this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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Correction: Education is not OK.
AI is just giving poor kids the same opportunities rich kids have had for decades. Opportunities for cheating the system that was made specifically not to give students the best education possible but instead to bring them up to speed on the bare minimum required to become factory workers.
Except we don't have very many factories any more. And we don't have jobs for all these graduates that pay a living wage.
The banks are going to have to get involved soon. They're going to have to figure out a way to load up working-age people with long term debt without college being involved.
Yeah, lots of people don’t realize that the public education system was designed to prepare kids for factories. It goes all the way back to the Industrial Revolution, when parents were working 16 hour days in the factories. They needed some way to keep their kids occupied while dad was stamping steel and mom was weaving fabric. The factory workers lived in corporate-owned towns, and all of their needs were (hopefully) covered by the factory owners. And along this line of thinking, the factory owners started public schools, both to keep the kids occupied during the day, and to prep them to work in the factories once they were old enough to know how.
Basically everything about modern education is run like a factory. Everything is standardized to the median 85% of the population; students who deviate too far from that are punished or segregated via special education. You work (study) when the bell tells you, eat when the bell tells you, shit when the bell tells you. You’re expected to sit quietly and do your work, no socializing except when the bell tells you. Et cetera… The entire idea was to give students a baseline level of education that they would need to work in the factory, and prep children to work in factories under the same grueling conditions.
Except that most of that is still in effect.
Especially poor people still spend 12+ hours a day working, and even for middle class people it's quite common that both parents work 10+h a day.
Average work hours per year have gone up by ~10% since 1980.
And when it comes to the jobs: While we like to pat ourselves on our back about how creative our work has become, we are essentially still doing factory work, just on a desk with a computer instead of in the factory with a welding torch.
Most of the work that most of the people do is still the same mundane, formulaic toiling away.
Modern education is focussed on teaching kids to learn stuff they don't care for at exactly the time it's asked for. Same as at work. If I have to learn a new framework for a project, I have to learn it right now, no matter if I feel like it or not. My boss is not going to wait around until I naturally feel like learning what's needed for the job.
That's why it's ok that we forget all but the basics the instant we graduate from school.
Why the hell do the banks need to step in? System for an indentured workforce is already in full effect:
Rich and poor cheat the system in different ways.
The rich can afford to put their kids in supportive schools that will teach those willing to learn a hell of a lot, and those that don't want to learn can benefit from the network effect.
AI helps the poor cheat the system by avoiding the work and learning, depending on a language tool to process language for them.
The poor aren't cheating any system, ever.
The system is cheating them