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.

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.

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.

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, Youtube and iPad tried to replace teachers. They all failed but this time it's different.

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 ...

Sounds like they didn't really have good tutors at the company.

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

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’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.

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.

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.

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.