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AI and Education
For a while now I’ve been saying that AI means the end of education, from pre-K to grad-school.
Because? If you have a question, just ask AI and AI will answer it. It’s up to you to remember what it told you.
But DataRepublican had another kind of problem. She had her kid in public school, but he “had trouble adjusting to middle school”. So she started scouting for a private school. She was
shocked at how far ahead they were of public schooling. The private school was mandating essays written in cursive by third grade, teaching algebra in sixth grade, and actually held students accountable from an early age on.
So her son took an admissions test and flunked it. And she had six weeks to fix it.
Enter AI!
DataRepublican got AI to fix her son’s deficiency in Saxon math. It came up with a plan.
Grammar needed a different repair plan. There, the gap was much more critical: he did not know the difference between a noun and a verb.
What! AI fixed that too.
Now DataRepublican is as smart as paint. Just because she can use AI to get her son to pass the private school entrance test in six weeks doesn’t mean that you or I could do the same.
But hey, give AI a couple of years and I bet it will be able to help Delta-minus moron parents to get their kids into private school.
Or, better, AI could supervise their kids’ homeschooling. How hard could that be?
I was talking to a young acquaintance who is converting his firm’s software development to AI. He says some of the developers just go for it, and some of them are upset, because they were in love with the craft of software development.
Same thing with every hand craft that got buggy-whipped by the industrial revolution.
And I’ll bet that is what happens to the “hand craft” that we call teaching. Some folks will adapt, and some will mourn the death of the craft of teaching.
Hey, whatabout the Saxon math textbooks? I checked on Amazon and they ain’t cheap.
But I bet that AI could do it all, for a smart parent, right now, on the cheap. And next year?
I’ve been reading and blogging Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise over the last few weeks, and one big takeaway is that human language is the most important thing since sliced bread. We communicate everything to each other with it, including our two types of knowledge, ritual and instrumental knowledge: ritual being “how we do stuff in our community” and instrumental being how we do stuff that we learn.
But who teaches a kid to learn language and speak it? Mom does, whether she is the smartest woman in the world, or the dumbest.
So really, once a human child has learned to speak, what’s left? Learning language is the hard part. Learning AI in a couple of years so you can teach your kid language and grammar will be easy by comparison.
| Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:04:23 GMT |
Merker: Wrestling with the Importance of Culture
B3P2S1 To me, the essence of Björn Merker’s Perishing Promise is to understand the culture of Victorian Britain — in which the Brits navigated the stormy sea of industrialization without ending on the rocks of political disaster — not just as a culture among cultures, but in the light of the science of human life that has developed over the last century.
Victorian Britain exhibited an extraordinary political maturity. And that
is a measure of the extent to which a culture, policy or population has educed — unwittingly over untold generations of cultural transmission — norms and conventions that move citizens to civil management of their affairs by what they willingly do for themselves and one another[.]
Our human nature is “open” in two ways.
We are not just programmed to live in a particular ecological niche.
Our unique language powers “propel us into an open space of possibilities stocked with both error and potential truths”.
The words of a prophet can teach young men that a certain shirt makes him “impervious to the white man’s bullets” or that the laws of industrial production will cause its destruction and “ring in the dawn” of a perfect world of “conflictless prosperity”.
Or maybe the prophet is wrong.
The question is how a culture transmits its truths from generation to generation without “the coercive power of the state”. It does it by transmitting its “norms and conventions” into the “second nature” of its members, starting as infants and continuing in a family, through concrete acts and interactions that survive the “learner bottlenecks” that process knowledge transmission.
If a person directs their personal engagements by “mutual agreement” rather than a “third party or institution” you get what Adam Smith called “the invisible hand”.
As long as exchanges are voluntary, each participant improves their lot in life by simply participating[.]
And the successful exchanges expand the economy and the participation of the population in prosperity.
But there is a problem.
[As] soon as a margin of prosperity has been achieved a new dynamic enters the process: the exploitation of this surplus through parasitism and predation.
Predation: using force to appropriate other people’s surplus.
Parasitism: appropriating other people’s surplus by “fraud, subterfuge, pretense, theft, “or appeal to abstract principle”.
The new economy needs protection for its surplus: it needs the state.
Our notable parasitisms are collectivism and other-regard morality.
Then there is the family, and its “natural communism”. If the culture defines family broadly, then “indigent members of an extended family” can claim support from the producers and keep everyone from advancing beyond subsistence.
The solution is a culture favoring the “monogamous nuclear family”, because it limits the parasitism of distant relatives. Perhaps it is not accidental that the monogamous Victorian nuclear family created “prosperity on a historically unprecedented scale”. Then there is “colonial monogamy”, practiced by birds like gulls, where everyone nests close together. Humans do this too, grouping their nests in villages, towns, and cities. It seems to be in the jeans, yet it seems not to forbid a man from “collecting” more than one wife.
And yet the partisans of overthrow and the enemies of promise all seem united to demolish the “monogamous nuclear family” in the service of emancipation and diversity. The point of flexible culture over simple instinct is to enable us to occupy “widely diverse circumstances” all over the planet. But free-for-all sexuality is actually limited by “imprinting” where the young are imprinted with the sexual mother-father monogamous relationship of the parents.
When the culture downplays the importance of the “monogamous nuclear family” you get the downplaying of sexual differences, such as the appearance of transexualism and all the present sexual confusion.
But the whole point of culture and tradition is to fill in the blanks of biology with cultural norms and “something to live up to” and limit the incidence of confusion.
But do sexual mores matter? Let’s agree that the nuclear family helped in the industrial revolution. But whatabout today? Maybe parental involvement in the creation of human capital is just as important as before.
More to come.
| Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:19:30 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Men are creators, fighters, destroyers; Women are learners, carers, teachers.
Government is force. Politics is violence. Government is injustice. System is domination. Politics is civil war by other means. Government never learns — Christopher Chantrill
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: List of Topics
