I wonder how aging populations and large-scale language models are going to change the difficulty of this problem. It seems to me that we're just about to unlock 1-to-1 learning, without actually needing 1 teacher per child.

It isn't hard to imagine a language model (or something similar, I'm not in AI myself so I might not have the best idea of the specifics) giving personalized instruction to a student based on a knowledge bank and generative prompts + reinforcement from what the child understands.

Add to that aging populations leading to less children and higher worker-child ratios, + automation in other industries, and its plausible to imagine that there could be a large movement towards training new teachers, thereby reducing class sizes. This could increase feedback between the two, and probably reduce behavioural problems as teachers could address them more easily.

I guess one problem of this approach is that this 'atomizes' the student, where they only engage with their device with the language model, removing some of the collaborative aspects of modern instructional methods. One easy fix to this is to increase the amount of recess or structured play, thereby increasing socialization. This seems to work in Finland [1]. If advances in AI can make learning more efficient, we can increase the amount of time for unstructured play.

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[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/06/how-fi...