Don’t you just hate it when you’re excited to talk about baseball and the goddamn news throws a particularly obnoxious wrench in your plans?

This time, the flying hardware came in the form of two truly magnificent turds from the New Yorker, both of which masquerade as some kind of brave truth-telling about the Bullshit Machine Known As “AI” (hereafter simply “the Bullshit Machine”) and its influence on education.

First, there’s Jessica Winter’s piece, which begins with public schools foisting modules about “basic concepts of Artificial Intelligence” and Gemini-enabled¹ Chromebooks on her children, against both her and her children’s wishes, and ends with a cri de coeur to, in the hyperbolic words of a parent she interviews, “chuck [the computers] into the sea.” Winter lays out an extensive case that the Bullshit Machine has infected our education system not because there’s organic demand for it, but because the people pushing it have a direct financial stake in more and more USian children vibe-learning their way through school.

Second, Jay Caspian Kang announced that he’s going to spend the next few weeks writing about the long-term viability of the American university system, especially outside those “élite”² colleges whose primary purpose is to reproduce (and expand, ever so slightly) the USian gentry and are therefore likely to survive this technological onslaught because of their social function. Kang isn’t wrong to see a wind age and a wolf age coming for universities, although I think he reverses the effect (USians not putting much trust in college or higher education) and cause (systematic bipartisan defunding of said higher education, combined with widespread deprofessionalization) in order to buttress his claim that he feels bound to provide for his daughter’s future education, but fears that by the time she’s college-age, chatbots will have hollowed out the knowledge economy.

Now, obviously, I’m childless, but I can empathize with parents horrified by the idea that their children are coming into contact with the Bullshit Machine at steadily younger ages, or the worry that one day the only jobs not replaced by chatbots will be subsistence farming and babysitting Elon Musk’s clone children.

Unfortunately, I think Winter and Kang both prove just why the situation has gotten this pear-shaped, and while I want to believe that neither purposefully did this, the fact that this is the New Yorker—part of the “élite” media apparatus, as Kang admits—gives me some pause.

I believe the following to be a mostly complete list of every source cited or interviewed across the two articles.

As you can see, Winter in particular cast a very wide investigative net: education and neuroscience professors, corporate Bullshit Machine boosters, Bullshit Machine boosters pretending to be educators, union leaders, and public school parents. For his part, Kang (whom I seem to remember finding worth reading in the past) got some quotes together from guys who’ve become rich off massaging the egos of other rich guys and called it a day.

Did you notice who’s missing from both lists?

Let me give you the kind of hint we used to get in physics class: it starts with “T” and rhymes with “Reacher.”

You might find this an unfair characterization. After all, there are several college professors: surely they teach classes now and again.⁶ Randi Weingarten may have spent most of her career as a lawyer, but she did teach at an actual high school—for less than half the time I have, but still. A number of the Bullshit Machine’s boosters, like Bickerstaff, stake their claim to pedagogical credibility on being veteran teachers who, unlike their less tech-savvy or forward-looking colleagues, see the benefits of subjugating human thought to a machine that confidently produces trash.

Still, I think this omission is telling. The fact that two professors from the same department of the same university get the honor of opining on the future (and value!) of higher education, while it’s not even considered noteworthy that zero K-12 teachers apparently have opinions about the Bullshit Machine, might as well be an admission that we’re not considered important enough to be in the room, even though we’re usually the ones both trying to keep our students from defaulting to using Copilot and explaining to our bosses that Flint isn’t actually saving us any work.

This is especially disappointing in Winter’s piece. I’m not going to tell you students and parents don’t have a role to play in excising the Bullshit Machine from education, but from where I’m sitting, for every parent who teaches their kids to do their own work, there’s three sets of parents excited about how those arrogant teachers will be replaced by properly subservient chatbots. For every student who wants to be proud of the work they do, there’s five who are happy that they can put in minimum effort, go do sports instead, and still complain about being too busy with schoolwork.

Maybe no teacher wanted to go on the record, or even comment anonymously. That’s certainly possible, though it seems unlikely. Still, given how Winter frames the ulterior motives of pro-Bullshit-Machine educational administrators like Alberto Carvalho and Miatheresa Pate, it’s hard to believe that she could not have similarly suggested that teachers fear going against the current. The closest she comes to that is when Weingarten mentions that she wants to give teachers “permission to object” to the Bullshit Machine, two paragraphs after she’s quoted as saying the point of the National Academy for AI Instruction is to help educators “navigate [the inevitable].” With such a strident advocate on the objectors’ side, how can we lose?

Leaving us out, even accidentally, frames the sides as concerned parents and the occasional psychology or neuroscience researcher versus gestalts of public school staff, without recognition that ed tech was already an extremely fraught issue within school buildings as well as around them, and the Bullshit Machine simply deepened the fault lines.

For his part, Kang readily acknowledges that the same pool of Ivy League graduates who form the backbone of “élite” institutions like the New Yorker are also the ones integrating the Bullshit Machine as quickly as possible into every aspect of their lives.

It’s interesting, as a person who wishes he could live off his writing, to read a person who does live off his writing (and whom I’d argue can do so in part because Bowdoin and Columbia degrees granted him a leg up in the media marketplace) decide that students have to be convinced that there’s still value in talking ideas out in a class, reading and writing about texts themselves, and otherwise treating colleges as places of learning, rather than a tests of future employability—but then confirm that with the thoughts of guys who spend their time hanging out with the DOGE kids, and who all seem to be at least copacetic with contracting access to public higher education, whether for ideological reasons or because young people can learn everything on YouTube instead.

Based not only on who profits from widespread adoption of the Bullshit Machine, but who salivates at the prospect of a future where their intellect is never again challenged by their economic inferiors, I’d think the answer is to provide for more academia, not less; to reverse the adjunctification of higher education, especially in the humanities, so that there are well-remunerated jobs that utilize the exact skills the Bullshit Machine pretends to have; to tax anti-teaching billionaires out of existence and use the proceeds to create a more robust civil service; and give people more time outside of work, so that they can actually think about the ideas they’ve absorbed in their education.

That is to say, I think the solution to both of these articles’ Betteridge’s-law-ass headlines is the same: if you want to keep the Bullshit Machine out of schools, if you want to maintain the university as not just a Certificate of Work Ethic but as a place to learn, reason, philosophize, discuss, and create, you also have to create a society that prizes actual learning and knowledge, rather than our current society run by charlatans and grifters who prize the quick buck, the fraud, and the loophole. Sadly, that means doing the exact thing neither of these writers did—talking to actual K-12 educators, who do our best to instill those values in children while knowing it’s us contra mundum—so I won’t hold my breath.

There are many professions that should not take shortcuts yet do: turns out you can’t even trust the Bullshit Machine in its supposed bailiwick of radiology, and at this point we all have a favorite Bullshit-Machined legal brief citing a bunch of fake cases.

Yet in this anti-intellectual country, where knowing a second language or reading a philosophical text instead of its pop summary marks you out as a suspicious egghead, those of us charged with facilitating learning and transmitting knowledge are paradoxically discouraged, on pain of ridicule and moral judgment, from finding easier ways to do so.

If you want to provide education that is real, humane, and unmediated by screens, maybe you should talk to the people whose job it is to provide that right now, regardless of whatever shiny toys are shoved in our faces, and see what we think and need.

Unlike the machine, we won’t bullshit you.