A Massachusetts couple claims that their son’s high school attempted to derail his future by giving him detention and a bad grade on an assignment he wrote using generative AI.
An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.
In what appears to be the first case of its kind, at least in Massachusetts, a couple has sued their local school district after it disciplined their son for using generative AI tools on a history project. Dale and Jennifer Harris allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments and that the punishment visited upon their son for using an AI tool—he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment—has harmed his chances of getting into Stanford University and other elite schools.
Yeah, I’m 100% with the school on this one.
I taught in Chinese universities for 16 years. Initially I liked it. The students were hard-working and respectful. Parents listened to teacher advice. If kids were caught cheating there was Hell to pay … from the parents, not just the school.
Over that 16 year period, though, everything changed. Parents started showing up to middle schools whose response to any misconduct was to privately donate red portraits of Chairman Mao to the school administrators and suddenly all records of misconduct went missing. Marks were “reassessed”. Leading to universities being flooded by the worst imaginable students who’d never had a negative effect to any shenanigans their entire lives.
Only universities are a different world entirely. It takes a whole lot more red portraits of Chairman Mao to get misconduct erased in university. Way more such portraits than all but the top 0.1% could pay. So these poor kids, having slid by for 12 years of no consequences suddenly get hit square between the eyes with consequences that for the first time in their lives Daddy couldn’t erase by waving said red portraits around.
Yes, they were little shits. Yes, I hated them as students. But I still felt bad for them as people because they were made monsters. They weren’t born monsters.
Still didn’t stop me from quitting teaching, though.
It’s funny how this reads like a typical “China bad” comment but goes on to show how economic inequality ruins society.
Not doubting or criticising you at all, just observing that “communist China” has very capitalist problems. If only they were more communist
There’s a lot of criticism of Chinese capitalist tendencies from the left. Yeah they do some things with communist values and everything but Dengism runs deep. The fact is that in the people’s republic of China the workers lack the power to exert their will on the means of production and the wealthy have the ability to exert outsized power over society and those around them.
China is not communist. It has never claimed to be communist. (Nor had the USSR made such a claim.)
“Communist” countries are, properly termed, “socialist” states because in Marxist theory (grossly simplified) the development is Capitalist->Socialist->Communist. In a socialist state the Communist Party is intended to shepherd people along the path to communism. Once communism is achieved, there is no need for a government. As such, the very term “communist government” is an oxymoron.
So China is a “socialist state”. And socialist states, in communist theory, are not about “free medical care” or whatnot, like the “social democracies” of the west (like, say, Sweden) are about. Socialism, in Marxist terminology, is a very specific thing that has nothing to do with free state services (though those may be a desirable byproduct of them). And, get this, socialist states may use capitalist tools to accomplish their ends. It’s just that capitalism in a socialist state is a tool used by the state, and is also under its thumb (which is why billionaires in China fear government; government in the USA, by contrast, fears billionaires).
That being said, yes, there’s huge swaths of inequality in China, and education in particular is currently being massacred by it. The government attacks inequality fitfully here and there, but there does need to be a more concerted and forceful effort for it to actually work.
(Of course, with my more anarchistic leanings, I’m pretty certain that the socialist phase is a regressive concept that will never end because the people who run socialist governments really like this feeling of being in power so won’t be giving it up anytime soon.)
The best parts of Actually Existing Socialism are commodity production and a centralized state!