Danish high schoolers will have to verbally defend written assignments

I'm tired of people echoing a common trope that somehow LLMs replace critical thinking or steal learning opportunities from students - they do the opposite. They provide students more opportunities to sharpen their critical thinking and democratize learning.

In your parent post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49225068), you asserted that "These are all useful skills, even in a post-LLM world.": I agreed with you, and proposed that you could use an LLM to debate you and furthur hone that skill because you certainly don't have unlimited time with a skilled human teacher but for $20/mo, you could debate a frontier model as long as you're awake, all day long.

Your research seems to be supporting what I just said, does it not?

> Indeed, LLMs can be helpful as an alternative to a teacher, if thought of as a sophist (I have even done research on this [0]). But that is not the approach you are proposing.

What according to you, did I propose instead?

I also need further clarification on the term "sophist", because in the US and the UK, it means a person who is "misusing" logic and attempting to deceive their opponents using trickery instead of an honest debate that centers around the objective truth. Their sole objective is to "win" a debate rather than appreciate debate itself or the merits of the topic itself. I believe, even in ancient history, Plato heavily criticized them.

For example: If we were debating whether child labor is wrong, a sophist who was put in a position "for" the topic would then argue there are good reasons why child labor is good. A "true" debator would concede that they could not support child labor and would not debate for the topic.

Is that what you meant by the term "sophist"? Or does "sophist" mean a "Debate Coach" or "Instructor of Rhetoric" or "teacher who excels in the art of debating"? If you meant "Debate Coach" but it sounds too simplistic, may I propose we use "Forensics Instructor" - because the term "sophist" in modern English certainly doesn't communicate that and its use will lead to confusion.

> then LLMs doing the hard work of identifying the gaps in their logic is counter-intuitive

Your use of the phrase "counter-intuitive" is unclear to me. Do you mean to say that:

1. it's actually a good idea that can certainly provide great outcomes but doesn't occur to a lot of people, or

2. that it's not a good idea at all because it just doesn't work?

3. something else?

Is the point of writing, to communicate information from one person to another group or something else?

Which of these fail to communicate the need:

i. "Need to go poo poo! NOW!"

ii. "Excuse me Sir. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, I didn't mean to intrude but could you, please, point me to the direction of the nearest latrines, or the head as some might say, so I can relieve myself. The burrito didn't sit well with me unfortunately and it's causing me much distress! I must stress, time is of the utmost essence!"

> So yes, you still need to have the students do the thing.

I don't disagree with "There is no replacement for actually doing the work".

What I do disagree with is the exact nature of the work done: when you have access to a gas/electric driven auger, trying to dig a hole by hand with a teaspoon is neither smart nor productive, like learning how to do long division.

> The knowledge would also be fleeting because actually doing the thing makes the knowledge stick more than just observing and understanding the thing

Define "stick".

1. I recall, in school, sitting in classes for days where the teacher went over multiplication tables 5x5 through 99x99. It was painful. I don't recall the top off my head what 93x95 is but I know how to calculate it now and I knew how to calculate it then. Hearing and doing 93x95 on a balckboard was not specially valuable nor additionally insightful nor marginally instructive over 13x19 and we could easily have stopped there and done something else with the remaining time.

2. I also recall, sitting in classes where we did long division by hand. You had to show your work and it was incredibly exhausting. I taught myself special tricks just to finish the long division exercises quickly and just be done with it so I could actually do the things that interested me more like reading manuals about vacuum tubes and how triodes worked.

3. Then there was this phase of "unitary method" which was just batshit crazy. They would ask questions like "if it takes 1 person to cut 1 block of wood 10 hours, how long would it take 10 men to cut the same wood?", and you would have to follow this insane mechanical process of decomposing the problem into its constituents and do all this crazy, laborious steps to arrive at the answer. It made absolutely no sense to me then and it still doesn't. It felt like digging a trench with a teaspoon. I had taught myself symbolic manipulation by then and used the "X, Y, Z" method to rapidly solve the problem. I recall annoying the teacher with "if it takes 1 person 10 days to cross a river, how long would it take 10 people to cross the same river?"

So back to my question - define "stick". What's the window of "stickiness"? Who defines that window and why?

Next:

4. Has long division been sticky for me (I don't recall it at all but I do remember I scored very well on those exercises then because the alternatives would leave me with even less time to do the things I actually liked doing like building mechanical robots)?

5. Exactly how many exercises were necessary and sufficient to prove that I understood long division? 1 page of long division? 5 pages? 100?

6. Do you recall how to do long division? I don't. I can bet you that I can look it up and do it correctly but I won't out of principle: There's absolutely 0 value in knowing how to do long division. It was as useful to me back then as it is now. We should have done something more productive with our time.

"But doing long division laid the very foundation of logic and mathematical ability!" - Nonsense. There were students in my class who excelled at long division but couldn't grok calculus no matter how hard they tried. The only thing that being able to do long division proves is that you can pay attention long enough and maintain state. There are far more exciting, interesting ways of proving that ability.

If I need to learn long division, I always had the ability to look it up, do some exercises, verify I understand it correctly and complete the task I was relying on long division for. Before the age of LLMs, one might argue that I needed to have some idea that long division was the tool I needed for solving my problem, and thus, having learned long division was valuable. In 2026, I can tell my desired state to a frontier model and it will propose various ways to solve it, then solve it for me if I so desire and walk me through the solution step-by-step if I want it to.

So no, long division, "unitary method" and all such matters were and are nonsense, a waste of time and we should replace them with something more meaningful. If we can't come up with that, we should atleast let the kids go outside and play games they like.

So again - what's this worry about knowledge being fleeting? Do either you, I or my teacher who taught me long division care whether I posses the knowledge of long division in 2026?

Even though I knew long division in 1997, mastered it, excelled at it back then, do I still know it now?

Does my inability to explain long division at a moment's notice in 2026 imply long division hasn't been "sticky"?

If I never, ever knew long division at all, can I correctly learn it now?

Who defines what knowledge is worth fleeting and which one is not? My history teacher and chemistry teacher certainly disagreed on that matter in 1997 and still do!

The only truce they were willing to sign is that history and chemistry are both equally important but given that I am a software engineer by trade and deploying high quality systems to production is how I support my lifestyle, I provably disagree with both of them.

However, there are very challenging tasks that can help to build experience in smaller groups. Like talking about a topic you just received a second earlier, without preparation, in a group of 10 where everybody takes turns and knows the experience from both sides.