Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'

As a parent I agree with you, but watching other kids get a leg up because their parents continue to jump in and save them. And your own get the double harsh reality of learning failure and then being punished for it through loss of placement and status. It's tragedy of the commons since everyone must pass no one can fail.

> Teaching our kids how to leverage AI is something parents should invest in. Its part of a broader education landscape.

The same was said for laptops and tablets. Now there is a push to remove them from the curriculum. Having them meant the students didn't retain anything because they were distracting. I feel using AI in place of pedagogy will have similar results. Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.

You're basically describing the established pedagogical field of Problem Based Learning, which is around as long as personal computing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem-based_learning

In PBL the teacher adopts a constructivist approach - supporting, guiding, and monitoring the learning process as opposed to delivering a defined curriculum via lectures or seminars.

Agentic AI is arguably a better fit for this as it can scale infinitely to monitor student progress, offer timely feedback on design choices, and adjust difficulty dynamically based on how the student interacts with the problem.

Your main contention is one I'd broadly agree with - that use of Agentic AI for tutoring abdicates intellectual agency, allowing the AI to perform the critical synthesis and analysis that the student should be doing themselves for learning to occur.

The solution, however, is clear: guardrail the AI to promote core pedagogical principles rather than replace learner cognition by mandating things like instructional friction and the strategic fading of AI support as students build competence.

As explored in the paper I link below, by balancing proactive scaffolding with necessary and beneficial cognitive challenges, AI can preserve the productive struggle essential to effective learning.

https://arxiv.org/html/2606.04543v1

(A final thought: have a look at the current field of companies who specialise in turning training materials into engaging interactive experiences for the likes of Compliance and Security training. This is a corporate field now being automated and democratised for use by the average student in Academic pursuits in an on-demand fashion. Appropriate AI tutoring is basically the same concept.)

> teachers have limited bandwidth

Hire more?

In terms of 3rd level accession and standardised testing I'd imagine they boast great statistics, and that the students are self-evident in communicating a degree of confidence and holistic education beyond their traditionally educated peers.

However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.

To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.

N.B. Public (read:Private) schools in the UK are about £30k a year. Boarding schools hit about 50k in the UK/Ireland. 'New Age' or International schools for the children of diplomats and HNW ex-pats like Nord Anglia or similar go from about €/£20k upwards. 40k a year isn't outrageous in context, even outside of America.

Alpha shows the results they do because they charge exorbitant rates (up to $75,000 / year depending on region) to staff the school with multiple individualized tutors per student.

It is a for-profit product which is sold to parents and state-level customers more than it is a school.

A good friend of mine works for them. It’s a weird combination of (1) probably the long-range future and (2) absolutely not going to use my kid as a test subject.

If you believe, as I do, that half of students only achieve half of their academic potential, then experiments like this are some of the most valuable work we could do in society.

But again, let me know how it goes in 25 years and my children can enroll my grandkids.

I’m very conceptually interested in AI assisted individual learning; I’ve managed to get into a lot of topics that I would have had a hard time approaching without an LLM helping. I really like having AI rephrase concepts usually visualizations and analogies that resonate with me personally. That said, I think there is a lot of sketchiness around Alpha Schools in particular: https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/special-repor...

Sounds like a good way to f**k up your kid

Slightly creepy, seems harmless now but future without supervision you don't know what they're teaching or what is going on. I would agree it's a double egged sword.

AI could either help or ruin American education. But the Department of Education is being shutdown. Many parents are relatively absent. And functionally all tech companies, and especially startups, are rapacious in pursuit of education funding.

I think the most likely outcome is AI makes American education worse, not because if the technology, but because of the “leaders” building and implementimg it.

I’ve found LLMs to be very good at teaching. Better than I expected.

You have to tell it what you want out of the session. A kid could just type in the question and get the answer, but that’s not tutoring.

When I use them for learning I tell it my goal, summarize my current status, and then tell it to teach me incrementally with a quiz after each step. You can get fancy and have it reach back into history to throw in extra refresher questions.

It uses very few tokens compared to a coding session so you can use the highest model for this and the usage is negligible. Using the top model available to you is important to keep things accurate. I wouldn’t have trusted this back in the GPT 4 or Sonnet days, but with Opus, Astra, or Fable it’s great.

For longer sessions set up a directory and have it keep notes about your progress, problem points, and what was covered in the past.

Students have always had the curriculum and standard study material, it was always possible to study alone, but the teacher mostly provides an interactive gap-bridging layer, and the classroom setting provides some level of obligation, I could be wrong but I don't know why AI can't fulfill the interaction layer part.

disagree- i used it for the last few years of coursework preparing for exams. If you give it context (i'm studying for an exam, do not give hints unless asked, your objective is to help my understanding) it is incredibly helpful. This isn't advice, it's a company going out of business.

As a teacher, this is obvious. But when you ask a student 'do you want to learn?' they don't actually understand the question.

I don't know if I agree, if I ask a physics question it will show me the process to get to the answer, and it's really nice to have something to talk to with infinite patience to dig down into steps you don't understand. I learned a ton about implementing machine learning from using AI models. Obviously that takes a level of curiosity and effort on the learners part, but with a pretty minimal system prompt I think you'd get a pretty great tutoring system.

They rule for maths. I had an extremely good experience going from high school trig through multivariable calc with them over a year. Best math teacher I ever had.

My daughter worked on learning for various classes by building her own plugin and skills for tutoring that uses various techniques of teaching without revealing answers, giving advice on homework questions without disclosure, etc. She overlaid with the personality of her stern gymnastics coach. It was surprisingly effective and I was pretty impressed at 11 she had the sense to not go straight to the answers. I think the “oh the kids” hand wringing is always overblown with kids - it’s the adults that don’t adapt well.

The ChatGPT web app, though apparently not the desktop app, does have a study mode where it will not give you the answer but will help you reason through the problem like the world's most knowledgeable, most attentive teacher.

A calculator is a tool that replaced the slide-rule or Abacus - no one contended the Abacus replaced teaching or teachers. Ditto an iPad which is effectively just a fancy calculator in this context.

Similarly Youtube didn't replace teachers - it afforded remote learning and correspondence courses a new medium for transmission, recording, and playback of teaching.

More to the point none of those were trained on a corpus containing the history of human pedagogy, were capable of inference, or of generating dynamic learning resources based on best-practice models with inherent self-correction and pedagogical reinforcement mechanisms.

This time around, AI being able to do student homework means that AI is replacing students not teachers.

That is a ridiculous take. It was trained on human notes. It very much has an opinion on how to structure specific content for teaching.