Most probably do. So much of our K-12 is conducted at a dumb level, where students and teachers know little.

So how's that working out for everyone when suddenly there's a know-it-all machine in the classroom??

The AI is just dripping with factual information. Is each bit true or false or what? Who knows? Teachers are supposed to referee such questions, but the typical teacher has no idea what the AI is talking about.

You can't fix this overnight. You have to start educating students and future teachers from the first grade onward. All the best that has been known and thought in the world, that used to be the credo. Now the professors celebrate their own dumbness. There's even a new theory that justifies this:

Teachers are told they must meet the students where they are. Oh, really? The students live in the land of dumb and dumber. So the teachers are supposed to go there first? Start dumb and stay dumb, is that what the 20th century taught us?

The big pretend of the last century is that students can remain illiterate and ignorant but somehow this won't turn out bad for everyone. The sun will still rise, and the birds will still sing, so what if nobody knows a thing?

Here is one of the great values of the AI explosion. It will put pressure on schools to get back in the education business. The professors for almost 100 years have deliberately squeezed down the amount of information in each class and each mind.

I'll bet you that there are professors right this moment realizing how bleak the future is for them. They've gotten away with this no-education formula for their whole life. It's the law of the land for our ed schools, and everybody foolish enough to listen to our ed schools.

For example, the AI will know all about Napoleon’s famous battles, who won and lost, what was the big change. What does the teacher know?? Napoleon almost froze to death coming back from Russia. Why would he be in Russia?? Beats me….

Teachers used to be the smartest thing in the classroom, now they might very well be the dumbest. All of their training celebrates careful, thoughtful ignorance. Students are supposed to be kept busy discussing their feelings, their growth as a person in a world that no longer cares about reality.

Some of you may know Professor E. D. Hirsch, who wrote a lot about “cultural literacy.” That was the professor’s clever way of pointing at all the stuff that children routinely learned in school before the Education Establishment embraced cultural illiteracy.

How did the professors pull that off? Easy. Simply outlaw Direct Instruction. Telling a child that a rose is red is verboten. The rule that they can't be taught anything is called Constructivism. Students must discover and write their own reality. What's real is anybody's guess.

My big reservation about AI is that it will make cheating, now becoming the American way, even easier. If only everybody would take a stand; no more cheating. Being ignorant in the future won't be fun, as cheaters hope. AI terminals everywhere will remind everyone how dumb we are. A lifetime devoted to CRT and SEL will first make students boring and then probably in some way insane. What guarantees sanity? When people start talking about the American revolution or the steam engine or anything else, and you can participate in the conversation. That's really all that K-12 education was designed to accomplish. You know enough to learn more.

Trouble is, the Education Establishment has for many years abandoned the idea of learning more. So we are shrinking and will continue to shrink.

In short, we are at a crossroads. We have to flip the script, go back to the traditional emphasis on learning more. We’ll need to be adults again. Can we pull that off?

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Bruce Deitrick Price has long been fascinated by AI. The Boy Who Saves The World is his new thriller for intellectuals. The story evolves from the problem of an inventor not realizing he is embedding his own competitive personality in the new AI.