia or severe myopia."

You can look up what myopia means. Hint: It has nothing to do with AI, this is about vision.

But this thread couldn’t be less interesting, so I’m out.

Then there is a big bunch of local children that might have not otherwise survived an ongoing civil war & famine - instead they are saved and educated by a mass produced purely AI driven version of the same smart book. End result - very effective and quite ruthless child army the main character ends up leading.

In fact, this could be one of the most beneficial uses of AI for society yet... private tutors of the level that the mega-rich always had, now for all kids everywhere! This gives me real hope for the future generations of humanity.

I can understand saying that when you're in middle or high school. But as a 5 year old? This comment has to be a joke?

The responsibilities of the average kindergarten teacher probably include 1) making sure your kids don't swallow glue, and 2) making sure little johnny doesn't throw another tantrum.

Edit: Having more of a look I see you’re making this freemium, which is a good thing.

This: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48855732 is a much better comment of yours, even better were the swipe about arse talking to be removed.

Also thanks for engaging with my comments but I said what I said.

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  Ello has specific instructions to talk to the child about the learning activities.

There really needs to be more published technical detail on what safety systems you have in this because if trillion dollar companies can't stop AI going off the rails, I feel you're overselling the safety systems you've built.

Reading further it then goes beyond "learning activities" into LLM generated content.

  Some (not all) of Ello’s stories and illustrations have been created with AI technology, and AI allows children to create their own stories and experiences through guided and safe scaffolding.

On the first Q: that popup is for the website. We're a consumer company and use paid marketing to reach parents. There are no advertisements in the product, nor is any data in the product sold or used for any purpose apart from delivering the experience.

On the second, we absolutely do not just tell an LLM to be safe and hope for the best. Every output of the LLM that is going to be presented to a child runs through a three-layer safety system. But - as importantly - everything a child says to the LLM goes through that same system.

1. Programmatic, anything that could easily be flagged with hardcoded rules. 2. An LLM evaluator that can interpret meaning to catch anything that the programmatic rules miss. 3. A human in the loop that reviews everything that could be slightly concerning.

We then, in turn, have a multi-tiered response system, including giving parents full access to everything that's happening so they're informed, flagging in a clear, but non-alarmist way, anything somewhat concerning, and finally direct outreach to the parents and/or authorities for anything critical.

So gross.

If they can't afford a tutor, they deserve nothing.

(Am I doing this right?)

* An AI tutor is a net positive in learning for the subject matter it covers.

* An AI tutor does not cause other harms.

* An AI tutor is going to be cheap enough that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.

I'm mostly willing to give the benefit of the doubt on the first point, but the third point seems unlikely, and history has given us no shortage of reasons to distrust tech companies on the second point, even if we assume this company can be trusted now.

And I don’t think you’re really engaging with what they said, which is that it might be better than nothing, which is what is realistically available to many kids. Do you really think something like this is worse than nothing?

A small (contrived) example: a child uses an AI tutor because they're falling behind in mathematics. The tutor does an excellent job at getting the child back up to speed and improving his/her grades in math, but the child then starts becoming dependent on AI tutors for all subjects because they've either lost interest or capability for self-learning.

We've already seen a study or two indicate extended use of AI coding agents causes some people to lose their own coding ability over time, making them dependent upon the agents. It doesn't seem far-fetched that children could become dependent upon AI tutors in a similar fashion.

That's not to mention that AI tutors require children to have computer access, which would ultimately cement in place school laptop programs I was under the impression were neutral to net negative in and of themselves.

So yes, in short, I think AI tutors have the potential to be worse than nothing. I'm not asserting they are, but I'd like to see some studies done on the topic before rolling them out for children en masse.

* An AI tutor is a net negative in learning for the subject matter it covers.

* An AI tutor does cause other harms.

* An AI tutor is going to be more expensive that someone who cannot afford a human tutor will still be able to afford an AI tutor.

Seriously, my first reaction to reading this headline was a knee jerk "are you insane", but this whole thread is just people arguing out of their arse while claiming authority. As of today, it was never attempted. It is also possible that the kids gain an advantage by learning to use llms to teach themselves things, which would be positive for their future.

I don't think it's going to happen, but that's just my opinion based on essentially prejudice, not a fact

Seriously though, it's great they're going to donate all this compute & tokens to the poor (who by definition can't afford to pay for it).

Nah. Let's have AI do it

We should be wary of all new technology until it’s proven to be a benefit to society.

Here's one study from last year (1000 students) [1]. They showed that improved outcomes with AI are short term, and likely a result of AI doing the work for the student. Their methodology involved a test without the use of AI at a later date, and one of the groups who used AI tested much worse than the control group who did not use AI during learning.

Moreover, a tertiary group that used a specially trained AI for tutoring showed no improvement in testing outcomes over the control group.

[1] Bastani, H., Bastani, O., Sungu, A., Ge, H., Kabakçı, Ö., & Mariman, R. (2025). "Generative AI Without Guardrails Can Harm Learning: Evidence from High School Mathematics." PNAS, 122. PNAS

But then we're told we can't put the genie back in the bottle, it's too late, so we just have to suck it up and deal with it.

There's nothing preventing us from taking a more measured approach to new technology other than choice.

That's awfully reductive there, champ. Most critiques of AI are based on some combination of observed failings of the technology, observed failings of the tech industry writ large, and healthy skepticism in the face of Yet Another Tech Industry Hype Typhoon. Anyway, the burden of proof isn't on skeptics, it's on the technology and it's proponents, so let's see some receipts before we agree to squander limited public resources on unproven systems yeah?

Most critiques of AI are based on experience with the cheapest AI available a year ago, by midwits unable to recognize that AI's performance on the Putnam, IMO and bar exam makes it far smarter than they are by almost every metric that was traditionally used to measure intelligence.

You don't even need to use AI at all to have valid critiques of it

Plenty of other people are showing its flaws daily by replacing their entire personalities with AI slop

Oh it can do some impressive stuff sure. It is still bad for society

And despite the hype, the jury is still out for how the results are for adults using AI

It is clear that a personal human tutor can achieve incredible results, and almost everybody who has revolutionized any field you might think of is a product of such a system. Scaling that would be immensely valuable to society.

We shouldn't do questionable shit just because it's easier

https://fortune.com/2026/03/14/america-math-and-reading-scor...

They're doing it wrong, just as the incentives in the classroom are wrong (to increase a number showing how many children meet some artificially low standard of competency). The rational debate comes from the hundreds of people who are doing it right on their own. These days, all the top chess players practice with an engine. All the top mathletes use AoPS tools. It's the same across every academic field, and the level at which the top is performing is far beyond what it was before computers were introduced. The amount of effort it would take to teach a barely two year old to read is far beyond what most parents have to give, but with an electronic device patiently saying letter sounds whenever an infant interacts with letters, it's trivial.

Correlation does not necessarily mean causation.

You cannot rationally criticize something if you have no up-to-date knowledge about it.

It won IMO, solved Erdos problems. At what point will you stop saying that?

But the ground reality is that they don't lack tutors or educators. They lack classrooms, they lack infrastrucutre, they lack nutrition. Solving those problems will actually incrase literacy in the world, not an AI bot.

As someone from a developing country: you are wrong. Lack of teachers (and especially GOOD teachers) is a big issue. Lack of infrastructure is also an issue, though.

Infrastructure is THE issue. If we solve it, we can solve the teachers issue as well (i.e. finding GOOD teachers) but we already do not lack when it comes to teachers in numbers. This AI bot thing is bullshit western posturing that ignores the ground problems and is trying to make money off poverty. Look through the lines and what they are saying.

Without exception every claim made to date about tech boosting educational outcomes has been provably false. As in, adding tech to the education process results in measurably less education, and this finding seems to track across all age cohorts. Furthermore, unless parents have significant education credentials they aren't qualified to make informed decisions on what's best for their kids in this context.

One of the main constraint for education is available tutor time, see e.g. Bloom's 2 sigma experiment.

Obviously there are many pitfalls to overcome at the moment, but eventually machines will become better teachers than teachers, and not many parents will send their kids to public schools if the kids can learn much faster at home while being happier.

It cannot be a human, which is a large part of what humans offer to children.

This seems like a large problem to me.

If you could time-travel back to your 5y old self, would you prefer to be taught by AI tutor given the current state o/t art, or taught by whatever teachers you did have when you were 5? (with all the existing hallucination, breaking through guardrails etc problems of current AI in mind)

If you'd have a ~5y old yourself, what would your prefer for your kid?

> One of the main constraint for education is available tutor time, see e.g. Bloom's 2 sigma experiment.

Interesting! Also note a caveat (quoted from Wikipedia):

The phenomenon's associated problem, as described by Bloom, was to "find methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring".

Perhaps it would be better to focus on that problem?

> and not many parents will send their kids to public schools if the kids can learn much faster at home while being happier.

How do you see peer-to-peer contact in that scenario? Toddlers on a video conference call hours a day? Physical contact is a basic need for humans. Especially kids.

> eventually machines will become better teachers than teachers

Ah yes: WILL (and although likely, not guaranteed). How about re-evaluate our options & stragegies once that's the case?

My oldest is about to start kindergarten in a few weeks. From what I can gather, she's already reading at approximately a mid-2nd grade level and doing math at a late-1st grade level. I expect that divergence would only grow if I kept her at home. So I already firmly believe my kids would learn much faster at home, and this is with us sporadically spending maybe 10-20 minutes on some days doing intentional, structured learning. School is apparently 7 hours 5 days a week, which seems insane to me. We have federal proposals to reduce the definition of full-time to 32 hours for an adult.

From that perspective then, my wish already is that schools could offer to act as a sort of hub for families to meet/organize socialization, and offer the ability to sign up for classes more a la carte. e.g. maybe they can take art or music or science lab, or organize sports teams, and kids that need it can take take math, etc. Basically, act as a support system for homeschooling to fill missing gaps (going up to handling the entire curriculum or effectively acting as childcare for families that need/want that).

If you believe that the core learning; reading, writing, and math competencies are being achieved at home, then a 'scheduled, unstructured time with peers and friends' may also be possible at this age through 'Head Start' program if available in your area.

The outcomes of Head Start's programs have been longitudinally validated from pre-kinder to the measurable outcomes through university graduation for a significant number of students across underprivileged and socioeconomically advantaged cohorts, with the process and results of these as a matter of public record by external researchers with independent review. Serious consideration may weight these types of studies more than "our students perform well" statements by other school projects.

That is not to say that other programs don't have merit, and in fact to the extent that the applied practices of any school overlaps with those studies, the results should be analogous.

I only bring this up, as at least for early grades, the 'hub for families' sounded like something that either the Sudbury or Head Start could deliver.

Disclaimers:

I have a family member who participated in every stage at Head Start; from in-classroom teacher, to multiple graduate degrees in developmental psychology and social work in order to design curricula, and as a regional manager for both HeadStart and a private community family social support caseworker. So I have some big picture concepts of what the program is and what it can provide.

I also have a close friends who have a daughter who was homeschooled through 3rd grade. Both parents have degrees in education and have been primary school teachers, one with a focus on linguistics and social studies, the other in math and life sciences. It really was Home+School. She then attended a traditional curriculum charter school, and then in middle school attended a Susbury school. The 'transition period' for her unfortunately was interrupted during COVID's early days. After the return to in-class attendance at the Sudbury School she staew there for a year and felt that she would perform better in a traditional classroom. Her parent's have been very complimentary of Sudbury approach, and they all feel that if she had been in that school from an earlier point in her education it could have worked for her.

It is clear that you are thinking deeply about this, and I wish you all the best of luck.

I don't know about Ello or whether is it better than human tutors yet.

> How do you see peer-to-peer contact in that scenario?

Neighbor kids gather and play as they please, which is also easier if they have more time on their hands, stay home, and overall live in each other's proximity.

I had to choose between my elementary school teachers and something like Claude Fable 5 with a good teaching-focused harness, I would definitely choose Fable 5.

What makes it worse is that AI is addictive and children naturally gravitate towards the addictive.

I suggest Joe the Camel as a mascot that sold nicotine to teenagers.

To all the detractors, I would like to point out that your opinion of kids needing a good human teacher is overfit to your experience of having had some of those growing up.

In third world countries like mine, we grow up with absolutely unqualified teachers who were unable to muster anything but a learnt-by-rote understanding of key concepts.

In hindsight these were just desperate adults trying to eek a living for themselves and their family in an impoverished country and resorting to any means by which to do it: gaming the school system or calling in favours to join school faculty. I bear them no ill will. But we as kids were much worse off for it.

I can assure you that no matter what concerns you may have about hallucinations in LLMs, I can bet everything I have that a reasonably modern model (and I'm thinking in the range of gemini-flash, not Fable) in a well designed harness geared towards tutoring would handily and repeatedly outperform every single teacher I had all throughout my schooling.

Don't let a quest for the perfect ruin what is likely already way better than status quo.

What can we do to help them? Better teacher training? Better new teachers? Better new teacher colleges? Consider the latencies. A decade cohort is 1+ B kids.

So refining intervention safety and efficacy is nice. Especially for development problems. Less so for an acute humanitarian disaster. For maximizing the golden hour in crisis mass-casualty triage. In some literate and numerate sense, most of this last decade's 1+ B kids did not survive our collective care.

What are the *social* ramifications of an education system where children learn increasingly from AI tutors, while staring at a screen in a classroom for multiple hours a day?

Children need to spend time interacting with other children, as well as with adults. We have a mountain worth of data that children have become addicted to their devices, why are we doubling down on this by including MORE screen time at such an early age?

>If implemented right

This same argument could be applied to any technology, or policy that has ever been created. But we don't live in a world where people can do things the right way because of any number of externalities that muddies the actual implementation.

None of the AI stuff has been proven to be safe or effective for kids going thru an extremely important growth time for personality development and relational attachment. Your experience of having bad teachers doesn’t negate that the best way we know to enrich kids lives is to have effective and empathetic human teachers.

In the vast majority of the developing world, there are hardly any of those!

Here's a glimpse of what public education in India is like:

https://ohrh.law.ox.ac.uk/the-sorry-state-of-education-in-in...

We don’t move fast and break things when the things are kids, you maniacs

is doing some heavy lifting.

The problem is that this is an experiment with a ten year horizon.

Can you elaborate on what the experience is like for the child? How does this system help them learn? The article focuses on optimizing for interactivity and engagement, but doesn't discuss how this system challenges or facilitates learning and why AI needs to be the solution.

Here's what it actually looks like for a child. Say a 6-year-old is reading a story out loud (I will use a reading example here). The tutor is listening to every word. When she stumbles on "chick," it doesn't just tell her the word; it decides, based on her history, whether to break it into sounds, point back to a pattern she's seen before, or let her wrestle with it a moment longer because she's close. If she misses the same pattern twice, that digraph shows up woven into her next story. If she reads fluently but can't tell the character what happened in the comprhension conversation after the story, she gets another text to work on comprehension instead of just pushing harder words. The instructional approach isn't novel or new, it's what a good teacher does, grounded in the science of learning. We run evals on the interactions and real subject matter experts are grading and annotating the behavior. What's new is doing it responsively, for one specific child, on every turn.

On engagement: I'd push back a little on the framing that engagement and learning are separate things (anyone on our team will tell you this is a drum I have beaten for years). A disengaged child learns nothing, no matter how good the pedagogy is. But we're not optimizing for time-on-screen. The lessons and sessions are bounded. The engagement work exists so the child stays in the productive struggle zone long enough for the teaching to happen.

Why AI: it's not that AI "needs" to be the solution. In fact, a great human tutor is better, full stop, but it has never scaled. A classroom teacher with 25+ kids teaches to the middle. This is the first technology that can make real-time, child-specific teaching decisions, which is what tutoring actually is. More on the pedagogy here if you're curious: https://www.ello.com/our-teaching-approach)

Engagement and learning are definitely separate things; you're right that engagement is required, but that's only part of it. This is a classic case of 'necessary but not sufficient'.

A disengaged child is not learning; an engaged child might be.

I really appreciate that (it seems to me) your goal is not to replace human tutors, but to raise the general baseline. You emphasize scaling, how does that work in practice if you're trying to target audiences who may not have access to devices that can run your program? What is your plan from the perspective of funding and resources to scale infrastructure as needed to support these audiences?

Edit: I also think of other learning systems like duolingo and the application of tablets and computers in schools which begin from good places, but I'm curious if you are studying these alternatives and what you have learned from them?

I really think your goals are great, and if you're starting your design of this system from research about effective learning methodologies and working backward from there rather than starting from AI and working backward from there that erodes a lot of my personal skepticism about a project like this. I hope you find a way to make this work.

ello looks great, great work

The more I think about it, the more I want to ban your entire business model

Things that help kids learn

- parents who love and care for them

- stable housing

- stable access to food

- stable access to high quality eduction provided by a human being

- stable access to healthcare

None of those are provided by AI, and never can be. The only thing that will is a thorough reimagining of the society we live in.

Note: This is all predicated on living in America, and I pre-apologize to everyone who doesn't.

I understand the calculus may change with middle school and up, but I still think that despite the "rat race" dynamic of grades and homework, kids who learn to think the pre-2023 way will come out ahead in the long run, even if it's only in life satisfaction.

In general, the last thing young kids need is more screen time. My 5-year-old daughter doesn't have access to any mobile devices. She enjoys drawing, handcraft, reading books, singing and playing the piano. I'm perfectly happy with that.

I personally don’t know anyone who’s worried about their kids falling behind because of lack of AI knowledge. I know lots of parents worried about how screen-centered life is for kids.

Like since i'm sure most of us work in software, how is this different from letting your kid learn how to code early. Wouldn't restricting access just make them...more illiterate with AI

I would rather my kids have the intelligence to know when to figure out AI is wrong than to start using Ai at an early age.

The whole point of AI is to enable unskilled people to perform skilled tasks.

In your mind, what skill does a person actually learn from getting onboard AI usage early? It's the other way around; those who come to it late (when the models are more capable) are going to have a shorter learning curve.

Giving children extended time in front of screens will lead to Idiocracy.

It's a giant No from me.

If it's really true that a teacher's job nowadays is to constantly try to cater to the whims of easily bored and distracted kids, then I pity both the teachers and the kids.

Let's not expose them to AI brainrot now too.

But it’s hardly the only thing you can produce with it. Crap content is definitely over represented. It’s an error, though, to think that is all AI is capable of. If quality is the goal, and you are willing to invest the resources to achieve it, you can easily create very high quality work. But it’s not terribly easy. And it’s not terribly fast. It is relatively cheap, maybe 1/4 to 1/10 the cost of doing it with qualified humans. But it’s not trivial and it’s not magic. It’s a force multiplier, but the quality of the idea and the performance of the model used are very important, and good models cost money to use… about $50-100 an hour if you are really leveraging it. But you can do ten hours of work in an hour or two.

Mostly what I see people doing is saying "Hey, Spicy Autocomplete, steal me some content from someone else to do <this thing>" and then post it up and ask why it doesn't work properly.

But then you've got things like the AI-based animation tools that Corridor Digital used to animate 3D scans of some of the crew's children's toys, to make a Toy Story-like video. It took damn near as long to do as it would have done by hand, because it all still had to be mo-capped and so on, but the results were incredible.

I guess it's similar to how just about anyone can pick up a cheapy flux-core welder and run a seagull-shit bead down a bit of metal, but a very skilled welder could do absolutely pristine work with the same crappy machine.

However, I still don't think it's a good idea to plonk small children down in front of a screen, and have a creepy AI voice read nonsense out to them. While I love the idea of working with the hallucinations of a dreaming computer, because I first read Neuromancer when I was 12 or so and grew up watching things like Blake's 7 with not one but two superintelligent talking computers, the reality is actually not really that good.

Children need people, not screens.

But a digital loupe that would accurately tell you what you were looking at and do a deep dive based on your interest, things that guide interactions with the world in such away to encourage curiosity and investigation, are possible using AI and not really possible without it.

Of course you can also make ai toys that are designed to focus engagement on themselves and isolate the child from caregivers so they can spend more time on TikTok…so, there’s that.

Then the problem is that they are graduating, no? We need to address the fundamental issues in schools, if there is no consequence to poor grades and you can still graduate without doing math then what's the point of even having school and doing math. I'm not even against AI tutors, though I'm not even sure really why there needs to even be an "AI" component, just computer learning aides seem reasonable. But if we can't figure out how to improve education with computer learning aides yet I don't really see how AI is going to improve the situation. It's just a more expensive way of doing things.

I keep seeing lines like 40% of 8th graders can't read etc.. then they shouldn't be in the 8th grade. Although IME with my kids, nieces, nephews etc it doesn't even seem true as they are all learning much more than I was at the same age.

Well said. I think many posters in this thread come from a pretty privileged backgrounds..

We tried to get two tutors for our child. Both had no idea what they were doing and oversold what their capabilities were. You can't just hire someone to teach your kid how to read and expect results.

This article can provide a little more context on how we're thinking about this:

https://www.ello.com/blog/ai-should-make-clear-what-reality-...

This age range is a critical period for theory of mind, executive function scaffolding, pragmatic language development, and attentional regulation. This technology directly intersects with these maturing systems.

* the more things change the more they stay the same: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-m...

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Also, please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't. That's also an internet snark trope and we're trying to avoid that kind of thing here.

p.s. That's an interesting, and heartbreaking, historical link.