The kids are NOT alright
If education in the U.S. was ever an enlightening institution, it no longer is. Capitalist education will never free us from capitalism, but, do we still need to learn how to think...?
Americans, even those who go to college, are now generally skeptical about schooling. Naturally, I could not consider myself a ruthless critic if I did not want to investigate why. As a teacher, a (former) student of a teaching program, and a general ponderer of the human condition, I am compelled to understand seemingly why students are unable to ‘get it’; and because this is a dialectical analysis, I immediately was confronted with the shortcomings of my assumptions. My thinking proceeded from When I went to school, I was able to understand this stuff, so…
Coming from this standpoint, I obviously had to reconfigure my analysis. The high school I attended is ranked in the 89th percentile for Maryland schools; in stark contrast, the high school I teach at is ranked in the 16th percentile for Maryland schools, according to 2023-2024 MSDE Report Cards.
Depending on your perspective or personal interests, conventional answers to What’s eating kids these days? can range from smartphones (a popular, correctly maligned culprit), to parenting trends (surely), to ‘wokeness’ (lol), CRT (lmao), or DEI (lmfao, even). As an educator for almost 5 years, as well as a political-economist, I feel as though many of the ideas that emerge to explain the reasoning behind these horrible academic returns and their future consequences are lacking a systemic approach — dare I say, a historical materialist approach — and therefore cannot be answered or even addressed somewhat adequately.
Based on OECD data, Americans are statistically not very good at reading1. The mere concept of critical media literacy is something so foreign to U.S. schools that I’m surprised it’s not being apprehended by ICE. Kendrick Lamar’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show spawned nonsense controversies and Disney’s Snow White became a ‘woke flop’ according to Fox News because of these misreadings. Although these stories are largely manufactured “culture war” debates, the lack of American reading comprehension skill perpetuates constricting discursive trends and prohibits widening the scope of discourse beyond predetermined, reactionary parameters.
Even approaching the question of what’s wrong with education? itself is hard: there are genuine critiques of the public education system from the particular to the existential. Schools are falling apart, teachers are leaving the profession in droves, and most importantly, student ‘education,’ — as measured by test scores — is constantly reaching lower and lower depths. Unlike the Titan Submersible, however, this implosion is in slow-motion, a combination of several decades of passive starvation and active campaigning, wrecking the lives of millions of Americans while creating our current crappy conditions: a nation devoid of critical thinking skills.
Did working-class education ever work for those it claims to serve?
Even if the war on public ed was not actively being waged, the origin-point of our modern school system is relatively indistinguishable from the school of today. We have all heard horror stories of the “depressing effect” of schools on students because of the “close, noisome atmosphere,” and the “scanty school furniture, deficiency of books and other materials for teaching.”
No, this was not from an elderly teacher still clinging to the last vestiges of public school prestige. These excerpts from the 1858 “Report of Inspections of Factories for the 31st October,” printed in the first edition of Marx’s Capital, also mention “rows of children doing absolutely nothing,” which any teacher — or student, for that matter! — in the modern era immediately recognizes.
How was your American school experience? Does it resonate with any of these quotes? Leave your thoughts below!
If Marx identified these problems with the English education system after the ‘reforms’ of the Factory Acts of the 1800s, then why are students still doing “absolutely nothing?” The only difference between my student and those described in Capital is that in the 1800s, the bored student watched the tick-tock; now, the bored student watches the TikTok2.
But, that is the point, isn’t it? Marx goes on to describe the haphazardly contingent legal framework that specifies children, who are here both printworkers and students3, must attend school sporadically — to the point that they are thrown “from school to work” and back again in order to be considered legally employable. Working at a school so poorly-equipped, I regularly contend with this kind of attitude toward education: students who show up just so their parents don’t get fined — and of course to hang with their friends. What I was more shocked by, however, was the teacher mentality. When I was in school, I was not under any false impressions that my teachers were not actually humans too, but, I did at least think (however naively, maybe) that that majority of my teachers enjoyed their jobs for the sake of their jobs.
Looking back, it’s laughable: how can I expect anyone4 to enjoy their job for the sake of it under the malicious and degrading capitalist organization of the economy? That’d be like asking for the animal you’re turning into meat to thank you while you butcher it.
The sheer volume and breadth of material that teachers are given yearly — to achieve certification5, to maintain certification, to professionally develop, etc. — equates to another entire education; it is explicitly outlined in many teaching programs’ principles that teachers are meant to be ‘lifetime learners.’ Or, lifetime customers of the Education Industrial Complex, a comprehensive, multi-layered web of for-profit companies, NGOs, teacher-teaching programs, McKinsey-style consultants, and more.
As a young professional, I was essentially forced into two different “certification” programs run by shady for-profit companies which gave me not even a facsimile of an education; other students in my class (ostensibly people who want to be teachers!) were content submitting ChatGPT responses to the weekly discussion board assignments. Initially, I was in utter disbelief at some of my coworkers’ nonchalance towards or outright encouraging of LLM/chatbot use in their classes. Since then, I have read more than a dozen school-wide emails from my principal that were seemingly wholly written by an AI model.
How can I as a teacher demand thoughtfulness from my students if the people paid the most in our district can’t even demonstrate a mediocre level of care and attention?
If I, a consummate learning-enjoyer6 am unable to complete rote, dry, majority-online classes that directly concern my profession, then how can I expect anything but the same apathy from my students whose brains are boiled from dopamine sickness and can only think about Fortnite?
How can I tell my student who is so enthused by the recommendation letter a teacher wrote about her that it is AI-written when it’s the only concrete encouragement she’s gotten all year from her other teachers?
What is the point of teaching if you can’t spare the time to write a letter of recommendation but must spend your time writing behavior referrals?
Why not just become a traffic cop and write tickets all day?
At least you’ll probably have a union willing to fight for your rights.
“Everything’s Computer”
Aided by the federal wrecking ball coming back for a second swing at the Department of Education, our state-administered, federally-supported education system is likely to continue lagging behind other modernized countries’, producing horrible results even on its own terms, and robbing American students of their formative years of neuroplasticity in favor of worksheets, packets, and now, computer work.
The increasing dependence upon ‘learning platforms’ such as Lexia, IXL, or Khan Academy7 highlights this de-skilling of teachers to an extreme extent: there are questions on my students’ supposedly-standards-based assignments that I get wrong, even with two English degrees. I only found out later that these companies are bragging about their use of AI to create these clunky, irrelevant-to-the-real-world questions. By expecting rigid compliance from students to abstract or convoluted standards, we have effectively flattened the possibility for students to make mistakes. If everything is simply pass or fail, there is no room for nuance, uncertainty, or uncomfortability, all of which are key to intellectual and intrapersonal development.
Allowing students to develop holistically — actually meeting them where they are and providing the tools to bridge gaps they may have in their understanding — is not possible in a system that does not even view people as full people. The student, aka, the future worker, is required only to ‘know’ the bare minimum in order to ‘function’ in society; anything beyond that is actually detrimental to their ability to ‘shut up and dribble,’ or ignore the realities of the society they inhabit.
There’s a reason that the phrase “ignorance is bliss” has some merit: if you cannot see yourself being wronged you obviously can’t muster a challenge to the existing order that wrongs you.
There’s also a reason that Brave New World has been repeatedly banned. It was right.
At the same time the student is reduced to a raw production material, the education industry’s investment into constant capital has developed more ‘efficient’ technologies of schooling, allowing ‘teachers’ to do a lot less in order to manipulate the machinery of education. So, the leaders in charge of the profession can expect more and more of teachers, who become responsible for ‘educating’ more and more students, to no end. The catch for the teacher-turned-unskilled-worker is a general reduction of consciousness; as the machines get ‘smarter,’ the people operating them get dumber.
Not by any fault of their own the workers are now subject to more and more complicated machinery, dominated by incomprehensible technology that is “indistinguishable from magic,” as Arthur C. Clarke once said. High schools will become pre-Amazon warehouse training facilities run by a handful of computer workers who will not even understand the ‘content’8 they are required to ‘instruct.’
We can watch this de-skilling in process from my classroom to the highest echelons of the academic elite. A recent New Yorker article features some staggering quotes:
“A survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used [ChatGPT] to help with homework assignments…”
A direct quote from a ‘student's’ TikTok who says:
“College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point…”
And the one that, for me, is the most frustrating:
“I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.”
What is this “college student” doing instead of thinking for herself? Watching so much TikTok that her fucking eyes hurt. Are we serious?
As a writing teacher, a student of language, and a thinking being, the next quote struck me as deeply concerning. A student explains step-by-step how they made an AI model write their essay, then almost confesses:
“I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”
The next paragraph contains ‘her’ essay’s first sentence: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” You literally can’t make this shit up. The student’s fake paper continued on to claim that “learning is what ‘makes us truly human,’” which, at this point, I’m not sure if she is!
You’re right, Wendy, you definitely don’t have to think that much. And it shows. She responds, literally not able to read and interpret the chatbot’s essay, which essentially argues she’s not human because she is not learning, stating the common refrain of technapologia that “now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.” My old man response:
As an aside, I will say that my curiosity in LLM-powered chatbots whose creators claim are artificially intelligent is not insignificant. A thing that can, with almost no user input, produce, in some cases, highly sophisticated texts for various uses, and then adapt to the user’s preferences and idiosyncrasies is somewhat cool. For like, a video game. Not for, say, the process of cognition, though.
I find it incredibly hard, however, to countenance the fact that an average AI search query costs 4-5 times as much electricity as a normal search, or as much electricity as “used when talking for an hour on a home phone.” At this point, even though my chronically-ill disabled partner desperately wants to see new medical breakthroughs to help treat some of their more esoteric disorders, I am even hesitant to be in favor of the use of AI in medicine.
If, as Lauritzen (2024)9 found, that AI-assisted screening is more effective at detecting cancerous masses in mammograms, we should not simply cede the territory of looking at mammograms and detecting cancer to a robot. On the contrary: we should interrogate every part of these findings. Why are radiologists not able to spend enough time looking at individual mammograms to diagnose cancer? What are the implications of displacing this workload to an AI system? Will doctors become increasingly reliant on these tools, like many ‘knowledge workers,’ already have? Will workloads actually decrease? Have they ever decreased for workers, even with increased productivity?
Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon’s survey of “knowledge workers,” referred to henceforth by myself as ‘email workers,’ have noted that in every category of critical thinking qualified in the familiar Bloom’s taxonomy10 over half of workers reported putting forth either slightly less or significantly less effort in their jobs as a result of continual AI use.11
It is becoming more and more apparent that nobody wants to work anymore. And who could blame us? The majority of jobs are superfluous, existing only because of the bloated rot of the capitalist state.12
To me, the most telling quote from the New Yorker article is the idea that “most assignments in college are not relevant.” Not relevant to what? The semi-spoken answer: What I care about. A frequent canard of school administrators or district supervisors is that teachers need to ‘make the curriculum relevant to students’ interests and experiences,’ regardless of the context. Despite their best efforts, most educators cannot remake flat, inhuman curricula and inflexible learning standards into ameliatory — much less emancipatory — frameworks and experiences.
The other Janus face of this problem is a trend I’ve been angry about since fall 2023: AI-integrated teaching software. My district’s learning platform (aka, curriculum) for English-Language Arts is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)13 and their proprietary online writing platform is called Writable. Thanks to modern ed tech, the Zizekian fantasy has been made nightmare: a teacher-AI uses an LLM model to grade an student’s AI-written paper. And has praise for it!
Are we — as the kids say — “cooked” …?
Creating meaningful, empowering learning experiences is an uphill, Sisyphean battle in today’s educational landscape. Reading Rethinking Schools’ “Teaching Palestine,” I am — perhaps naively — drawn to an aspirational quote describing a rigorous and intellectually brave vision of public education:
“Inherent in academic exploration and learning about multiple perspectives is the right to make up one’s own mind about what is factually correct and incorrect and about what is morally right or wrong.”
The premise the authors outline above is almost utopian at this point: that students are able to make up their own minds and decide for themselves.
Unfortunately for us, more and more college graduates are “essentially illiterate,” according to Cal State Chico professor Troy Jollimore. These students are illiterate “both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate,” both of which are significant problems in an era where xenophobia and racism are key factors animating far-right parties and ideologies across the Western world. Even though our educational outcomes are dogshit, both Silicon Valley and venture capital still want to take your right to free public school from you. Isn’t that enough of a reason to fight back?
I really do want to emphasize that — despite everything I have said to indicate otherwise — there are some students who are still thoughtful, who still want to think. This aligns with John Warner’s claim that “the students who are brilliant… 1600 SAT-type students… have no interest in using this technology [AI/ChatGPT].”14
Several of my highest-achieving students have expressed significant frustration at their peers’ reliance on AI. While I don’t particularly think these students subscribe to Warner’s idea that “they are fascinated by the products of their own minds,” these outlier students — even those who, in previous generations may have been more likely to become middle-managers or PMC — are now poised to become leaders in their fields. The stratification of class society continues apace. So it goes.
But I do see the seeds of revolutionary care and thoughtfulness growing amidst the seemingly-mundane relational experiences of teaching, from one student offering me bandaids for my vicious cat scratches to another proclaiming that he would “simply not be tempted” by the One Ring.
I just hope that my students can find it in their hearts to forgive me for reading every word they write in their journals and on their assignments. I (too) know the terror of unhoming. But in discomfort there is room for growth.
And for opportunity. And or change. And, one day, for revolution.
I’m thinking about education a lot, and I will be writing about it more in the coming months. Until then, thank you for reading!
-HE
More than half of U.S. adults surveyed scored below a level 2/6 in English proficiency. Source: U.S. Department of Education, NCES, PIAAC, U.S. 2017, U.S. PIAAC 2012/2014.
I am bolding this because I think it’s a fucking bar. If you disagree, please explain your answer in at least 3-4 sentences .
I’ll let you decide which is their primary identity to the state. In modern expressions, think about underage workers across all contexts but especially in fast food industries.
For more on the spiritually degrading aspects of capitalist labor, see Marx’s “Estranged Labour” exegesis from Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.
Yes, you read that right: American teachers are routinely recruited — uncertified, like myself originally — from outside the “teaching profession,” and then made to take classes (sometimes at the Master’s level) in order to keep doing the job they were hired to do.
The term “nerd” has connotations that I do not necessarily consider positive anymore, so I eschew it for a more precise form.
Khan modules are generally well-done, but a majority of the courses are significantly watered down versions of real curriculum materials.
I have seen this discussed somewhat, but the flattening of art and aesthetic consumption to the ingesting of ‘content’ parallels the vapidity of the educational ‘content standard’; the idea of learning is itself seen as something technocratically and statistically parseable, measurable, quantifiable, and systemitizable which is obviously inherently reductive of the way that language, dialectical inquiry, and even bourgeois-capitalist science develop and interpret the world. If all knowledge is known, then what is the point of continuing to progress? Yet, these are the general conclusions of the educational-industrial complex.
Lauritzen AD, Lillholm M, Lynge E, Nielsen M, Karssemeijer N, Vejborg I. Early Indicators of the Impact of Using AI in Mammography Screening for Breast Cancer. Radiology. 2024 Jun;311(3):e232479. doi: 10.1148/radiol.232479. PMID: 38832880. url: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38832880/
Consisting of the domains: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation
Hao-Ping (Hank) Lee, Advait Sarkar, Lev Tankelevitch, Ian Drosos, Sean Rintel, Richard Banks, and Nicholas Wilson. 2025. The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 1121, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713778
See David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory for more about why this economy doesn’t work while making us work even more.
HMH is owned by Veritas Capital, listed as the 4th-largest private equity outfit in the U.S. Also owners of — at various times — Raytheon, DynCorp, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and, unsurprisingly, Cambium Learning Group, among many others.
Transcribed from “Playboi Farti and his AI Homework Machine,” from the podcast Search Engine.