I had an interesting conversation with a friend from India. He was talking to his daughter back home in first grade. He actively encouraged her to look around in an exam, to copy off of others, to cheat in an examination. I overheard him and asked him why he wants to put so much pressure on a child. Like even if you don't care about the ethics of cheating in an exam, wouldn't it be better to have less pressure as a child and have a good childhood?
I clearly don't understand how difficult life is outside the US. Yes, it is important to know the material. However, it is also important to know your surroundings and what everyone else is doing. If you are in India and literally everyone else is cheating in exams, well you better start doing that as well just to keep up. If you are gen alpha and everyone else is using ChatGPT to polish essays, ...
It's not, but (presumably) you're hearing about your one mentioned data point from a biased subset of people from India in English. How many people who didn't study English in school and dropped out there would you even have a chance of having talked to?
And that's not to say the behavior doesn't exist in the US, just maybe in a different social strata or subculture than you're in. Specifically, the phrase "tiger mom" entered our lexicon due to a book written by a (ethnically) Chinese woman, but is not limited to it.
In the US, this is not how things are done. Grades are literally everything within the education system. Learning how the system works and playing how your final grading is weighted including but not limited in regard to tests, assignments, and homework is a gigantic portion of how a student's aptitude is determined.
A lot of the system is based off of memorization and paperwork anyways. Something an AI can do all day, every day.
With a lot of caveats. You are in competition with these peers for grades, college admissions, and job applications. In many cases, the benefits of actually accruing knowledge and the consequences of failure to do so is delayed decades into the future.
It is absolutely amazing just how long some people can "fake" it. Even in jobs that you would expect needing real expertise say being a medical doctor.
And corporation can be even simpler if you get in right types of roles, where no hard skills might be needed.
AI is "faking" it when you think about it. If a machine can "fake" skills and expertise, and we can measure its ability to fake it using the Turing Test, then why can't people fake it, too?
The US is one of, if not the most, socially mobile countries in the west. Countries like the Nordics have much more equality of outcome, but the chances someone leaves the economic quintile they are born into is lower.
Paging through the Brookings document, it tracks pretty closely with what I have seen before. I dont see anything that contradicts what I have said (mobility is higher in the US than elsewhere).
1) Do you have a comparison with European countries that makes you think the US is worse?
2) What do you think US mobility numbers should look like? Pure randomness is not desirable either.
How long have we been saying that rote memorization is not learning? ChatGPT makes it clearer than ever that we need to focus on teaching children to be able to analyze and solve problems, not memorize a bunch of facts.
What we need to start focusing on is teaching children how to use AI to evaluate their solutions. We also need an AI built for students that can mentor children and help them develop their own solution.
Shielding children from the technologies that's going to be part of their world doesn't seem wise. They'll push the technology in new and unexpected directions.
