Transcription
Today, I want to talk about my experience growing up in the Chinese education system, the US education system, their respective trade-offs, and how I think AI is opening up an exciting new frontier that allows us to synthesize the best of both worlds.
I was motivated to make this video after reading this article on the Wall Street Journal about an innovative new school called Alpha School, that is using AI in this specific way.
And so, as I've gotten to know the leaders and the founders at Alpha quite a bit, the stats that they're sharing with me are just incredible. They're just blowing it out of the water in terms of standardized testing. They produce more students who ace the Texas Star exam, the standardized test exam, out of 250 students than entire school districts of 100,000 students. The craziest part about all of this is that their kids only spent about two hours a day doing coursework with their AI system.
And so I wanted to share this story because, as you guys know, I'm doing an interview series on the philosophy of AI. There's a lot of doomerism about humans being made obsolete with AI systems, but I think this is a very real and positive case where education is also going to be made a lot better. And so, you know, the way we beat AI, so to speak, is by being trained by AI.
So maybe before I tell you guys about what I think is so special about Alpha, let me tell you a bit more about my own experience in the US and the China system respectively, because that will bring out what is really special about our moment today and what AI enables.
I was born in Beijing and I went to local school there all the way until I was 15, so that's grade eight. It was brutal; it was the modern Spartan agoge, but for the mind. We'd get up at 8 a.m., this is from grade 1, go to school until 4, come back home, eat dinner, and then we would be sent to math camps, various math camps. My parents were nice; they only sent me to like three or four math camps a week. Most of the other students had their entire weeknights and their entire weekends just completely booked out with math camps.
On one hand, it was enormously positive, productive, and awesome to have had that training early on, because it establishes a really solid core of fundamentals that becomes incredibly important if you want to do not just math in the future, but physics, even philosophy. It sets up a really rigid and strong foundation.
Of course, there are extreme downsides to this as well, because I think, you know, to use a metaphor, every kid kind of comes into the world as a spiky ball with a bunch of desires pointed in different directions. You almost never have a kid who comes out of a womb liking playing the piano or even doing a lot of sports, or reading Homer, doing math. And so there's a lot of social engineering you need to do to direct all of those spiky desires into the direction of study. The way that the Chinese system does it is two things: one is that they remove all of your spikes; okay, they give you this kind of iron discipline, not just to resist your own desires, but almost to forget about what your original desires are.
So I remember in school in China what we would do is we would stand in a grid during recess, and that's it, okay, for 20, 30 minutes, just being able to just stand there unmoving in a grid, as part of a collective, kind of breeds a kind of detachment from the individual. That's just one of many examples, but it's not just enough to get rid of the kid's desires, right, the spiky ball of desires; you also need to add a positive force. The way that the Chinese system does this is through the mimetic forces, the social forces, and primarily shame, shame and honor.
Another quick story: in seventh grade in middle school, we had 400 kids in our grade. Every month we would do a standardized test across the grade, and we would go into an assembly with all 400 students. Each of us would be ranked by our score; we would be called up on stage individually based on the ranking of our score; all of our raw scores would be displayed on a projector behind us, in front of all 400 kids. And that was the exercise, okay.
So now the challenge here is that once you remove the individual, once you dissolve the individual, and once you fully make the individual responsible to these social mimetic forces, that's fine if you're trying to produce, I think, a 75th percentile, 80th percentile talent who just needs to follow the rules. But when you're trying to produce world-class talent that is capable of originality, innovation, being a strong leader, this system no longer works as well. I think this actually has to relate to why the Chinese economy itself is not as innovative as it could be. I think it's actually a lot more innovative than people give it credit for, but the reason that's not even more innovative is partially due to this education system that kind of is about dissolving the individual, because what innovation is, is almost, in a very arrogant way, ignoring the demands and the signals from the group and bravely establishing your own path.
Of course, like I said, the Chinese system is supposed to make you almost even forget about your own desires. Like when I came to the West, there was a lot of adjustment I had to do, not just about being able to bravely follow what I really wanted to do, but even to tap in, to figure out what I wanted to do in the first place, because the discipline I was given was so strong that I almost ignored what my own desires were. Okay, okay.
And so that's the kind of Chinese system. The American system is the exact opposite, right? I went to high school in Canada, close enough, and children there, in the schooling system, are given loads of freedom, right, not just in time, but in resources, in, in, they get to choose what classes they want to take from a young age, and there's a lot of potentiality there. Now the issue is the exact opposite, which is that it doesn't prune the ball enough. There's almost an excess of freedom there, and what this reminds me of is Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, says that democracies and free societies only function with a specific type of disciplined and responsible character. And that might seem counterintuitive because you might think what freedom is is being able to do whatever the hell you please, is is not having to be constrained to be a certain type of character. But Tocqueville says no, that the only way a free society works is if you have a, loosely speaking, disciplined, responsible population there. And there's an equivalent in the schooling system where I felt my Chinese discipline that I got from the education system there was the perfect preparation for me to succeed in the American system of freedom.
Because when you don't have that, when your spiky ball is not pruned at all, funnily enough, I think you again fall into the mimetic and the social forces, but in the case of America, it's even stupider than the mimetic and social forces of China. There, the mimetic forces are pointed towards doing well in math; it's pointed towards, I don't know, athletic achievement. But in America, a lot of it, especially in more, maybe urban communities, is it's more, you know, who can shotgun a beer the fastest or something like that.
So the difference between the two systems, I think China, in all actuality, it gives you this amazing foundation, but it's very restrictive, so there's very little potentiality. Whereas America is all potentiality; you have a lot of freedom to be able to do great things, but very little actuality, but very little of the necessary preparation and training that someone actually needs in order to really wield that successfully.
And so, in some sense, these two education systems are equally tragic, one right, gives you the ability to do great things without the kind of freedom, and one gives you the freedom to do great things without the ability.
And so I think AI is opening up a new frontier here, and it's able to democratize what was previously reserved for an aristocratic tutorial kind of education to the masses. And here I think Alpha School is a good example. So what Alpha School does is that it's able to synthesize the best of both worlds and make a Pareto efficient leap by using AI to delineate what were previously the two functions of the teacher. One function of the teacher is to impart the knowledge, the facts themselves; another part of the teacher, however, is as teacher as motivator. What Alpha does, and what AI makes possible now, is to do the first part even better than human teachers, because it's able to tailor specific programs for the student themselves.
And so at Alpha, they made this app that is mastery-based learning, so you learn at the pace that you are comfortable with; you only proceed to the next chapter after you master the previous chapter, instead of an entire class all proceeding in one speed. And so this gives the kind of Chinese actuality, that the Chinese kind of foundational, fundamental training, and in some sense I think it's even better because the bad students won't feel lost because they only proceed when they've mastered a subject. But also, and this is a lot less intuitive, the good students won't feel bored because one of the worst things, if you're a good student, is to feel that you're not being challenged at all.
And so what this enables, what AI enables here that's very exciting, is it's able to take the original tutorial system, right, one-on-one tutors, which has been shown over and over again to be the best mode of education in terms of knowledge acquisition, and make it available for everyone.
And so now the question is what the hell do teachers do if it's not about imparting knowledge, and the answer is teachers get to focus 100% of their energies on motivation. This comes in many different forms. One form is for the natural kind of mimetic desires, the good and positive mimetic desires for learning, by the teacher to carry off on the student. In my own like academic career, the biggest difference that teachers have made has never been on the knowledge side, okay, whether it's Girard or or certain certain kind of learning, certain kinds of math; I've always preferred learning by myself through books, but teachers have been transformational because when you see someone who's so accomplished and ahead of you, have a passion for a thing that you don't necessarily have a taste for yet, especially as a young child, you can mimetically take on that desire before you've actually gained that intrinsic desire yourself.
So in my early days at Columbia, before I fell in love with philosophy, I was inspired by the teachers who clearly they themselves were in love with philosophy. And so now there's other very interesting ways that the teacher as motivator is expressed in Alpha, which is bribes, okay. Because each individual can be tailored, because they don't have to focus on the teaching, the knowledge impartation side anymore, what that enables them to do is to understand a child very, very deeply and intimately as an individual and really tailor their how they motivate them. So the stories I've heard are, are you know, if a kid really likes playing Xbox, then you say, okay, after you complete X, then you'll be able to play Xbox, or I mean sometimes it's just literal bribes, okay, like you will get $100 if you pass this in this specific way within this time frame.
Now you might think this clearly is a terrible way, right, to motivate students, the reason because, uh, being well, they're not intrinsically interested in these subjects; it's all extrinsic motivation. And my two responses there is number one, no kid, very little, very few children come out of the womb liking math, liking these necessary skills they need to develop. And so the way I think about early education is almost like a booster rocket that you need to rely on different extrinsic motivators in order to get the ship into orbit, and then the ship itself can can can carry it.
Now the real question then is, there's a garbage truck coming, the real question then is what kind of extrinsic motivators do you want to tap into? In the Chinese system, that it was, you know, mimetic desire, shame, honor, and that I think is a lot more dangerous, and the booster rocket is least likely to detach because those drives, those social drives, are a lot more addictive. And so I almost think that the single-player drives, playing Xbox, getting 100 bucks, is more detachable than the social drives and is therefore, I think, a better booster rocket.
And so this is why I see Alpha as a synthesis of the kind of best of both worlds, where on one hand the two-hour learning gets their fundamentals as good as any school in America, and they free up all this time so that the individual can pursue his or her own interests, guided by these individual teachers who are who just focused as basically hype men for the students. And so what this enables is that it enables both the establishment of the fundamentals, like the Chinese model, but not in a way that kind of crushes necessarily their their individuality.
And so maybe the last thing I'll say is I'm sharing this I think as a general case of what's really optimistic about our AI, our AI future, because this is a case where you know AI is better at that knowledge impartation already than than teachers, right, but that doesn't mean there won't be teachers anymore; that also doesn't mean the teacher's job will be worse; right, most teachers prefer that that mo that that motivator side, and it also means that humans get to level up quicker as well. So optimistic, optimistic AI story; I hope you enjoyed it.