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I'm Steve today with Yushan and Feifei.
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Alpha School, that's what it's called.
It has replaced the teacher at the front of the classroom with a personal chatbot for every child.
This education model trades the standard six-hour academic schedule for hyper-efficient two-hour learning sprints, an exchange that places supreme value on personalized data transfer and over human-led instruction.
Cool idea, but can it work?
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And now...
Imagine a school where the traditional teacher at the front of the classroom has been replaced by an individualized AI tutor.
And the standard six-hour academic grind is condensed into just 120 minutes.
In the heart of Silicon Valley and other locations.
A new 65000 a year private institution called Alpha School is claiming to do exactly that, promising that its students can master core subjects like math and reading in a fraction of the time required by traditional schools.
By leveraging the one chatbot per child, Alpha aims to solve the problem of the one-size-fits-all education system that has remained largely unchanged for about a century or more.
But as we see this model gaining traction and even political attention in America, There's a lot of questions that need to be asked.
One is about education itself, Yushan and Fei-Fei.
Is education simply a transfer of data from a computer to a child's brain?
Is that enough?
And what happens when we remove the teacher from the academic core?
What are we losing in that process?
What are we potentially gaining in that process?
I mean this is a very I don't know if controversial is the right word for this school model in America right now, but it is absolutely getting a lot of attention.
So let's learn about it.
What is the alpha school model?
I touched on it briefly, but let's dig in.
So the Alpha School was developed by a tech entrepreneur in the US who argues that the current American school system is, quote unquote, broken and obsolete.
So that's why she designed this school that utilizes AI as the primary teacher of all classes.
But it doesn't mean that they don't have human staff.
But the human staff will be more acting like coaches or guides than that lecturer.
So there is an adult in the room, maybe more than one, but they are not teachers.
They are not teachers.
They are AI guides.
Okay.
Yeah, and the foundation of this school is said to be hyper-efficient.
So the students only need to spend two hours each morning working with adaptive AI software.
Complete their math, reading and writing requirements.
And then they can move on to other learning tasks in the afternoon or outdoors.
And the founder of the school asserts that, because the AI adapts to their specific pace, children can learn twice as much in half the time compared with a traditional school system.
So you have a classroom of students. you have a person standing at the front of the classroom.
So it looks like perhaps a traditional classroom setting.
But each of those students is actually not interacting with the other students during this two-hour study time.
They are interacting with their computer.
They are interacting with the avatar or the chatbot on the screen and they are doing their own lessons.
Now, when they're doing their own lessons, they are not all going at the same pace.
So the two students next to each other, even though I'm pretty sure they're going to be in the same age group, might be at totally different levels.
So that's what this means when we say this is individualized education.
I understand all that, but one question.
You said there's a teacher role standing at the front.
A guide.
That's an avatar.
No, that's a person.
That's a person, not the computer.
Yeah, that's a human being, but these people are not certified teachers.
They are AI guides.
Think of like a gym trainer when they're not training you specifically, but they're still there in the room.
So if you have a question about the exercise equipment or something, they'll come over and help you out.
That's what these guides are.
The sci-fi movie coming to reality again.
I'm wondering if this is the reason because the founder named it Alpha School, because it's a really bold design and schooling system.
So yes, Silicon Valley also.
Austin in Texas, Brownsville in Texas, I believe, is another place in that state.
Most recently, as far as I know, New York City and in the city, too, in Manhattan.
I believe they've opened a center there as well.
And they're doing this strategically.
They're moving into urban markets to try to secure this high-end private education corner of the market.
And it's gotten a lot of attention.
I mean, it's in national media.
It's gotten political attention as well.
So a lot of people are looking at this model and wondering...
Can this actually work?
But let's learn a little bit more.
The AI, let's go to the computer specifically.
So how does the AI system actually function?
What's the user experience like for the student?
I read that it's like playing a game because students, they don't interact with digital textbooks.
They use a high definition gamified dashboard that's very similar to Minecraft.
I'm a huge fan of Minecraft and I can't imagine going to school using a Minecraft angle.
They have like a skill tree.
I don't know what other online video games use this kind of thing, but you know what I mean, right?
So you get one skill.
Ah, it's a perk.
Yeah, okay.
So you can't move up to the next level until you've already accomplished your goals at that current level.
So that's what that skill tree idea means here.
When they say it's like a video game, that's what they mean.
But I think it's a sort of a video game with tests as well.
It's like that they also have continuous testing that the students need to complete this level 100 until they can reach to the next level.
So, even for a small lesson, the AI will provide check for understanding, and that's is the tests.
And the students even get one question wrong, they can't move on.
Yeah yeah, so there's no traditional midterm exams or final exams.
The testing is continuous.
The testing is continuous because you can't go to the next level until you get 100 on the previous level, and then the AI.
The avatar and the avatars are different, by the way, depending on how old the student is.
Yeah, they try to customize those apparently.
Yeah.
But if you get, if a student gets a question wrong, then the AI will kind of reroute the lesson and they'll explain the concept, not just explain the concept again.
They'll explain the concept differently so that the student can try to grasp it in a different kind of way.
And once they do, once they get all the answers correct, then they move up the skill tree, then they move to the next level.
And I guess another engine of this whole mechanism is that the students gets to learn uh rather, earn this alpha coins for staying in the what they call the flow state.
That means to that they're deep, focusing on the tasks, and then they pass mastery checks and earn the digital coins.
So this is tracked on a live leaderboard visible to the entire room.
I read about that and i couldn't find a second or third source that verified that, because i thought that's they put a leaderboard in the room yeah, and like a ranking yes, your ranks and everything yeah, but i couldn't find.
I read about that, but i couldn't find a second or third source, and i also couldn't see video inside the classroom to see if there is an actual leaderboard there or not.
Um, but they do have the very obvious way of moving up the skill tree, and that's by getting all the answers right.
And if they can't, they can't move up.
Now going back to the guides, they have what is called a heat map on their screen.
So the guides at the front of the room have a heat map and the heat map is for each student.
And if the student's icon turns red, it means that they've been stuck for five minutes the same spot in their program, or maybe their focus has drifted, or something like that.
That's gonna be both cases with me with physics.
For physics it'd be stuck for a lot longer than five minutes.
So in that scenario then the guide goes to the student for what they call this such a hippie term a micro intervention.
Okay now, That micro intervention is kind of like a motivational nudge or a clarifying question to get the student back into that AI loop.
So they're not doing the teaching.
The human is not doing the teaching themselves.
Not at all.
They're sort of asking, what are you doing?
Or how are you?
Everything okay?
Yeah, or they're there to answer a question if they might have it, or to get them back on track, or things like that.
I think the point here is that the room isn't empty with the students.
There are adults there that are keeping them on track.
Now, that's done in two hours.
That's done within 120 minutes.
The AI portion of the student's day is is finished after that, but the students don't go home because their school day continues but they're done with the math and reading and writing or whatever subjects.
They're done with that study.
What they do next called life skills workshops.
What's that about?
That's intensive workshops that's specifically designed to teach practical and real-world abilities such as entrepreneurship, public speaking and financial literacy.
I found that really interesting because usually in public schools, if not private schools, those classes are not like available to everybody.
You have to choose it or really enroll it in part of the school's program in order for students to get to learn that.
But apparently these alpha schools, they're also incorporating much more than what's usually covered in the schools for their students.
And they also have these mastery sessions.
That includes hands-on tasks that I believe most traditional schools will ignore, like tasks like car maintenance changing oil and tires which I still don't know how to do that.
And like cooking and nutrition and even first aid and CPR certification.
So that the goal for these tasks is really about, you know, living in the real world, learning about real life lessons.
Um, car maintenance okay, let's just i, i want to get, i want to get through all this, and then i want to come back and talk about it, but let's just keep these things in mind as we go through car maintenance.
Financial literacy that could include everything from taxes how to do your taxes to investing cooking nutrition, as you mentioned, i think, first aid, cpr certifications Okay, so those are some of the kind of life skills things that they work on.
Then they've got something called masterpieces.
Now, this is different.
This is like an expedition type thing of sorts.
This is where the students take on these long-term projects.
An example of that, I saw this on the website.
I visited the Alpha website.
And an example...
It was from San Francisco.
And the students, I don't know how old they were, but they were quite young.
The job for the task for the students as a group was to bike across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
Really?
Now, if you've not seen the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, we'll describe it as this.
It's huge and it's very long.
And those bicycle paths are quite intimidating, I would say even for an adult, because you're on a bridge, you're next to the edge of the bridge and there are cars on the other side of you.
But this is one of the tasks that they present to the children.
And they also need to manage a budget as a group and they also need to handle mechanical repairs themselves.
And so it's said to be able to build up the bicycles.
It's said to be able to build up their resilience and bravery, of course, bravery.
And there are also other trainings when it comes to social and emotional skills.
So instead of a standard lunch break, students will participate in a squad meeting.
They're called squad meetings.
Which basically, is also a group task.
I would say that are games, collaborative games, that focus on conflict resolution and leadership skills, which is also the efficient morning is, so that the efficient morning that's really dominated by AI chatbot will be balanced by human-centric afternoons.
So it's, as I said, it's a very bold design of schooling system, I would say, as a parent.
It sounds to me like the school is trying all they can to squeeze classroom time or traditionally classroom time as short and highly efficient as possible in order to make room for all the other practical things that they seem to value more.
You are correct.
And one of the things that Alpha is proud of is they say that they can eliminate students the fluff in the classroom and also the teaching to the middle.
Now, the fluff in the classroom means the time in the class that is spent doing things where the students aren't learning administrative dead time, things like taking attendance or disciplining someone if they're talking to their friend or looking at their smartphone, passing out papers, collecting papers.
They say that that fluff accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the traditional school day.
Now, that's according to Alpha.
I don't know where those statistics come from, but that's what they say.
They say with this model, it eliminates that fluff.
Now, what does it mean to teach to the middle?
So what that means is in a traditional classroom, teachers are forced to teach to the average student.
The students that are ahead of the group, the material is too easy.
They're bored.
They're not paying attention.
Then you've got the group that doesn't grasp the concepts, who are getting left behind.
The teachers when they're teaching to the middle means that they're teaching to the average student who, with a little instruction, will grasp the material.
That means two groups...
Two thirds, if you will.
I don't know how those statistics would work out.
A large percentage, let's say a large percentage of the class is not being effectively taught.
Alpha says we are eliminating the fluff and we are eliminating the teaching to the middle.
That happens in a classroom too.
So that's why they are calling themselves hyper-efficient.
All right.
I want to know if China has anything similar to this.
I searched.
I searched really hard.
I can't find one example that's even close in China.
Simply because, for both public and private schooling systems, they still think human teachers should be the central role in the classrooms.
That's the thing.
The key word in our educational system, private or not, still remains that AI remains to be an assisting tool role.
It helps the sister uh, the teachers to get faster with their scoring or like coming up with questions or exam for the students.
It helps the students to learn faster, but it only helps, it doesn't dominate like the two-hour thing with alpha school, even with the ai tools and there are ai tools being used in the classroom here in china.
But even there can be a little bit of i Again is controversy the right word?
But people question the effectiveness.
And one was about grading papers.
Yeah, because in a lot of schools and classrooms people are trying to incorporate AI as a marking tool.
And that's really controversial simply because for the kids, for the people who are sort of pro-AI, they're saying that, just like Alpha states that the AI tools can reduce the time on fluff tasks so that teacher can spend more time on creativity, critical thinking, student development.
But there are the con group that's saying that if you are only grading students' homework and tests using AI, first of all, as teachers you won't be able to keep track of the development phase of every student in your classroom.
Because you only see the number, the score.
Yeah, and also there is no interactions between students and teachers.
Because right now, if a teacher is really marking their homework and tests, If something really stand out to them, they will probably go to the students themselves and ask around.
You know what's wrong with you.
Or why are you doing this in this particular question?
Or praise you for the very style you're demonstrating.
Yeah, yeah.
So this is the interaction between humans, teachers, and students.
But if really relying on AI as a marketing tool, it eliminates that interaction.
Right.
Let's go back to Alpha.
Now, this is a private school.
They have various locations.
This is not the American education system has changed.
No, that's not happening, but it's getting attention, as I said.
What do you think, Yushan?
Do you support this kind of model?
Do you think it can be successful?
What problems might you see here?
What I see that's the very good size that I'm very much backing at this point is that how they save time for students' learning process and how it saves time for teachers because they can then assign teachers for other important tasks that we don't really see very often, especially depending on the countries.
Here in China we have first aid trainings, but it's limited to the school and also That kind of leads to my concerns.
That is, eliminating the teaching role at that scale, because in my opinion teachers sort of are the only authoritative roles that a student are exposed to in their earlier ages.
For many hours a day.
For many hours a day outside of their family.
And that's important for them because they get to learn the rules of the society from that kind of interactions with teachers and also learn about how to respect what are the boundaries, what's right, what's wrong between like classmate interactions and stuff.
If we just draw all that out from from their system, even just for like two hours a day, i wouldn't well, i guess two hours is okay as per how alpha school is running and that is is expanding um in in various us cities, But in the long term I'm really uncertain of how that might turn out for the students as they grow up.
You know, I'm a parent.
I'm really, really skeptical about this kind of AI dominating the classrooms.
Simply for one example, that the tool they're using, the AI tool, is highly gamified.
And I have a problem with that is that, when it comes to study and learning, I think one thing is really important is that for students, they need to realize that learning is a really difficult path.
And you need to spend time, sometimes very repetitive.
You need to spend a lot of time on these kind of repetitive tasks, like doing math problems, like remembering some of the ancient poems in Chinese literatures.
It's painful, no one likes it, but that's how society would work, right?
You need to have this kind of resilience when it comes to this kind of really painful and dull tasks.
Why couldn't an ai model teach you an ancient chinese poem?
Again, it's not about putting data into your brain.
It doesn't work like that, isn't it?
Because many people might argue, with our standardized test systems that we have, That's exactly what education has become a data transfer from point A to point B.
Okay, I'm not really sure how well these AI models can be designed.
But when it comes to, for example, an ancient Chinese poem, instead of just explaining what this poem is about, what this writer, this poet is about, how his life is about, sometimes human teachers have his or her own understanding of that particular phase of history.
And that's when the connection between students and teachers are established.
When the teachers go on about their own understanding of this history, of this piece of literature, and the students are like yeah, It can broaden perspectives.
Yes.
So this is what I believe currently, at least currently, AI is not capable of.
Would you send your kids to this school?
Definitely not.
First of all, it's very expensive.
65 grand a year.
Equity?
I don't think so.
This is for the rich.
That's the very difference between a classroom.
What you said just now, Feifei, the very difference between a classroom and an army squad.
You don't listen to orders.
You learn as if you dive in a new.
We call it the sea of oceans all the time, but you dive in a new world that you've never heard of before.
And that's the point of education.
Yeah.
I mean, I agree with pretty much everything that you said.
I love getting rid of the fluff.
I love and I agree that teaching down the middle has been a problem in education.
I don't care what public school system you're talking about.
Some students are going to get left out.
I love getting rid of that.
I don't like that it's expensive and it's for the rich.
But if I could have like a seven year old that could change the oil in my car.
I see some advantages to this education model.
And that will do it for Roundtable for this afternoon.
Thank you very much for giving us your time today.
We had fun on the show.
We hope you did as well.
I'm Steve with Yushan and Feifei.
Have a good one and please do come back next time.
