Great piece!
I've long thought society overestimates the value of schooling (particularly secondary school).
One reason is negative spillovers (i.e, some of the benefits to individuals from education is probably from winning zero-sum games around jobs). Do you know if education RCTs have tried to take this into account (Eg - via two-step randomisation?)
Another reason I've been thinking about recently is the fact that most people forget most of the knowledge they learned in school, very soon after finishing school. I don't think there's a plausible mechanism by which this forgotten knowledge generates benefits for the individual or wider society.
I think it's likely that the optimal age to finish school isn't 17/18 as is the norm in many countries. The time we spend in school seems to have been very arbitrarily selected (eg - why not extend secondary school by 5 more years and have everyone continue a broad education if education is so beneficial?)
I also feel that the opportunity cost of more schooling isn't discussed near enough - people could do more on-the-job training more relevant to their actual jobs instead.
Do you think there's an opportunity for LLMs to enable a lot of translation of primary school books into local languages / help develop lesson plans? Is there a charity idea here?
There's definite possibility here - even potentially in marking and monitoring lessons. How much to "Automate" learning in general is. To put it crudely, many LMIC primary school education systems are based on rote learning. So one big question (and debate) in education circles is, should we then make that rote learning as effective as possible? Which is what orgs like Gates foundation funded bridge acadamies have tried to do.
https://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/
Or should we try and transform learning environments and teaching styles, so that classrooms are transfrormed into the kind of interactive and exploratory spaces we have in higher income countries?
I don't have a strong opinion on this, but lean towards the "improve the rote learning" in places like Uganda where i live, especially if the government isn't putting in a huge effort to transform education sustem
LLMs even right now could easily play a big role in improving rote learning, but I'm not sure they are at the stage yet to play much of a role in transforming classroom spaces - but that could come in the near future.
Yes, this also came top of the ideas when we did a discussion on potential use cases for AI in education for LMIC (https://ai-for-education.org/working-group-discussion-ai-use-cases/)
There’s a few people trying this - my concern though, and something we just got a grant to think about, is how we make sure the content is good qualiTy. So we will start the year thinking about benchmarks for AI in education.
lots of charity ideas here, and something we’re fortunate to get funding from BMGF and others to explore.