Doesn't technology erase gatekeeping behavior while removing learning barriers?

[u/Automatic_Office_925]

I was wondering if the past era of gatekeeping and hoarding information is over in educational institutions? I am referring to rural environments or small cities with a less diverse range of books or school choices...

Mechanics of gatekeeping before 2010:

* Incompetent teacher: say bye, bye math, the probability of learning it drops considerably.

* No cash for private sessions, well too bad, you are just left behind your peers that can pay for that extra information.

* The teacher doesn't like this class so he hoards info or is just plain cryptic confusing everyone.

* An authoritarian teacher, might as well not ask anything or it's going to be a humiliation ritual.

* Oh, you're a textbook cowboy now. Gee, but there are no answers at the end for most of the math problems.

It seems technology should really remove barriers making anything much easier to learn for the upcoming generations: languages, blue collar skills, science. The present tools free at your disposal are insane, I would not have dreamt possible as a kid starting school in the 90s.

[u/Firm_Baseball_37]

OP seems really to hate teachers.

The reality is that most of them are competent people who went into a low-paid, low status profession because they really wanted to help kids. Intentional gatekeeping is pretty rare.

[u/Affectionate_Ad_8483 → u/Firm_Baseball_37]

Exactly. OP just sounds disgruntled. There will always be gate keeping—-OP forgets where the information they are gathering is coming from.

[u/Firm_Baseball_37 → u/Affectionate_Ad_8483]

I'm very reminded of the "Why didn't they teach us this in school?"--"They did. You were sleeping" meme.

[u/EnvironmentalYam2058 → u/Firm_Baseball_37]

I told someone they taught you all the skills needed to do it you just have to be smart enough to put them together. They were still confused. I called them dumb because they were being dumb. And didn’t know I was insulting them.

[u/Firm_Baseball_37 → u/EnvironmentalYam2058]

That's always true. But often, it's also true that they told you specifically how to put it together in this situation.

[u/Automatic_Office_925 → u/Firm_Baseball_37]

It's more of a caricature to make a point.

I don't hate teachers, I actually obtained teaching credentials while I did my science diploma, but never worked in education. Did some private tutoring though. Half of my family worked in education as high school teachers so I know very well how the system was in the past.

[u/Firm_Baseball_37 → u/Automatic_Office_925]

Any point you thought you were making was obscured by the malicious caricatures of educators.

[u/Automatic_Office_925 → u/Firm_Baseball_37]

Inequality of access to information was a huge problem pre-Ai, pre-unlimited info on the internet. Especially combined with geographical isolation.

It was not all doom and gloom of course, but being at the mercy of the information provided by a specific teacher was a reality of that era. You could not be on a farm and have access to a better physics teacher explaining thermodynamics problem solving.

[u/maroonalberich27 → u/Automatic_Office_925]

I don't know when you graduated HS, but for me it was the 90s. No AI, the internet was barely a thing. After that, I got advanced degrees in science and law before becoming a HS math teacher myself in my old age. So what has changed?

In my experience, expectations. Regular classes were expected to work through the Quadratic Formula's derivation to take one example. Students were expected to struggle with it, but through that struggle, the students were to learn how to think. Now, they look up blankly and wait for the teacher to just show them every step. The more industrious students may look it up online. But actually do the heavy lifting themselves? GTFOH.

There is your gatekeeping. Students need to have some modicum of desire to learn to think. Remove access to the tools that make it seem like they can think, and they flounder. All this is my own experience, of course, but that experience has shown me time and again that those things that were supposed to remove barriers have only distances students from what they should be learning--how to think critically. These aren't tools or resources to 95%+ of students, they are crutches, slowly removing their ability to walk on their own.

[u/Firm_Baseball_37 → u/Automatic_Office_925]

Go read 1984 and then read A Brave New World. Our situation is much closer to the second.

Access to the internet has done very little to empower students to work around poor education from their teachers and far more to empower kids to confidently shout at their science teachers that the world is flat.

[u/Automatic_Office_925 → u/Firm_Baseball_37]

I don't have a current picture of the state of education and how Ai is implemented in the system. That's why I started the technology question making it readable providing some caricatures of the past.

I find technology and Ai use in education fascinating. Was talking to a colleague doing a phd, and the amount of info she was able to synthesize and gather was insane, minimizing friction and letting her focus on her own ideas.

[u/Firm_Baseball_37 → u/Automatic_Office_925]

AI is mostly implemented in the same way that students used to ask friends to do their work for them, but much faster.

[u/Automatic_Office_925 → u/Firm_Baseball_37]

In my view, the difference between a good high school and a mediocre one in the 2000s, could ruin your entire future. While now you can mitigate some of that risk by using technology.

I remember sayings: I am not a chemistry person, I am not a math person, like fate or genetics were at hand while it was mostly institutional failure.

[u/Firm_Baseball_37 → u/Automatic_Office_925]

Well, that's your view. But I taught in a "bad" public high school in that time frame, and the kids who showed up, behaved, and did the work went on to top-level colleges if they were interested in doing so. So I've got much better information than you do, and I would say that your view is mistaken.

[u/ahazred8vt → u/Automatic_Office_925]

Remember how instructors would hand out novels to read, and then students would go out and buy Cliff's Notes so they wouldn't have to read the novel? Those kids already had the access to information, but they wanted to avoid the work of reading it.
Nowadays they're using AI to avoid doing the work.

[u/Classic_vortex_3515 → u/Automatic_Office_925]

Um speaking as someone who grew up before the internet, no, this just isn’t true. Among other things, we had these great things called public libraries where you could get information. And no teachers were hoarding info. This is just nonsense. OP, do you work for one of the big AI companies, by chance?

[u/Automatic_Office_925 → u/Classic_vortex_3515]

Even today there are a ton of places in different countries that lack public libraries, not to mention 30 years ago. Tech is a huge equalizer in places were educational resources are scarce. It provides learning opportunity.

You don't have to treat every student like some suspect that uses Ai just to cheat on their tests.

And yeah, I work for the Zuck.

[u/Classic_vortex_3515 → u/Automatic_Office_925]

OK, I did not grow up in a rural area, but I did grow up more than 30 years ago. My teachers did not hoard Information. I learned a lot and was better informed than most of the kids who hit my freshman college classes these days. I also read a newspaper every day. Do you think that the Internet as it is currently configured makes it easier or harder to get real news and know which is real and which is not? Or was that a little bit easier back when everybody had a cheap daily newspaper that covered national and local news wherever they lived?

[u/Automatic_Office_925 → u/Classic_vortex_3515]

Yeah, my initial post was quite exaggerated. Thanks for your insight!

I think harder to get quality news because of so much noise and algorithms. You have the illusion of choice, but can get easily drowned or manipulated by this volume of information. Back then you had the peace of mind to process the news.

[u/Firm_Baseball_37 → u/Automatic_Office_925]

I suspect we've found the problem.

[u/GrumpyOldSeniorScout → u/Automatic_Office_925]

Were you going to suggest something to ensure that the vast, vast majority of teachers were good instead of accepting that, in your view, rural teachers are bad and need to be worked around? 

No analysis of why that might be or what would fix it, or an opinion on the analyses others have written about teacher quality in different countries?

[u/JasmineHawke]

Doesn't matter what's online if people don't engage with it. The biggest task of teachers is to force children to learn against their will, or find ways to convince children who think they don't want to learn to decide that they want to learn.

That's the barrier.

[u/PrincessWails → u/JasmineHawke]

This. The apathy is exhausting.

[u/ladiesngentlemenplz → u/PrincessWails]

And then, after a career spent trying to get apathetic students to learn, someone accuses you of "hoarding all the knowledge."

[u/Grassfed_Burp]

Access to information does not equal improved education. During the pandemic, schools went virtual and students failed in droves.

While (yes) your right, this misses an important caveat. Kids gotta care and parents gotta monitor.

[u/Thorninthefoot]

I'm not clear what kind of information hoarding you mean? 

[u/FilthyCabal663]

Grew up in a town of 2,000 people and the difference between what my nephew has access to now versus what I had in 2002 is staggering. The gatekeeping's still there in the sense that a bad teacher can kill your motivation, but the info hoarding part is mostly dead. You can pull up full lectures from actual professors on any topic, get step by step solutions to textbook problems, and find communities that explain things ten different ways until one clicks. What tech hasn't fixed is the kid who doesn't know what they don't know, if you have no clue that calculus exists or that programming is even a thing, the algorithm isn't gonna magically serve it up.

[u/PrincessWails → u/FilthyCabal663]

At what point to do we start holding kids accountable for motivating themselves?

[u/Hebbianlearning]

You're right. Education inequality is a huge problem. Take a look at the lead story in last week's New York times magazine, about a (black, educated, middle class) mother's battle to get her daughter a decent education from the Brooklyn public school system. Yet, as others have pointed out, information has always been available to the motivated via libraries, the real challenge is making kids (and adults) care about learning. For every rural kid reaping the benefit of Khan Academy AP Calc, there are literally 100 others whose use of the internet is having chatgpt write their book report on Brave New World.

[u/zoppaTheDim]

Nonsense

You know what you’re calling gatekeeping?

Somone pointing out you’ve been up a blind alley of your own making. That all your private studying has been you sitting in a room smelling farts that someone already smelled five hundred years ago and proved were onions.

[u/tyrekecorrea]

If technology is used well, it can be used for some of the best gatekeeping. how many of you faced the inescapable reality of the inescapable detection power of Turnitin? To be distrusted so as for that to be necessary is a nightmare.

[u/DrummerBusiness3434]

The gate keeping continues, but not for education or intellectual reasons. Its all about snob appeal and access to name-brand colleges for career advancement.

[u/empressith]

Until all all academic journals and classes are accessible for free by the public, your utopia won't exist. 

[u/Repulsive_Cut_1872]

Well, I mean, everyone could just learn everything on the Internet these days but instead we have tons of dumb, confused people entertaining themselves to death

I mean it’s not rocket science here - many humans do not go for the best results in education available right in their own web browser 24 hours a day - why would they be any different at school?