Education's Bitter Pill - III

In an age of artificial intelligence it matters more than ever that we get education right. But education arises from a cultural-social-political-economic system in which it is so deeply rooted that it proves almost impossible to reform it before that system reforms. In the UK alone over 9 million children are educated by over 400,000 teachers, each of them with different backgrounds, skills, interests, strengths and weaknesses. So it is not surprising that education's first knee-jerk response to AI has been to entrench, double-down and pretend that if we ignore it, it will go away. It will not go away.

Singapore has just announced that from September 2025 every school student will receive 5 academic hours of training in AI. The UK still seems intent on trying to prohibit it form playing any part in education.

But Rich Sutton's analysis holds good: 'training in AI' needs to be accompanied by an equivalent revolution in what we understand education to be. We need to stop trying to fill young heads with predetermined knowledge and skills as if we know what they need to know because we don't know what they need to know and what we think they need to know is almost certainly mistaken.

Instead we need to implement educational policies that teach children how to search and how to learn as guided by nothing more sophisticated than their own interests. The only intervention required is that the education system ensures their exposure to increasingly diverse areas of interest as they grow more able to cope with them so that their interests have a chance to expand into areas that they might otherwise not discover. "You should learn this because we think you need to know it" needs to become "you could learn this if you are interested". Central to this new policy is the realisation that the only thing anyone is ever really good at is something they passionately want to do.

We also need to take much more seriously that fact that human brains, like LLMs, operate according to principles that we neither understand nor control. Yes, we have some idea about how both systems work, but only at a very general level. "Thinking" - which is roughly what we call the processes that go on in the non-conscious brain - is performed by the brain in ways that are not intelligible at a conscious level. It is almost certainly not 'logical' in the way conscious thought reasons, but employs processes that search through spaces of possibility looking for plausible solutions (although they wouldn't look like solutions to consciousness because they are part of a process we don't understand and probably can't understand).

The same, mutatis mutandis, is true of LLMs: they use their trained neural nets - their models - to generate possible continuations (completions) to sentences, and then choose (variously) either the most probable (if they are being conservative, because their temperature is set low) or less probable continuation. Temperature here corresponds roughly to human adrenalin: how adventurous, brave, divergent do we want to be given our current circumstances? What eventually emerges as the LLMs response is akin to the thought that non-conscious brains throw up into wherever it is experienced as consciousness.

We remark here parenthetically and proleptically that our controversial answer to the question how a distributed brain gives rise to a conscious experience that exhibits unity can be had from the Holographic Principle we shall cover in a later post: the brain constitutes the boundary that encodes the entirely of the bulk; by being that body-with-a-brain we have access to the bulk; consciousness of the irruptions of the distributed brain arises in being the bulk defined by that brain as its boundary.

From outside-looking-in you can only 'see' the workings of my brain as neurophysiological processes, but not how I experience them from inside-looking-out. Only I have access to the consciousness constituted out of my brain because only I am my brain. This is what my Twitter/X sub-handle "Being Bit Makes It" means: then when we are an information-system, a 'bit' (obviously billions of bits in a network) becomes an 'it' (in John Wheeler's evocative terminology) because only by being those bits can their it-ness be experienced as their bulk. The 'bits' are the boundary; the 'it' is the bulk; it and bit are duals in their holographic relationship.

The boundary can be influenced both by its bulk - because they are in an inseparably bound dual relationship - but it can also be influenced by external physical-chemical-biological factors such as damage, drugs and so forth, as well as integrative events which occasion reconfigurations of the boundary by having an effect upon the bulk: something frightens us; something inspires us; something interests us; and so forth. All this affects the boundary by reconfiguring the bulk just as the trajectory of the bulk can itself configure the boundary and makes itself influential in the external world. Our conceptual problems all arise from trying to conceive of these things separately, as happens with all forms of dualism and talk of souls and ensoulment.

Attempts to educate by forcing brains to absorb information they resist are futile, damaging and dangerous. They involve taking an immeasurably complex object and attempting to try to force it into a configuration to which it is intrinsically opposed and unsuited. Brains can only be at their best when they are allowed to develop in their own unique ways; forcing them to develop according to externally-dictated criteria to learn predetermined things that are inimical damages them, gives rise to potentially dangerous distortions, and is bound ultimately to be futile.

It follows that Education's Bitter Pill involves swallowing the unpalatable truth that what we have been doing since the dawn of time has for the most part been a futile failure because only a very small proportion of the brains we have subjected to this torture have been compatible with it, susceptible to it and, to put it in more vernacular terms, interested in learning what we have thought it necessary to teach. Education's Bitter Pill is that we have been force-feeding one of the most sophisticated and complex objects in the known universe with a régime of information that has acted like a poison, forcing the brain to become something that it can only become by allowing itself to be damaged, sometimes destroyed.

Conventional educational wisdom reacts to this by saying that one of the most important roles of education is to beat these recalcitrant brains into conformity with civilised standards of thought and behaviour, systematically and ruthlessly obiterating all resistance, individuality, innovation and divergence. Consider this monstrous expression of such views from Hegel 200 years ago:

[T]he assertion that the teacher should carefully adjust himself to the individuality of each of his pupils, studying and developing it, must be treated as idle chatter. He has simply no time to do this. The peculiarities of children are tolerated within the family circle; but at school there begins a life subject to general regulations, to a rule which applies to all; it is the place where mind must be brought to lay aside its idiosyncrasies, to know and to desire the universal, to accept the existing general culture. This reshaping of the soul, this alone is what education means. The more educated a man is, the less is there apparent in his behaviour anything peculiar only to him, anything therefore that is merely contingent.[i]

A more deplorable, misguided and damaging piece of educational advice would be hard to come by.

Yet almost all education has until relatively recently, and then only in the most enlightened circumstances, been based on at least some of these deplorable principles. And the belief that it still falls to governments to dictate what children learn, how quickly they should learn it, at what age, and what standards they should reach by those ages - cf. Key Stage Tests of the UK education system and the absurd and counter-productive 'reforms' introduced over decades, usually by Conservative governments - rather than allowing each child to develop in their own way, in which case we would evolve a culture in which everyone had been encouraged and enabled to develop according to their own interests, abilities and ambitions. It is, of course, exactly this kind of personalised learning that AI could facilitate as never before, meeting Hegel's objection that teachers have 'simply no time' to develop each child individually. But for some reason we seem peculiarly frightened of this possibility, almost as if we fear that when we allow every child 'their head' (a peculiarly appropriate metaphor), there is no telling what kind of world will ensue. Which is, of course, exactly the point: if we allow people to do what they are best able and most interested to do, there is no telling what wonders may emerge.

[i]                 Hegel, Georg Frederick, Subjective Spirit 395n quoted at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/hegel-on-education.htm