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This is: High School EA Outreach, published by cafelow on the AI Alignment Forum.
Contributions by the Students for High-Impact Charity Team (Catherine Low, Baxter Bullock, Tee Barnett, David Vatousios and Callum Hinchcliffe), the Run to Better Days Team (Brenton Mayer, Daniel Charles, Laura Koefler), Jessica McCurdy, Daniel, Alex, Jamie Harris and Sebastian Becker[1]. Compiled by Catherine Low. Introductory segments written by Catherine Low.
Summary
This post compiles summarized reports on several projects and instances in which effective altruism (EA) concepts have been introduced to school students aged 13 to 18 (referred to hereafter as high school students):
Guest presenters running workshops in high schools (Run to Better Days and Students for High-Impact Charity).
Resourcing university student coordinators to help high school students set up EA-aligned groups in their in high schools (Students for High-Impact Charity).
Recruiting and resourcing high school student leaders to run sessions on EA concepts with their peers (Students for High-Impact Charity).
Recruiting non-EA teachers run EA sessions in schools (Students for High-Impact Charity).
University students running EA sessions as part of the Splash program in USA Universities.
EA-aligned teachers presenting concepts in classes and extracurricular clubs.
The content delivered to students varied from project to project, and included charity comparisons, ethical questions, cause prioritization, high-impact career choices, and discussions of common EA cause areas.
We hope this post will be a useful resource for people who are interested in communicating the basic principles of EA to young people.
This post was prompted by Students for High-Impact Charity (SHIC) recently choosing to suspend outreach to high school students.
We begin by explaining the generally accepted reasons for why reaching out to high school students may be useful, and our tentative conclusions. This is followed by detailed descriptions of some projects that have been tried, written by that project’s team or coordinator. For each project, we explain the method used and any measured impact.
Why choose high school outreach?
Many self-identified effective altruists state that they wished they had gained EA knowledge much earlier than they did, so that they could have had a roadmap to effectively improve the world from a younger age. These statements suggest it was worth testing whether high school students are a good group to educate about EA.
Our initial reasons for believing that high school students could be a good audience were:
They are less likely to have fixed opinions about the best way to do good than people who have been doing altruistic actions for some years.
They may be more open to new ideas than older people.
They are in a significantly better position to make impactful life decisions than university students or adults, as they haven’t sunk time and resources into a potentially lower impact path.
It’s possible to gain access to an audience of high school students more easily than audiences of older people.
Anecdotally, EA ideas seem to be more appealing if they’re presented by someone more senior than they are, which most EAs are relative to high school students.
There are several ways that reaching high school students could have an impact:
Guiding high school students towards higher impact career paths, volunteering and donations.
Influencing school fundraisers.
Providing a positive first experience of EA concepts, increasing the chances that these students would take action after subsequent exposures to EA—for example, when they are at university.
Conclusions
Catherine’s conclusions
This section was authored by Catherine Low (Manager of SHIC since 2018, closely involved with SHIC since early 2016, and a former teacher).
The contribut...
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