Kooskia, Sept. 2024

As I became involved in the fight to fix our local school system, I was challenged by a friend to pony up and teach some classes to our local homeschoolers.

This resulted in me offering a Calculus and Programming class and this prompted me to research how I might do it.

I was aware of “Brilliant” which was an automated learning site which specialized in math type curriculums. As I pursued that line I eventually found that subscribing to teach 5 students each would amount to a cost of about $500/year which was ok for me and I then began to pursue that.

Then another friend told me about “Khan Academy” which was geard towared the same goals as Brilliant but was free! The system is supportive of both simple coaching and teacher classrooms.

My experience with Khan Academy has so far been great and I wanted to recommend this to both home-school parents and to public school teachers and administrators.

Khan Academy includes AI support for both teachers and students. AI enables taking the drudge-work out of things like planning, researching, and test grading.

AI is changing the world quickly but it is not all good. It all depends on what the AI was trained on.

It is, in all states I know of, illegal for any public school textbook to contain untrue information. These days, since the gaslighting of the pandemic, we are seeing lies propagated freely without consequence in social media, in internet articles and videos, and even (maybe especially) in the main stream media.

The narrative enforcement of the media, facts notwithstanding, and cancel culture, are so glaringly obvious as to make one wonder what AI is being trained on.

We have already seen Google’s AI exhibit obvious “woke” tendencies like the inability to show an image of George Washington as a “white” male and this hilarious example of Alexa refusing to give political advice in a conservative direction.

If this is the way systems like Khan Academy’s AI is trained, I wouldn’t want that being taught to my children.

The problem is, as these teaching systems mature, AI becomes more central to their design. Teachers are able to work less with the details and simply click to make assignments and grade tests. This will lower the guard of oversight over the curriculum and by simply retraining the AI a completely different and very intelligent system of indoctrination can be introduced without instructors even realizing what has just happened.

So in conclusion, I recommend parents and teachers look into these systems to help them instruct their students but at the same time, keep a very watchful eye on what the students are being taught.

What I did was made myself one of my own students and this way I take the course along with the students so I see everything they see and it keeps me involved in the details of the course.

Sanford Staab