Modern Education is Dead and AI Killed It

New Guard Press
Ben Porter
Aug 1, 2025

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Recently, a video went viral of a UCLA student scrolling through his iPad showing how he used AI on his term papers and got away with it. 

In response to the A.I. takeover, educators scramble to snap Pandora’s Box shut, trying to revert to pen and paper. This has led to arguments over specific policies, but they miss the deeper flaw in modern education. 

When C.S. Lewis wrote “The Abolition of Man,” he pinpointed an error in 20th-century educational philosophy and predicted the AI revolution. Lewis argued that by abandoning the humanities, educators would also abandon reason. Education would devolve from the pursuit of truth to the promotion of propaganda. 

Modern education feigns authenticity, putting on a theatrical display, hoping to convince us it is real. For decades, administrators pointed to the billions of dollars they elicited from the government, graduation rates, and college placement as proof that “look, we are doing the thing called education.” However, the means they use to convince are an indication of their underlying philosophy. 

Until the mid-nineteenth century, education was understood to be the process of enculturation, which meant handing down the Western Tradition to the next generation. Its end was the pursuit of truth. To the ancients, pursuing truth meant conforming man’s entire nature to reality. 

In America, the mode of education started to change in the late 1800s. While abandoning the duality of man as both soul and body, modern education claimed to focus on the mind. Rationalism was fused with Utilitarianism, which sought to fit man to his current age. 

The late-19th century was an Information and Industrial Age, so students needed to be loaded with facts and taught skills that would help them become good workers in the economy, like sitting at a desk for much of the day. 

Originally, there was great optimism as increased literacy and graduation rates seemed to prove that the experiment was successful. Gradually, an emphasis on STEM subjects fit students to the computerized economy, and Western education did not realize it had discovered the rope with which it would hang itself. 

Like a tragic play unfolding, the evangelists of educational progress preached their victories as the organism of society deteriorated. The metrics administrators used to quantify success only reaffirmed their biases towards utilitarianism. The improvement of material conditions (graduation, college acceptance, successful laborers) is not the same as the pursuit of truth, but these ends were conflated. 

Yet, despite the myth of progress the experts continued to parrot, everyday people witnessed the real effects of the educational system. Standards were dropped while new concepts such as child-centered learning and sight reading were invented. It came into full bloom as math was labeled “racist,” children having manners became an oxymoron, popular art devolved into pornographic insanity, drag shows crept into libraries, and the average student lost the ability to think without the aid of Google. 

While a shred of human reason was useful for the Informational and Industrial Age, it no longer remains necessary in the Digital Age. If education is simply learning how to become more proficient on Google, what happens when Google becomes exponentially more efficient than any human ever can at that same process? The purpose for which the modern education system was tailored has been replaced by AI. The logical end of utilitarianism is something like the matrix, where bodies are obstacles and human intelligence is supplanted by the machine. 

Around 2012, phones were admitted into classrooms, and it was then that even the meager metrics professionals used to track “educational outcomes” began to tell a frightening story. Jonathan Haidt explains that starting in 2012, statistics such as literacy and graduation rates started to decline. Next came 2020, when schools were forced to do a test run of matrix learning. The fallout of the Covid experiment cannot be measured. Almost all educators agree that during Covid students lost a year and potentially two years of education. Class over Zoom was a monumental failure. 

The insanity of our age is that while educators scramble to circumnavigate AI, they do not realize the philosophy guiding them necessitates a total immersion into the digital web. By severing humanity from the humanities, it was believed that a being of pure logic and reason would remain, and an age of enlightenment would begin. Instead, reason was outsourced to the machine, and what is left is a society stripped of ethics and intellect. As a consequence, the current system produces immoral idiots. I don’t use that phrase pejoratively—I mean it literally. 

The tragedy of our age is that we are outraged to find civilization exactly as we designed it to be. From general distrust and dissatisfaction with our political leadership to phenomena such as the waning of romance and the desecration of art, we are oblivious to the fact that we perpetuate our own misery. People still believe in the cancer of modern education, and they think that increasing public funds for it will fix the problem. Spreading cancer throughout the body does not rid an organism of the disease; instead, it kills the animal. 

Last year, I tutored some students in SAT prep at a local public school in an English classroom. Two of the six or eight books that were being taught in that class were The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and Born A Crime by Trevor Noah. Since the mind has been outsourced to the machine, the questions become which values should be taught and what culture will be passed on? 

The answer, as seen by the books in the English classroom, is anticulture. Propaganda is the strategic dissemination of information, often biased or misleading, to influence public opinion and promote an agenda or cause. The “cause” is the overthrow of Western man. This is why bathrooms must be “regendered” and why, instead of creating beautiful works of art, students are marching to tear down historical statues in their free time. Statues are history crystallized in place, preserving memory for posterity. They are aesthetic reminders of human nature; physical representations of education. 

Propagandized man is at war with education, so the logical action for him to take is to tear statues down, for they symbolize the final frontier of his conquest: himself. 

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