Truthout has an editorial entitled, Regulating AI Isn't Enough. Let's Dismantle the Logic That Put It in Schools. Pushing for AI in schools is part of a larger extractive and dehumanizing trend, as opposed to liberating minds.
Funny — until it wasn't. Because behind the gaffe was something far more disturbing: The person leading federal education policy wants to replace the emotional and intellectual process of teaching and learning with a mechanical process of content delivery, data extraction, and surveillance masquerading as education.
[...] Philosopher Raphaël Millière explains that what these systems are doing is not thinking or understanding, but using what he calls "algorithmic mimicry": sophisticated pattern-matching that mimics human outputs without possessing human cognition. He writes that large pre-trained models like ChatGPT or DALL-E 2 are more like "stochastic chameleons" — not merely parroting back memorized phrases, but blending into the style, tone, and logic of a given prompt with uncanny fluidity. That adaptability is impressive — and can be dangerous — precisely because it can so easily be mistaken for understanding.
So-called AI can be useful in certain contexts. But what we're calling AI in schools today doesn't think, doesn't reason, doesn't understand. It guesses. It copies. It manipulates syntax and patterns based on probability, not meaning. It doesn't teach — it prompts. It doesn't mentor — it manages.
In short, it mimics intelligence. But mimicry is not wisdom. It is not care. It is not pedagogy.
Previously:
(2025) 1960s Schools Experiment That Created a New Alphabet and Left Thousands of Children Unable to Spell
(2024) Schools Under Siege: From Nation-States To Ransomware Gangs
(2024) Some Teachers Are Now Using ChatGPT to Grade Papers
(2023) Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?
(2023) Amid ChatGPT Outcry, Some Teachers are Inviting AI to Class
(2023) Seattle Public Schools Bans ChatGPT; District 'Requires Original Thought and Work From Students'
Related Stories
Seattle Public Schools is joining a growing number of school districts banning ChatGPT, the natural language chatbot from OpenAI that has sparked widespread attention in recent weeks.
ChatGPT has garnered praise for its ability to quickly answer complex queries and instantly produce content.
But it's also generating concern among educators worried that students will use the technology to do their homework.
SPS blocked ChatGPT on all school devices in December, said Tim Robinson, a spokesman for Seattle Public Schools, in an email to GeekWire.
"Like all school districts, Seattle Public Schools does not allow cheating and requires original thought and work from students," he said.
The district also blocks other "cheating tools," Robinson said.
Under the fluorescent lights of a fifth grade classroom in Lexington, Kentucky, Donnie Piercey instructed his 23 students to try and outwit the "robot" that was churning out writing assignments:
The robot was the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, which can generate everything from essays and haikus to term papers within seconds. The technology has panicked teachers and prompted school districts to block access to the site. But Piercey has taken another approach by embracing it as a teaching tool, saying his job is to prepare students for a world where knowledge of AI will be required.
"This is the future," said Piercey, who describes ChatGPT as just the latest technology in his 17 years of teaching that prompted concerns about the potential for cheating. The calculator, spellcheck, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube. Now all his students have Chromebooks on their desks. "As educators, we haven't figured out the best way to use artificial intelligence yet. But it's coming, whether we want it to or not."
The article goes on to describe different exercises Piercey uses and comments from other teachers who are using ChatGPT to enhance their lessons.
[...] The fifth graders seemed unaware of the hype or controversy surrounding ChatGPT. For these children, who will grow up as the world's first native AI users, their approach is simple: Use it for suggestions, but do your own work.
Previously:
- Seattle Public Schools Bans ChatGPT; District 'Requires Original Thought and Work From Students'
- ChatGPT Arrives in the Academic World
Students say they are getting 'screwed over' for sticking to the rules. Professors say students are acting like 'tyrants.' Then came ChatGPT:
When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes.
But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn't be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.
"Anyone who hears that knows it's a free-for-all," Beyda told me.
[...] For decades, campus standards have been plummeting. The hallowed, ivy-draped buildings, the stately quads, the timeless Latin mottos—all that tradition and honor have been slipping away. That's an old story. Then Covid struck and all bets were off. With college kids doing college from their bedrooms and smartphones, and with the explosion of new technology, cheating became not just easy but practically unavoidable. "Cheating is rampant," a Princeton senior told me. "Since Covid there's been an increasing trend toward grade inflation, cheating, and ultimately, academic mediocrity."
Now that students are back on campus, colleges are having a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle. Remote testing combined with an array of tech tools—exam helpers like Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet, and Coursera; messaging apps like GroupMe and WhatsApp; Dropbox folders containing course material from years past; and most recently, ChatGPT, the AI that can write essays—have permanently transformed the student experience.
[...] On January 2, a Princeton University computer science major named Edward Tian—who may be the most hated man on campus—tweeted: "I spent New Years building GPTZero—an app that can quickly and efficiently detect whether an essay is ChatGPT or human written."
So now it's nerd vs. nerd, and one of the nerds is going to win—probably whoever gets more venture funding. Everything is up in the air.
Previously:
- Amid ChatGPT Outcry, Some Teachers are Inviting AI to Class
- Seattle Public Schools Bans ChatGPT; District 'Requires Original Thought and Work From Students'
- ChatGPT Arrives in the Academic World
In a notable shift toward sanctioned use of AI in schools, some educators in grades 3–12 are now using a ChatGPT-powered grading tool called Writable, reports Axios. The tool, acquired last summer by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is designed to streamline the grading process, potentially offering time-saving benefits for teachers. But is it a good idea to outsource critical feedback to a machine?
[...]
"Make feedback more actionable with AI suggestions delivered to teachers as the writing happens," Writable promises on its AI website. "Target specific areas for improvement with powerful, rubric-aligned comments, and save grading time with AI-generated draft scores." The service also provides AI-written writing-prompt suggestions: "Input any topic and instantly receive unique prompts that engage students and are tailored to your classroom needs."
[...]
The reliance on AI for grading will likely have drawbacks. Automated grading might encourage some educators to take shortcuts, diminishing the value of personalized feedback. Over time, the augmentation from AI may allow teachers to be less familiar with the material they are teaching. The use of cloud-based AI tools may have privacy implications for teachers and students. Also, ChatGPT isn't a perfect analyst. It can get things wrong and potentially confabulate (make up) false information, possibly misinterpret a student's work, or provide erroneous information in lesson plans.
[...]
there's a divide among parents regarding the use of AI in evaluating students' academic performance. A recent poll of parents revealed mixed opinions, with nearly half of the respondents open to the idea of AI-assisted grading.As the generative AI craze permeates every space, it's no surprise that Writable isn't the only AI-powered grading tool on the market. Others include Crowdmark, Gradescope, and EssayGrader. McGraw Hill is reportedly developing similar technology aimed at enhancing teacher assessment and feedback.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
If we were to draw an infosec Venn diagram, with one circle representing "sensitive info that attackers would want to steal" and the other "limited resources plus difficult-to-secure IT environments," education would sit in the overlap.
Schools – including K-12, colleges, and universities – store health and medical records, data belonging to minors, financial information, sensitive research, AI training models and other proprietary IP. At the same time, they are famously understaffed (with the exception of some well-heeled private institutions) and underfunded – especially when it comes to IT and security.
Their network users include students – some as young as five years old – teachers and professors, doctors and patients, food service workers, janitors, staff, and visitors.
Plus, educational facilities and campuses have to secure IT environments that span both legacy and modern systems, covering everything from payment processing systems to medical equipment as well as personal phones, computers, and gaming consoles.
Every week, the education/research sector faces an average of 2,507 attempted cyber attacks, with everyone from nation-state groups to ransomware gangs and other financially motivated criminals putting schools in their crosshairs. At least according to Microsoft, which, in its Cyber Signals report published today, warned that Iran and North Korea are among the miscreants targeting schools.
As of the second quarter of 2024, education holds the dubious distinction of being the third most targeted industry, based on analyzed security events, Redmond notes.
Here's an interesting story someone dropped in IRC:
The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of children unable to spell (and yes, I tweaked the sub title to fit into SN's tiny title limit):
The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a radical, little-known educational experiment trialled in British schools (and in other English-speaking countries) during the 1960s and 70s. Billed as a way to help children learn to read faster by making spelling more phonetically intuitive, it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight. And then it vanished without explanation. Barely documented, rarely acknowledged, and quietly abandoned – but never quite forgotten by those it touched.
Why was it only implemented in certain schools – or even, in some cases, only certain classes in those schools? How did it appear to disappear without record or reckoning? Are there others like my mum, still aggrieved by ITA? And what happens to a generation taught to read and write using a system that no longer exists?
[...] Unlike Spanish or Welsh, where letters have consistent sound values, English is a patchwork of linguistic inheritances. Its roughly 44 phonemes – the distinct sounds that make up speech – can each be spelt multiple ways. The long "i" sound alone, as in "eye", has more than 20 possible spellings. And many letter combinations contradict one another across different words: think of "through", "though" and "thought".
It was precisely this inconsistency that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand – identified as the single greatest obstacle for young readers. In a 1953 parliamentary debate, he argued that it is our "illogical and ridiculous spelling" which is the "chief handicap" that leads many children to stumble with reading, with lasting consequences for their education. His proposed solution, launched six years later, was radical: to completely reimagine the alphabet.
The result was ITA: 44 characters, each representing a distinct sound, designed to bypass the chaos of traditional English and teach children to read, and fast. Among the host of strange new letters were a backwards "z", an "n" with a "g" inside, a backwards "t" conjoined with an "h", a bloated "w" with an "o" in the middle. Sentences in ITA were all written in lower case.
[...] The issue isn't simply whether or not ITA worked – the problem is that no one really knows. For all its scale and ambition, the experiment was never followed by a national longitudinal study. No one tracked whether the children who learned to read with ITA went on to excel, or struggle, as they moved through the education system. There was no formal inquiry into why the scheme was eventually dropped, and no comprehensive lessons-learned document to account for its legacy.
The article has a few stories of ITA students who went on to have poor spelling and bad grades in school from teachers who didn't seem to know about ITA.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gnuman on Tuesday September 02 2025, @02:44PM (1 child)
But, is it good enough?
As species, we haven't really gravitated to pragmatic answers. We just go for the easy ones. AI is an easy answer.
Secondly, many teachers are good teachers. They don't even know the material. They mimic what is in some book they were provided. In such situations, AI is an improvement.
The problems is not with AI teachers. The problem is with students that can outsource their *work* to AI. Then they are no longer learning, they just have an illusion of learning. That may even be good enough for a while, until these kids meet the real world where AI is no longer there. You then end up with toddler brains, unable to function and no longer capable of abstract thought as it was outsourced to the AI to trick another AI (ie. the "teacher AI")
You may say that the students are then cheating. But we are told to cheat all the time now. Don't do the work. Let the AI summarize things for you, even if it does it wrongly. Don't do the work. Let the AI do the coding. Don't do the work. Let the AI come up with a marketing plan. Don't do the work. Let the AI review these AI generated resumes.
Road to hell is paved with good intentions and all that. It applies especially to AI.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gnuman on Tuesday September 02 2025, @02:46PM
typo correction.... if editing was possible....
s,many teachers are,many teachers aren't
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2025, @02:50PM (2 children)
No comments from our trumpeteers extolling the wonder that is Ai. Interesting. Simple fact is fascism needs uneducated victims.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 02 2025, @03:11PM (1 child)
Is that even a Trump thing?
I feel like that's the avowed position of the sensible economy-focused political center. "America must innovate to succeed, and things I don't personally understand are innovation, therefor high fidelity predictive text is what the US must do to succeed"
I don't know how many members of congress in either party are willing to accurately assert that this slop shit sucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2025, @03:49PM
Well, we could call it a "Fall of Rome" thing, he's just the latest incarnation, but the idea is the same
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 02 2025, @02:53PM (11 children)
Schools have always prepared students for the workplaces of their parents and grandparents, almost especially if the former workplace is in decline.
They were still pushing assembly line style life when I was in, LOL. Also pushing cursive.
If you see public ed as something more like hazing then it all starts to make more sense.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 02 2025, @02:55PM
My point being that if Mom could be an email bot 20 years ago, replaced by a AI today, that makes sense that schools produce email bots in 2025, especially if hiring for that has declined. Always be Hazing!
(Score: 5, Touché) by ikanreed on Tuesday September 02 2025, @03:08PM (4 children)
I'm often inclined to disagree with your posts, but this time, I'm not even sure there is anything to disagree with.
If I try to re-express your post as a syllogism
A. "Traditional" schooling serves to train factory workers
B. "Modern" schooling prepares for email jobs
C. ???
Conclusion: School is bad? Is that even your conclusion?
I don't quite grasp the through-line here.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 02 2025, @03:31PM (3 children)
Its business as usual for an org that was mostly interested in getting me a nice factory job where I'll do all my basic arithmetic by hand on paper. They also wanted me to learn curvise as all papers at uni will have to be submitted as cursive, presumably with a quill pen. Of course tech made that obsolete before I even got to HS in the gen-x era.
So... preparing students to be email busywork writers in an era where most online persona are AI or bots or both sounds about par for the course.
You'll know 3-d VR is obsolete in the workplace when high schools have it as a graduation requirement LOL.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @01:59PM (2 children)
That's mostly because you reject intelligence and are on board with all the mouth breathers that support the President despite all the numerous issues with what he's doing. He'll be dead in a year tops from the consequences of his age and poor healthcare, and the rest of us will be left to deal with the various ignorant followers that he had. It is not going to be pretty and I only hope that a party emerges with the stones to prosecute anybody and everybody that supported this madness so that we don't have a repeat of the civil war where a bunch of ignorant hicks are allowed to believe that they won, even though they very clearly are still in the country and are not permitted to have slaves.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday September 03 2025, @03:15PM (1 child)
The whole reason a large swath of Americans vote for an arrogant shithead like trump in the first place is that the Dems don't have any actual convictions. The closest they seem to come to having specific ideals they'll actually hold on to is pointing at trump and saying "not that"
The last Democrat presidential candidate didn't even have an official published platform for fear of offending the non-existent moderate conservatives they thought would win them the election.
I don't think that's going to change enough to get the purges you're hoping for.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @03:26PM
Yes, so far as the actual VOTING goes, that's largely my take. The Democrats keep moving further and further to the right and sabotaging anybody promising the voters anything better. Even when the voters think they're voting for change, they don't get it. Obama was an absolute fraud and he wound up offering up a right wing health care overhaul and then watering it down even further because he didn't want to bother whipping the votes in his own party to get even a public option included.
And clearly we're not going to get the purges we need because the donors agree on most of the worst stuff, it's only been in the last year where it's gone so cartoonishly super-villainy that even normies are starting to have to admit that the politicians on the Democratic side flat out don't care. Right now you've got a handful of Democrats doing anything at all and we're getting strong questions and silence from leadership.
The voting doesn't actually represent the issue I'm thinking about so much as the vast numbers of already right leaning voters that flat out buy into the MAGA cult. Folks like VLM that seem to be just flat out incapable of reasoning when it comes to Trump, MAGA and the modern GOP. They may well be smart and/or educated in other areas, but when it comes to voting, it's hard to comprehend how anybody could be that ignorant about how the system is supposed to work.
My personal biggest fear is that it's already too late. That Trump will have his health event that either kills him or incapacitates him to the point where even MAGA has to admit that he's no longer fit and the Democrats get back into power the next election cycle, and they just flat out waste the opportunity by stymieing anybody on the left that's pushing for policies that benefit the voters, and don't lose enough support to allow a viable 3rd party to replace them on the left. And that seems probable as nothing inspires the Democratic elites to fight quite like somebody on the left promising to do things to help normal people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Tuesday September 02 2025, @11:44PM (4 children)
You say that like cursive isn't useful. Android phones still accept it via handwriting input and it's a lot more efficient when doing a lot of writing. It's just flat out easier to mix handwritten notes with drawings in many cases.
This issue with AI is that it's not very smart at all and depends heavily on strip mining the stuff that humans have done in order to do anything. And, it's been going through all of the collected creations of humans back to the beginning, and as such isn't really ever going to keep up with human advancement.
There are uses for AI that are helpful, such as quickly determining the difficulty level of books, but it's vastly overrated and if we decide to go down the road of using AI in education, we're likely to wind up in a place where nobody knows what's going on.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by BeaverCleaver on Wednesday September 03 2025, @04:34AM (3 children)
Not everything we do at school has to be "useful" anyway. Even if students don't need to write cursive for their job, learning to do so improves their fine motor skills, and also helps them "learn how to learn." School isn't supposed to be merely a preparation for getting a job and being a cog in a machine. It is supposed to do much more than that. School is meant to teach people how to be lifelong learners. Teach them how to get along with other humans. To show kids something beyond what they would learn from their immediate family or church.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @05:31AM
In general yes, although there's so much stuff that is useful that could be covered in school that just being useful isn't always enough. Every year, we get another years worth of history that probably ought to be addressed in some fashion, not to mention that technology keeps getting more complicated. Which is kind of dumb as most of the complications in technology are purely so that companies can sell all the stuff that goes along with it. It's hard for me to point out anything that's got a legitimate reason for being more complicated that isn't for professionals anyways. Most of the time it's either incompetent UX people or companies that are looking to charge people for support contracts or deliberately doing it to prevent interoperability.
You are correct about the life long learning and that's part of why there ought to be more emphasis on things such as knowing and understanding how to read mathematical expressions as any of the easy ones have been solvable by relatively inexpensive technology for decades. My TI-89 Titanium from nearly 20 years ago was under $200 and could do algebra quite effectively, and it wasn't even the first model to manage it.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 03 2025, @12:15PM (1 child)
Have they been doing a good job of that, LOL?
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @01:50PM
To be fair, ignorant people have been sabotaging the process for decades by cutting school funding, book burning and exerting undue influence over what goes on in schools. Not to mention that students are actually in classes for only like 12% of their time during the years they're in K-12 and many of them come from homes where both parents now work due to the continued attacks on worker rights coming from the right.
Yes, they could be doing a lot better, but it's kind of interesting how it's the same ignorant people that are complaining about that who are also disproportionately responsible for voting for the politicians that are sabotaging the process. Then again, anybody ignorant enough to fall for all the MAGA stuff is one of those children that was left behind. Something that the GOP was at least willing to pretend to care about 20years ago. Now, the strategy is pretty clearly to leave as many children behind as possible so that they don't question all the obvious BS going on.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 02 2025, @03:21PM (15 children)
Modern education functions in a capitalist worldview where the purpose of a system is to combine the inputs (materials and labor) to produce a product as cheaply and quickly as possible. The inputs of education are computers, teachers, children, books, etc, and the outputs are people that appear to be qualified enough either for jobs or for the next stage in their education.
"Appear to be" is doing a lot in that last sentence. And you will notice that those graduates actually knowing anything or being able to do anything is not a requirement, and indeed anything they do that involves learning things is an expense that management (a.k.a. "deans" and "administration") would rather not pay.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 02 2025, @04:01PM (3 children)
"Modern education functions in a capitalist worldview where the purpose of a system is to combine the inputs (materials and labor) to produce a product as cheaply and quickly as possible."
Which no longer is done in America
In the future, education will exist so that Republicans are elected and people have enough knowledge to push "buy it now" on their phones.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 02 2025, @06:19PM (1 child)
You might be confused between how much it costs to produce a product (in this case humans with diplomas), and how much is being charged to customers to produce it. The goal of any effort under capitalism is to maximize the difference between those two things.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Tuesday September 02 2025, @11:47PM
That's a large part of why education used to be heavily subsidized at the post secondary level. Even if people aren't directly using what they've learned, it can still be used indirectly in many ways. Unfortunately, it also makes people harder to fear monger with rightwing talking points, which is a large part of why the funding keeps getting cut.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 02 2025, @09:17PM
Will they have enough money, tho'? Or anything of value to exchange for the thingy to be bought?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Troll) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday September 03 2025, @12:45AM (10 children)
Named by its enemies, capitalism is the system that inevitably results when people's right to life is protected. From that right come subsidiary rights: the right do things to support one's life, and the right to protect oneself from those who would harm your life. To support oneself, a person needs freedom of action, freedom to communicate, and the freedom to own property (which leftists so hate.) The right to protect oneself includes direct action in emergencies, and the right to form a just government whose sole function is to protect rights.
There is nothing in capitalism that points exclusively to cheapness, and it wasn't capitalism that produced the Trabant. People living in a capitalist system can choose to produce high quality goods or low quality goods; they can choose to purchase high quality goods or low quality goods.
At a particular quality level, not producing a product as cheaply and quickly as possible is a waste of material and (if you don't have something better to do) of time.
Not all managers are shallow. Many are happy to see people improve themselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03 2025, @01:01AM (1 child)
"Named by its enemies, capitalism is the system that inevitably results when people's right to life is protected."
aka "People with the gold make the rules"
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @02:29AM
I think you've confused "capitalism" with "Das Kapital"...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday September 03 2025, @02:50AM (1 child)
Produce? Produce??
The world can be very confusing. Aside from the complexity, there's a lot of bull, lies, wrong thinking, framing, false narratives, superstition, conspiracy theories, scams, grifts, and cons, plus our own mental shortcomings. Education is about learning to think and reason. We have made some progress. People used to halfway believe a lot of motivated and just plain dumb superstitions. Like that the number 13 is bad luck. Or that seeing a black cat, or having a black cat cross your path is a bad sign. Or that there are spirits and ghosts, and that psychics and mediums can communicate with them. That kind of superstition clearly taps into our fear of death. Astrology I find rather telling, in that in astrology, it's almost as if the stars exist only to bear news for us. That's a ridiculously egotistical view. Some still do eat up that garbage, but most of us have learned better. Even as a child, I never found horoscopes at all convincing, quickly seeing that many were so vague that they'd be true for most people, perhaps everyone. I noted that the newspaper had the horoscopes in the comics section, and I wondered if that was an acknowledgment that astrology was not to be taken too seriously, or at all seriously. I didn't see anything particularly entertaining about it either, and reading that quickly became boring. It was the same old shtick over and over, and I wondered why the newspaper even bothered printing it. When the news broke that First Lady Nancy Reagan ate up astrology, she became a laughingstock. Embarrassed the United States, too. From what I gather from history, people used to be much more superstitious.
These LLMs tap a common mental shortcoming, the same shortcoming tapped by con artists posing as psychics, clairvoyants, prophets, astrologers, palm readers, and so on. It was soon obvious to me that LLMs actually have no intelligence at all. They merely bandy words. They're very good at bandying words. But they have no understanding of what they say. The only mystery to me was, why were so many people fooled and why all this hype and hysteria? I think I understand. This [softwarecrisis.dev] explains it fairly well.
And so, as should be obvious to the well educated, this casting of education in terms of "trying to produce" is of course a too narrow, and mean, view of it that overlooks the enormous value in having become a wiser, better person. The educated person is not going to cower in fear of superstitious nonsense, or worse, aggress against whatever they wrongly accuse, going on witch hunts. The value to society in heading off witch hunts, lynchings, and the like, is huge. The educated person will also, it is hoped, be just a tiny bit harder to con. Falling for a con hurts more than the victim, it encourages further corruptive activity.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 03 2025, @02:34PM
Yes, all of that is what education should be.
I'm talking about what education is. Those aren't the same thing.
Among other things, you mention that properly educated people are harder to con. I agree with you. Which explains why a society that has largely been run by con-men for the last several decades would want to have the worst educational system for the public at large they think they can get away with.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Insightful) by BeaverCleaver on Wednesday September 03 2025, @04:40AM (3 children)
No but such "capitalism" gave us the Edsel and the Pinto. It also contributed to a massive decline in public transportation. You could choose any car you wanted (as long as it was a big gas guzzler). But you couldn't choose efficient public transit as an alternative to driving.
This is a very short-sighted view. What about maintaining sovereign capability? What about all the negative externalities that don't get factored into the price or time estimate? The most obvious example is environmental protection. It's cheaper to make things in a place where the local don't care about pollution. This ensures low prices until those areas are too polluted to sustain the factories or their population of workers. Then at best, prices shoot up. At worst, you have large displaced populations of angry people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @05:33AM (2 children)
Yes, and that's why it was such a mistake to underestimate the importance of government and regulations in terms of guarding against market failures. Libertarians in particular seem awfully fond of corporate control of everything, even when that comes with fewer options for restraining bad actors. It's hard to effectively boycott companies when there's only 4 or 5 in a given market and the all adopt similar bad practices.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03 2025, @11:03AM (1 child)
Yeah most libertarians are idiots[1]. There's no right to bear arms in Disneyland. There's no freedom of speech in Apple.
The more the Corps own and control the less those "Precious Amendments" apply...
Those who think the corporations automatically do a better job than government haven't been paying attention for the past decade or so. So many corporations trying to screw people that words like "Enshittification" pop up.
[1] The ones that aren't idiots are the evil ones with power trying to get more power to screw the people even more.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @01:56PM
I keep pointing out that if they really think that the government is the enemy, that they should move to someplace where there is no government, because such hellholes do exist. Oddly enough, I don't believe any of them have ever taken the suggestion seriously and gone.
I think there's some sort of intellectual deficiency that leads them to not see the very obvious conclusion of Libertarianism. There is a reason why pretty much everywhere that humans have ever lived has evolved some form of governance after the population grew to more than a handful of people and the places that don't have a functioning government now, mostly had one until it was toppled with no group available with the strength to enforce a new one.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 03 2025, @02:31PM
No it isn't: It was a system imposed by force with the Enclosure process that gave control over all the land to a handful of rich people, and continues to use force to enforce property rights over most others. It very consistently protects people's right to personal property over somebody else's right to life whenever those two come into conflict, e.g. under capitalism a landlord has the right to keep their apartment empty while somebody else risks death on the streets.
But none of that changes the really sweet spots of business under capitalism, which tend to be:
1. Government contracts where neither the quality or quantity of goods produced matters so long as the right politicians get kickbacks.
2. Monopolies, monopsonies (1 buyer in a market), and to a lesser extent oligopolies and oligopsonies: If there are a limited number of buyers or sellers of a product in a market, and the product is a valuable and important commodity, then the advantage goes to the few buyers and sellers that exist to skew the prices upwards or downwards. The best-known example of this has to be in the shiny rock business and the one company that controls the entire market for a particular kind of shiny rocks.
3. Taking low-quality products and engaging in enough turd-polishing to be able to sell them as high-quality products. So using your example of the crappy car, this would be like taking an accident-prone car which couldn't handle being out in the rain and successfully selling it for more than competing luxury vehicles.
So in the education marketplace, this would be why private for-profit 2-year institutions work hard to portray themselves as offering exactly the same product as Stanford or MIT, even though they plainly don't.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Wednesday September 03 2025, @03:34PM
You clearly haven't read Adam Smith then, because he was very clear about the fact that without a government and regulations to stop it, every capitalist economy will eventually devolve into a single source provider for everything, because that's always going to be more profitable than having to compete. And once enough of the business is done by one company, they can operate at a loss long enough to put everybody else out of business. It's literally why Sherman and Clayton were put into law in the US.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Undefined on Wednesday September 03 2025, @10:58AM
The cynic in me reminds me that grade schools also babysit. Which lets the parents be cogs in the workforce, as well as at the same time, keeping (most) kids from competing in the general job market or working with their parents in family businesses. Along with the relatively recent (late 1800's ... early 1900's) laws that assist with the latter.
And speaking of the actual public school curricula they pushed in the 1960's, they weren't doing all that stellar a job of "providing an education", then, either. Football, though... now that was emphasized. Rah, rah, blah blah blah.
And considering the 2016 and 2024 elections, it looks to me like some very shitty education policies have definitely come home to roost. And we're all paying for it here in the US, definitely including those who made it happen.
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Hover to reveal elaborations.
(Score: 1, Troll) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday September 03 2025, @07:30PM
I vehemently disagree with the opinion that AI does not have a place in schools. Our classrooms move, at best, at the pace set by the slowest kid in the class. Kids that can go faster are stuck with busywork and the drudgery is painful. We refuse to sort kids by ability for political reasons; AIs represent a tantalizingly close lifeline away from that. They are a near-infinitely patient and broad tutor to allow kids to move at their own pace instead. Please don't rip that away.
"AI in schools today doesn't think, doesn't reason, doesn't understand."
How many teachers also match that same description, clock-punching their way to retirement?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 04 2025, @06:36AM
Not American here, but Asian. A lot of the Asian education institutions are based on rote learning anyway, and the teachers don't really add much. Though I agree a better system is needed, replacing these mechanatrons of teaching meat-bags with AI isn't really a step back but a step forward in my mind.
Again, not advocating for rote learning here, but barring a change to that - AI does bring value. YMMV of course stateside.