Brady Fukumoto

Well, a top math education professor from Stanford has persuaded many elementary school teachers that memorizing multiplication tables isn't essential. Jo Boaler has repeatedly claimed that she had never memorized her times tables. “It has never held me back, even though I work with maths every day,” she said.

We are sending our kids to school to memorize facts that AI can retrieve in 0.3 seconds. We're grading them on essays that AI writes better than their teachers. We're preparing them for jobs that won't exist by the time they graduate. The entire education system is training humans to compete with machines at what machines do best. That's not education. That's sabotage. The schools that survive will teach thinking, not memorizing. Creating, not repeating. Discerning, not obeying. Every other school is a museum that doesn't know it yet.

LLMs are living off the moral and intellectual capital of a pre-AI world, just like Nietzsche said secular liberals live off Christianity. What happens when the inheritance runs out? Using LLMs well — knowing when to trust them, how to interrogate their outputs, what questions are worth asking — depends on capacities that are pre-LLM in origin: critical judgment, domain expertise, philosophical seriousness, taste. People who use LLMs well right now tend to be people formed by traditions of deep reading, argument, and intellectual discipline that were not themselves produced by or optimized for interaction with language models. The tool works for them because they bring something the tool cannot supply. Nietzsche thought secular liberals were coasting on the fumes of a Christian metaphysics they'd officially abandoned. The shadow of God lingering on the cave wall. The question is whether LLM-native thinking is the same kind of afterglow.

This is the part I think a lot of people don't understand. These kids are getting A's and B's in classes like Algebra II and Pre-Calculus in high school, but grade inflation and lack of standardized testing for admissions hide the issues.

NEW: UC San Diego has released a new report documenting a “steep decline in the academic preparedness” of its freshmen. The number of entering students needing remedial math has exploded from 1/100 to 1/8. They’ve had to create a second remedial class covering elementary and middle school math skills in addition to the one covering gaps from high school. 🧵