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#schooling — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #schooling, aggregated by home.social.

  1. The Cognitive Bargain Has Ended: A Generation Born Without Comparative Advantage

    The claim circulating in policy papers, venture capital essays, and parental anxiety threads runs like this: no child born this year will grow up to be smarter than artificial intelligence. The line gets used as a slogan, which is the first sign it deserves examination. Slogans that move easily through dinner parties usually carry hidden machinery. The machinery here is a definition of intelligence narrow enough to fit on a benchmark and broad enough to terrify a parent. Both functions are intentional, and both deserve to be unbundled before the consequences can be argued honestly.

    A six-year-old can pour milk without spilling, recognize her grandmother by the sound of her walk on the stairs, and read her father’s mood from a quarter-second facial flicker before he speaks. No current AI does these reliably, which is why the warehouse, the construction site, and the elder-care ward continue to employ humans at rising wages while law firms cut their summer associate classes. What machines do well, with present technology, is symbol manipulation at scale: text, code, formal reasoning, pattern completion across enormous corpora of written human output. The honest version of the claim is narrower than the slogan and still consequential. No child born this year will outperform machines at symbol manipulation, retrieval, or formal reasoning across most of the tasks that currently pay a salary in an office. The slogan compresses that into a panic, which is bad rhetoric and bad policy, and the underlying observation remains true. What follows from the observation is the actual subject of the analysis below.

    The Credentialed Class Loses Its Logic

    The first casualty is the credentialed professional class, roughly the top 20 percent of American earners by household income. This stratum organized itself across the twentieth century around cognitive screening. The SAT in 1926, refined through the GI Bill expansion. The LSAT in 1948. The MCAT in its modern multiple-choice form in 1962. The USMLE consolidated in 1992. Each gate selected for a particular form of paid cognition: rapid pattern recognition under time pressure, short-term retention of densely structured information, formal reasoning across domain-specific symbol systems. The gates were effective because the cognitive work they screened for was scarce, expensive to develop, and economically valuable.

    Three conditions held the system together. Scarcity was the first: only humans could perform the cognitive work, and only some humans, after long training. Expense was the second: the training cost time and money and required institutional infrastructure no individual could replicate. Value was the third: the market rewarded the work because nothing cheaper could produce equivalent output. All three conditions are now eroding simultaneously. A subscription that costs less than a Manhattan dinner produces legal memos, differential diagnoses, and tax planning at a level competent enough to embarrass the junior tier of every paid profession.

    Embarrassment falls short of replacement. The senior partner still signs the brief. The attending physician still admits the patient. The accounting principal still files the return. What has collapsed is the economic logic of the apprentice tier, the rung at which young people once learned the trade by performing the work that AI now performs faster and at a thousandth of the cost. Without the apprentice tier, the senior tier has no successors, and the senior tier itself ages out within twenty years. The professions are not being replaced. They are being denied a generation, which is the same outcome on a longer clock.

    The lawyer keeps courtroom presence, client relationship, and signature liability. For the doctor, what survives is touch, witness, legal accountability, and judgment under stakes. The architect’s irreducible work happens in the kitchen, in conversation with the homeowner about how the family actually lives. Three of those four functions are not why medical school costs $300,000. The training, the credentialing, the expensive cognitive certification, was effective because it produced the rare commodity. When the commodity is no longer rare, the price of training cannot hold. Either tuition collapses, which would gut the universities that have leveraged themselves on that revenue, or graduates default on debt for credentials that no longer command premium wages. Both outcomes are visible in early data. Neither has yet been admitted by the institutions whose survival depends on denying it.

    The same compression is hitting working-class employment, particularly in transportation, customer service, and routine clerical work, and the human stakes there are larger in absolute terms. The reason this analysis concentrates on the credentialed class is that this class produced and sustained the public sphere through which the broader transition will be argued, named, and contested. When that class loses its grip on its own coherence, the conversation about every other displacement becomes harder to organize.

    The Parental Project Loses Its Currency

    The second consequence is psychological and reaches beyond economics into the structure of family life. American parenting in the educated class has run for at least three generations on a transmission model. Cultivate the child’s mind, secure the child’s place. The cultivation produced status, the status produced security, and the bargain held because each generation could roughly verify the prior one’s judgment. A father who tutored his daughter in algebra in 1995 watched her, twelve years later, take a meeting with someone who had been tutored similarly by similarly anxious parents. The investment paid out in a recognizable currency.

    The currency has been redenominated without warning. A father in 2026 watches his daughter receive better tutoring, free, from a machine that has read every algebra textbook ever written and never tires. The democratization is real and worth celebrating. The disappearance of his comparative advantage is also real, and both arrive on the same Tuesday. He had counted on that advantage. Greed had nothing to do with it. The entire architecture of middle-class American parenting had encoded the cognitive premium as the path, and he was a competent parent walking the path his own parents had walked. The consolation that “my child will think for a living” has lost its meaning. What replaces it has not arrived. The vacuum is producing the parental anxiety that fills bookstores, podcast feeds, and pediatric psychiatry waiting rooms, and producing it faster than the helping professions can absorb the demand.

    The School System Confronts Its Cover Story

    The third consequence runs through the school itself. American schooling has carried at least four functions through the twentieth century: childcare for working parents, social formation, cognitive training, and credentialing for the labor market. The cognitive training and credentialing functions are the two AI most directly displaces, and they happen to be the two schools advertise in their mission statements as the reason for existing. Childcare and social formation remain, untouched and irreplaceable, and no school district raises a tax levy on those grounds.

    The honest reckoning is one administrators are not yet willing to give. We run schools mostly to keep parents working and to teach children how to negotiate the social geometry of a room full of other children. The cognitive content has always been somewhat ornamental, a respectable cover story for an institution whose deeper functions were custodial and socializing. AI is forcing the cover story to retire. At least a decade of denial will follow. Curriculum committees will add “AI literacy” units that are structurally indistinguishable from the typing classes of 1985, the computer lab visits of 1995, and the laptop initiatives of 2010, each of which functioned as institutional reassurance rather than pedagogical substance. After the denial, a slow and reluctant rewriting of mission statements will move toward something more honest about what schools actually do, which is gather children safely while their parents earn a living and teach them to sit in rooms with people they did not choose. Both functions are valuable. Neither justifies the per-pupil expenditure of the current system, and the public will eventually discover that the math no longer works.

    The Political Bargain Loses Its Foundation

    The fourth consequence is political and may be the most important one in the medium term. Technocratic liberal democracy, the regime under which most readers of this essay have lived their entire lives, rested on a quiet bargain. Experts would govern the complicated parts. Voters would govern the simple parts. The experts held position because they knew more than the voters, and the voters tolerated the experts because the system, on average, delivered rising material conditions. The bargain frayed before AI arrived, evident in the populist movements of the past fifteen years, but AI removes the bargain’s foundation outright. If a machine knows more than the expert and the voter alike, the expert has no remaining claim that distinguishes her from any other citizen. She becomes one more citizen with opinions. The voice of trained competence has gone elsewhere, into the model and the dataset, where no human can claim it as her own.

    Two political responses follow, and both are visible in the present. The populist response decides that if no human is more qualified than any other, then will, identity, and tribal allegiance settle the question. This is the shape of politics in much of Europe, the Americas, and parts of Asia at the moment of writing, and the authoritarian movements within that response are gaining institutional ground rather than losing it. The technocratic response in a new key hands the decisions to the machine itself, which is the direction parts of finance, military targeting, and judicial sentencing are already moving. The first response sustains the form of democracy while emptying its substance. The second response abandons even the form. Neither response preserves democratic self-rule as the founding generations understood it, and there is no third response visibly forming. The honest political forecast is that what we have called liberal democracy will continue to use its old vocabulary while operating on different machinery, and the gap between the vocabulary and the machinery will widen until the vocabulary collapses, probably within a generation. Whether the collapse opens onto a new democratic form or onto its successor is the open question of the next twenty years.

    The Cultural Layer Has Absorbed Shocks Like This Before

    The fifth consequence is cultural and harder to predict, because culture has absorbed previous shocks of this kind. Photography arrived in 1839 and was widely expected to end painting. Painting survived by abandoning the territory photography claimed and inventing impressionism, then cubism, then abstraction. Recorded music arrived around 1900 and was expected to end live performance. Live performance survived by becoming an experience economy where presence, not fidelity, was the product. Chess engines surpassed human grandmasters in the late 1990s and were expected to kill the game. Online chess is now larger than at any point in its history, with more humans playing more games against more opponents than the pre-engine era could imagine.

    The pattern across these examples is consistent. Mechanical reproduction shifts the value of the human version from product to presence. A handmade chair is no longer a better chair than a factory chair, and it costs ten times more, because the value lives in the maker’s hand and the buyer’s relationship to it. Live theatre does not compete with film on visual spectacle and does not need to, because the live audience pays for the breath in the room. Human writing, if AI writing becomes competent and ubiquitous, will likely become a luxury good signaling effort, time, and personal stake. The author’s life will count for more, and the work without an author behind it will lose value as it becomes plentiful. Whether that economy supports as many writers as the previous one is a separate question, and the answer is no. The professional middle of the writing trade, the working journalist, the staff editor, the workmanlike novelist, will thin out. The top will hold and the amateur base will expand. The middle was always the most vulnerable layer in any cultural economy, and AI accelerates a contraction that began with the collapse of newspaper revenue around 2007.

    The Counter-Case Worth Holding

    A counter-case deserves to be kept in view, because the foregoing analysis can slide into a fatalism the evidence does not support. Intelligence, as humans have meant the word for most of recorded history, has always carried more than symbol manipulation. The fuller meaning includes desire, mortality, embodiment, the capacity to lose, the capacity to refuse. A chess engine plays better chess than any human and cares about nothing. A writing engine produces fluent prose and risks no humiliation when the prose fails. The child born this year will live in a body that ages, will love people who die, will choose between options under genuine uncertainty about her own future, will know what it is to be afraid without being shut down for it. All of that registers as full-weight human activity, equal in importance to whatever the machine produces. The category is different from symbol manipulation, and the question of which category we will continue to honor with the word intelligence is a political question more than a technical one. The answer will be settled by what the courts protect, what the schools teach, what the markets pay for, and what the surviving institutions of self-government decide to defend.

    The Hardest Truth

    The hardest truth, the one this site has been documenting across a decade of work on institutional collapse, is that societies do not adjust gracefully to shifts of this size. Institutions built on one logic do not refactor themselves when the logic changes. They hollow out, keep their letterhead, draw their salaries, and lose their function while everyone with standing to name the loss benefits from its concealment. The American university, the credentialing professions, the editorial gatekeepers of the legacy press, the expert commentariat on broadcast television, each is running on borrowed legitimacy at this moment. None of these institutions will announce its own obsolescence. Each will continue to charge tuition, bill hours, issue credentials, and accept underwriting for some years past practical relevance, then collapse when a critical mass of clients notices they have been paying for what is now free.

    The collapse will look like the late stages of American public broadcasting documented in the third volume of the Institutional Autopsy trilogy: a long, dignified fade that no one with authority is willing to name in real time, followed by a sudden insolvency event that surprises no one in retrospect. The next fifteen years will involve a generation-long restructuring of who has standing to speak, who deserves to be paid, and what humans are for once the symbol work has been outsourced. Some of that restructuring will be fair. Much of it will be brutal. Almost none of it will be planned, because the institutions in best position to plan are also the institutions with most to lose by acknowledging the situation.

    What Is Left for the Child

    The children in question will inherit the result without having known the previous arrangement. They will not mourn what they never had. That is the only mercy on offer, and it is offered only to them. The rest of us, who knew the cognitive bargain when it functioned and built our lives on its assumptions, will spend the remainder of our working lives attending its funeral while pretending it is still in business. The pretense will be socially mandatory, professionally protective, and personally corrosive.

    The honest response is to name what is happening, refuse the pretense, and locate value where it is actually moving, which is into presence, judgment, embodiment, and the kind of human authorship that machines cannot fake because they have no stake in the result. The child born this year, if she is lucky, will grow up in a world that has finished the funeral and started building the next thing. The question is whether her parents and grandparents can endure the funeral with enough dignity to leave her something to build on.

    #ai #brain #child #cognitive #credentials #culture #knowing #logic #mind #parenting #politics #schooling #tech #truth #writing
  2. Schooling at Scale

    Relatively simple visual and hydrodynamic signals are enough to make digital fish school in ways that resemble living ones. Here, researchers look at what happens when well-behaved schools of fish get too big. The researchers first demonstrate that their schools behave reasonably at one hundred members, either in a schooling configuration or a group milling around a central region.

    At one thousand fish, the schools are still reasonably coherent and sensible. But at fifty thousand fish, the picture is drastically different. Neither schooling nor milling groups are able to remain together. They fracture and scatter into smaller groupings. (Video and image credit: H. Hang et al.)

    #2025gofm #activeMatter #biology #collectiveMotion #fish #fluidDynamics #instability #numericalSimulation #physics #schooling #science
  3. Going to School in Hungary in the 1950s

    April13,2026 The first memory that came to mind when I thought about attending elementary school in the early 1950s was getting hit on the knuckles with a ruler by a nun because I wrote with my left hand, and the nuns trained me to use my right hand for writing. I was eight years old. While searching for a Catholic school in Sopron, Hungary on Google Maps, I found the St. Orsolya Roman Catholic School (run by the Ursulines, established in 1757), and the road I took to go to this school came […]

    andrasthehun.ca/2026/04/13/goi

  4. OH: "Screens didn't create the morbidly obese curriculum, or eliminate recess, or ban teens from the mall, or build suburbs without parks, or kill arts programs, or spend endless time on test-prep, or make play a semi-professional 24/7 career – adults and their decisions did." —Gary Stager

    professorgarystager.com/about-

    #education #schooling

  5. @MelissaBearTrix

    We've had over 100 years of compulsory schooling in Australia.

    They've had to put up spy cameras to stop people using texting on their mobile phones on freeways.
    And then there are our anti-vaxxers.

    Not impressed Mr Runciman (former headmaster at Subiaco primary school). Maybe caning you would have worked better?

    #CompulsoryEducation #Schooling #Australia #Stupidity #Subiaco

  6. "Another Brick in the Wall" is a three-part composition on #PinkFloyd's eleventh studio album #TheWall (1979), written by the bassist, #RogerWaters. "Part 2", a #protestSong against #corporalPunishment and rigid and abusive #schooling, features a children's #choir. At the suggestion of the producer, #BobEzrin, Pink Floyd incorporated elements of #disco. "Part 2" was Pink Floyd's first UK single since "#PointMeAtTheSky" (1968).
    youtube.com/watch?v=HrxX9TBj2zY

  7. "Another Brick in the Wall" is a three-part composition on #PinkFloyd's eleventh studio album #TheWall (1979), written by the bassist, #RogerWaters. "Part 2", a #protestSong against #corporalPunishment and rigid and abusive #schooling, features a children's #choir. At the suggestion of the producer, #BobEzrin, Pink Floyd incorporated elements of #disco. "Part 2" was Pink Floyd's first UK single since "#PointMeAtTheSky" (1968).
    youtube.com/watch?v=HrxX9TBj2zY

  8. "Another Brick in the Wall" is a three-part composition on #PinkFloyd's eleventh studio album #TheWall (1979), written by the bassist, #RogerWaters. "Part 2", a #protestSong against #corporalPunishment and rigid and abusive #schooling, features a children's #choir. At the suggestion of the producer, #BobEzrin, Pink Floyd incorporated elements of #disco. "Part 2" was Pink Floyd's first UK single since "#PointMeAtTheSky" (1968).
    youtube.com/watch?v=HrxX9TBj2zY

  9. "Another Brick in the Wall" is a three-part composition on #PinkFloyd's eleventh studio album #TheWall (1979), written by the bassist, #RogerWaters. "Part 2", a #protestSong against #corporalPunishment and rigid and abusive #schooling, features a children's #choir. At the suggestion of the producer, #BobEzrin, Pink Floyd incorporated elements of #disco. "Part 2" was Pink Floyd's first UK single since "#PointMeAtTheSky" (1968).
    youtube.com/watch?v=HrxX9TBj2zY

  10. "Another Brick in the Wall" is a three-part composition on #PinkFloyd's eleventh studio album #TheWall (1979), written by the bassist, #RogerWaters. "Part 2", a #protestSong against #corporalPunishment and rigid and abusive #schooling, features a children's #choir. At the suggestion of the producer, #BobEzrin, Pink Floyd incorporated elements of #disco. "Part 2" was Pink Floyd's first UK single since "#PointMeAtTheSky" (1968).
    youtube.com/watch?v=HrxX9TBj2zY

  11. ZDNet: Some teachers are using AI to grade their students, Anthropic finds – why that matters. “Anthropic found that the most common use cases of AI for educators were curriculum development (57%) and academic research (13%). In a smaller use case, however, Anthropic found that the remaining 7% of educators used Claude to ‘assess student performance,’ which includes giving students feedback, […]

    https://rbfirehose.com/2025/08/31/zdnet-some-teachers-are-using-ai-to-grade-their-students-anthropic-finds-why-that-matters/

  12. A quotation from Joseph Addison

    I consider an human soul without education like marble in the quarry, which shews none of its inherent beauties till the skill of the polisher fetches out the colours, makes the surface shine, and discovers every ornamental cloud, spot and vein that runs through the body of it.

    Joseph Addison (1672-1719) English essayist, poet, statesman
    Essay (1711-11-06), The Spectator, No. 215

    Sourcing, notes: wist.info/addison-joseph/78581…

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #josephaddison #crafting #education #learning #refinement #schooling #sculpting #teachers #teaching

  13. #HorribleHistories #UKTV #Education #Schooling #Kids #UK #TV #History #Rap #EnglishHistory #CharlesTheSecond #Music #Funny #Comedy #Song #BBC
    Teaching kids history UK style. I guarantee you’ll learn more about Charles the Second in the next few minutes than you ever learned at school.
    I just love this stuff, and it’s so brilliantly written I’m not surprised the show got an award.
    Matthew Baynton at his peak!
    youtube.com/watch?v=FA5abHKvUBQ

  14. As fall approaches, my reading list grows. Today I discovered Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo I will sit with this message for a while: Education policies should be devised on the basis that all languages are treasuries of history, beauty and possibility. #IndigenousLanguage #Schooling #Decolonization

  15. Schools aren't just teaching ABCs anymore—they're teaching kids how to feel, heal, and handle life. From peace rooms to peer support squads, mental health is finally getting the spotlight it deserves.

    Learn more below!

    #mentalhealthmatters #schools #students #ittybitty4life #learning #wellness #healthyliving #schooling #teaching #support

    ittybitty4life.com/2025/06/08/

  16. Michael Rosen captures what many trained linguists think: michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/
    I loved that things I've been saying down the years find their place in this: that much school 'grammar' is soft class warfare and much of it is misleading or just erroneous.
    #linguistics #schooling #grammar #classWar

  17. Michael Rosen captures what many trained linguists think: michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/
    I loved that things I've been saying down the years find their place in this: that much school 'grammar' is soft class warfare and much of it is misleading or just erroneous.
    #linguistics #schooling #grammar #classWar

  18. A quotation from J. M. Barrie

    MRS. DARLING: (from the window) Peter, where are you? Let me adopt you too. (She is the loveliest age for a woman, but too old to see PETER clearly.)
     
    PETER: Would you send me to school?
     
    MRS. DARLING: (obligingly) Yes.
     
    PETER: And then to an office?
     
    MRS. DARLING: I suppose so.
     
    PETER: Soon I should be a man?
     
    MRS. DARLING: Very soon.
     
    PETER: (passionately) I don’t want to go to school and learn solemn things. No one is going to catch me, lady, and make me a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.

    J. M. Barrie (1860-1937) Scottish novelist and dramatist [James Matthew Barrie]
    Peter Pan, Act 5 (1904, pub. 1928)

    Sourcing, notes: wist.info/barrie-james/76383/

    #quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #peterpan #beard #boy #boyhood #childhood #fun #growingup #independence #job #maturity #office #play #school #schooling #seriousness #work #youth

  19. Progress report received for teen

    Favourite teachers: behavioural ticks in the exceptional range

    Generally: ticks in the acceptable range

    English, with the old-school teacher who decided to diagnosis him with “Asperger’s but we’re not allowed to call it that anymore”: ticks in the abysmal range for behaviour, ability to self-manage, time management, etc, etc, parent interview required.

    Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh.

    And now we have to delicately try to explain that this is what he does when he is not being challenged (except this is the most extreme we’ve seen it), actually he IS special needs but in the “needs far more extension than you’re giving him” direction no matter the opinion you’ve already formed of his abilities, and an Individual Education Plan where you outline exactly how you plan to manage his extension program for the rest of the year would be really handy (for when we have to justify the anomalous grade during his upper school applications by pointing to the IEP and explaining how none of it happened).

    Greatly regretting not insisting he did English online with his other G&T subjects.
    And really bad timing for his usual English teacher to go off on leave, given this year’s results are what gets him into the upper school of his choice. Not with a D in English, kiddo.

    (And yes, obviously we’ll ask him to take responsibility for his own behaviour but there’s only so much a 14-year-old can do in the face of a massive personality clash and an extremely poor first impression...)

    #parenting #schooling

  20. Sadly it's against the law to home school in Malta, not that I have kids, but having your children taught from an impressionable age, this load of hogwash -

    "The strategy says students will learn how to use AI for image creation, text-to-speech and online searching."

    How about instead of; you know, teaching children 'How to cheat.' You teach children how to critically think, read books, imagine, and create for themselves!

    timesofmalta.com/article/ai-ta

    #Malta #EU #AI #schooling

  21. “…I think the fear of the #US #imperialist approach has lately become bigger than the anger towards Denmark," said Julie Rademacher, a consultant & fmr adviser to #Greenland's govt.

    Reuters spoke to…Greenlanders in Nuuk, all of whom said they favored #independence, although many expressed concern that a swift transition could damage the economy & eliminate Nordic #welfare services like #UniversalHealthcare & free #schooling.

    #geopolitics #Trump #kleptocracy #USexpansionism

  22. Conversation with a #teacher colleague: My friend in 10th grade taught me how to “play school.” From then in I got lots of questions right, but didn’t learn much.” #education #schooling #learning #learningfirst

  23. Is school policy for trans kids in England set at the school level or by the council or where does this happen? Is it useful to ask parents to talk to the head teacher or is this a waste of time?

    Boosts like so super welcome.

    #uk #trans #ukpol #transPolitics #schooling #schools

  24. For some perspective I hope you follow Larry Cubans blog… Very few things are new in the world of #schooling
    larrycuban.wordpress.com/2023/
    #Education #educationhistory @edutooters #schoolreform
    He says 1/3 of his readers are abroad, but when you check the map on the site it looks like this