"AI" & social media are red herrings. What's really happening to students: they watch the world's political, financial, social, scientific, business, cultural & security leaders - adults only in name - consistently behave in corrupt, amoral, arrogant & self-interested ways, while their own parents, for one contemptible reason after another, fully support, imitate & excuse this rampant behavior day after dreadful day.

An allegedly intelligent species doesn't ruin its children's only habitat. Why, then, should any child even want to be educated by so-called adults?

On the rare occasions that young people do protest & express anger, harsh criticism & punishment are sure to follow. They're only dissatisfied customers, after all, viewed as regrettable exceptions to a system that works well enough but dares not mention its Taylorist origins, purpose-built to fill 19th-century factories as the most suited conveyors for tethering a newly literate workforce to industrial time management, only to double the workforce, from the mid-20th century onward, with the cynical "inclusion" of women, both to lower wages for workers & artificially inflate "surplus value" for crony managers & their public-facing CEOs.

Why, then, should the kids even trust the adults when the system is clearly designed for factory obedience, not cognitive independence, let alone fair compensation?

I graduated with a baccalaureate from a public–private European School, touted as a superior model for "civic education", but underneath the elitist & Eurocratic surface, you could find many students who, to no one's surprise, simply learned to parrot what their teachers had hand-fed them in class. While critical thinking was encouraged, superficially, it was also marked down, & while there were many creative ways to maintain a parent-pleasing average, you also had to share in the blue-banner pride of "Queen Europa" - & no sooner did you refuse than you found out just how conditioned we were to complete our tasks on Her Majesty's time, or else.

Cui bono?

Who benefits?

To send kids to university, with all that baggage, is to bury them in a time capsule & certify them as graduates in advanced irrelevance, learning their way to limited opportunities & limitless replacement within years of securing a stupefying e-mail job that offers only brief glimpses of a future against any proof that their false sense of security will be further threatened by alienation, automation, & the entropic randomness of life.

Schooling continues to prepare young people for the past, not the future, & generative so-called "AI" & "social" media, being mechanized forms of productive human stupidity, simply reflect this in their output, used & re-used to maintain the sta-tech quo, just as the school bell once did for the Victorians & operant conditioning still does AC, that is, after Covid.

If you follow a string of assignments at school just to follow a string of assignments at a corporation, the question isn't whether you'll be replaced, but WHEN you'll be replaced. I'm the (discontinued) product of public higher education & it's made my life infintely harder, just sorting through the diabolical volume of what to unlearn, deprogram & actively decondition myself from. Taylorism has done NOTHING to nurture the critical-thinking skills served up in standardized curricula, now ruthlessly enforced by bots of the two-legged & double-chinned variety. AI- or computer-assisted learning might well benefit some minority or subset of youth, struggling with the social aspects of school, but unless their learning style is to read from a screen & only a screen, they, like all kids, will just learn to hate their future bosses as much as the corporatized adults are right to hate theirs.

Why, then, should any child be forced along this march when they'd rather choose to go their own way?

A march which, for most of us, is the means by which we're turned into look-alike bureaucrats useful to a hierarchy &, at best, glancingly democratic social order of tie-wearing bosses who never seem to ask their own "students", by way of direct referenda for example, if any of us should be resigned to being so useful before we're offered a choice.

Needless to say, my own teachers & university professors did not smell the red herrings they cooked up. They could only blush when I brought up the smell, and inherent cruelty of it.

How unexpected.

Even if education isn't intent on creating dull, dim-witted, & narrow-minded workers, that's still its one & tragic outcome. Schools are hatcheries for economic champions, universities are search engines for little heroes & so-called democracies are Petri dishes for the ingredients of landslide victories. As the fraternity inculcates cruelty, so the classroom, enabled by myopic media, teaches ruthlessness & narcissism while the global GPA rises in the alchemical process. Our mores, crumbling institutions & social norms instill the ritual worship of victors & volunteers, as well as the ritual humiliation, if not sacrifice, of those who refuse to conform to this self-devouring orthodoxy.

Education no longer catapults children, no longer transforms young adults into better human beings, because it's not, & never has been, a priority, despite what you believe.

The public schooling system is a historical artifact of the 1800s when now-evergreen markets of health, wealth, relationships & happiness were non-existent. The factory-based approach is indiscriminately applied to education spaces in which neither the current modes of teaching, nor the outdated concept of the classroom, not even the timetable & graded assignments are examined or questioned from the root up.

At best, thousands hack at the branches & nothing changes. Mindless rebellion is just as dumb as mindless obedience, and the road to hell, as you know, is still paved with good SIMULATIONS.

When the system prioritizes convergent thinking, compartmentalized learning, conformity over confrontation, memorization over process, authority as unquestionable, failure as inadmissible & intelligence defined as centuries-old book smarts that condition students to accept replaceable jobs, it is the knowledge not taught in schools TODAY that will be their source of self-actualization not found in employment NOW.

And who cares to tell them the truth?

Kids don't want to know anything anymore.

Nah, they just want to watch it burn.

Can you blame them?

Are the kids even at fault for being "post-loyal"?

And are the boomers & Xers really so confused, after lying to three consecutive generations, that they can't be bothered to board the Titanic with them?

We lost the dedication of the youth a long time ago, & this was never about those wretched smartphones & it's not even about the threat of AI, but all about the fact that kids are hip to society's tricks.

The kids have finally gathered, with their combined understanding, that school, & the obedient society of voluntary serfs it produced, is a bottom-up scam, an incubator for little slaves who go on to become big slaves, even if this defeats people's best intentions & even if corporate bondage is the byproduct of school as an institution churning out wagies with Stockholm syndrome. Comfortable but captive, gilded but caged, conscious but exploited…

Empowered but powerless.

Fortunately, that sense of powerlessness can be co-opted by a handful of power-hungry Cluster-Bs who love to remind us, with each (s)election cycle, that we need them to preserve our hard-won gains, if fucking any.

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