An Un-Beautiful Mind

From illiteracy to ChatGPT, we're hollowing out competence faster than schools can teach it

America’s education crisis is unfolding around us. We are witnessing a shocking collapse of competence, now compounding into oblivion thanks to AI.

But how did we get here? Let’s go back a couple decades.

I am a product of the public school system. Mostly.

Growing up, though we could afford private school, I felt there was something noble about public school. Where’s the fun in succeeding if you’re given extra advantages? So, I remained enrolled in the public school system.

Until I didn’t. During my ninth grade year, I shadowed my best friend at his private school and decided almost immediately to ask my parents to let me attend. A few admissions interviews later and I had traded the populist everyman route for the path of the landed gentry.

That first year, I figured it would be like public school but… nice. I had no idea how much education could differ between schools, and I was about to learn.

My first clue was discovering that all of my peers had been doing several hours per week of SAT tutoring. This didn’t interest me at all. The cutthroat world of college admissions was still in its infancy, but the tutor industrial complex was growing.

Then I tried to enroll in AP Composition. I crafted a tremendous essay, hammering it out over my metaphorical anvil, molding it into something worthy of perfect marks. The essay was great, A+… Then I proceeded to fail the exam because I completely tanked the short answer section on the rules of grammar.

Hmmmm.

Turns out, there’s a huge disparity in education quality across institutions. Imagine that!

This was way back in 2011. Now, nearly everyone is playing the same game to maximize their chances at an elite college. $1,000/hr tutoring services, several SAT retakes, obsessive pruning of extracurricular activities. Elite private schools are engaged in an arms race based on college outcomes. Truly, education has never been on a higher pedestal.

So, why are we subverting education?

Though college admissions have been elevated to a place of significance in society that few could have predicted, that doesn’t extend to the rest of our education system.

We are actively decimating our youth and their education in a multi-prong attack. San Antonio, New York City, St. Louis. Almost entirely across the board, and in nearly every metric, American students are rapidly deteriorating in competence. In a lot of ways, it’s our fault.

In Connecticut, a high school student graduated from a local high school and enrolled at the University of Connecticut. She can’t read.

Meanwhile, down in New York City, barely a quarter of all 4th graders are considered proficient at reading, despite billions in education funding.

The top ten percent of students have excelled, but every other bracket has seen steady and increasing decline, particularly since COVID.

The story only gets darker from there.

Long ago we removed the SAT’s analogies section, the critical portion that forced students to map relationships, not merely memorize vocabulary. New reports suggest we will axe the extended reading passages, because difficult reading takes time and time is “inequitable.” The SAT that you and I took is no more, in its place is a facsimile of the real thing.

But none of it compares to the hollowing out of our critical thinking skills and overall competence by an over-reliance on AI.

A video went viral this weekend: a freshly minted UCLA graduate brags on TikTok—at his graduation ceremony no less—that every assignment was churned out by ChatGPT.

When you were learning math, you first learned the concept then how to do it by hand. Only then did you introduce a calculator.

Even then, a calculator is dumb by comparison. A crutch, at worst.

Today, AI is a mental wheelchair rolling out students effortlessly through all of the lessons they so desperately need to learn. They are willingly ceding their critical thinking to AI, to the point where they’re incapable of functioning without it.

A recent study suggests this is true. An MIT research paper making the rounds on social media argues that people accumulate “cognitive debt” when relying on AI tools. To put it simply, overuse of AI degrades our capacity for complex tasks.

Our schools weren’t even ready for smartphones, now we have artificial intelligence that promises to solve any problem, no personal sacrifice or hard work required. AI may represent a quantum leap in our technological development, but the regression in our students (and adults!) is real.

To quote philosopher Oliver Traldi, “I truly believe that the United States is undergoing a disastrous crisis of competence. As our leaders age out of cogency, our students are gentled through lower and lower standards with more and more allowance that they will not even meet those standards without assistance.”

He’s right. We’re experiencing a recession of competence, as we make it easier on our students to coast through school, lowering our academic standards below any meaningful threshold. Then, to twist the knife, we have unleashed this brain-eating artificial organism on them. They stood no chance.

This will have profound and far reaching effects across society. We expect our young talent to meet a certain baseline. For years, that talent has been eroding, to the point now where it may even need AI to produce anything.

So, they use AI. But what’s the cost? Well, apparently, it’s at least in part the destruction of critical thinking and capacity for meaningful work.

For the rest, we will just have to wait and see. I doubt it’s good.