#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
It’s difficult to get too carried away by the euphoria of being auto-enlightened by one’s intelligence in the aftermath of getting played by a Ridgeback putting on an award-worthy performance of a starving puppy whom everyone somehow forgot to feed. The sheer pathos of her stunning portrayal of a sad, hungry little dog who had just been patiently waiting without complaint for HOURS after her normal dinnertime had passed would have brought tears to even Cruella De Vil’s eyes.
While I knew the current higher education system is both unsustainable and unnecessary now, I never suspected that it would be AI and not debt or the absence of men that would put the final nail in the university coffin:
While professors may think they are good at detecting AI-generated writing, studies have found they’re actually not. One, published in June 2024, used fake student profiles to slip 100 percent AI-generated work into professors’ grading piles at a U.K. university. The professors failed to flag 97 percent. It doesn’t help that since ChatGPT’s launch, AI’s capacity to write human-sounding essays has only gotten better…
There are, of course, plenty of simple ways to fool both professors and detectors. After using AI to produce an essay, students can always rewrite it in their own voice or add typos. Or they can ask AI to do that for them: One student on TikTok said her preferred prompt is “Write it as a college freshman who is a li’l dumb.” Students can also launder AI-generated paragraphs through other AIs, some of which advertise the “authenticity” of their outputs or allow students to upload their past essays to train the AI in their voice. “They’re really good at manipulating the systems. You put a prompt in ChatGPT, then put the output into another AI system, then put it into another AI system. At that point, if you put it into an AI-detection system, it decreases the percentage of AI used every time,” said Eric, a sophomore at Stanford.
Most professors have come to the conclusion that stopping rampant AI abuse would require more than simply policing individual cases and would likely mean overhauling the education system to consider students more holistically. “Cheating correlates with mental health, well-being, sleep exhaustion, anxiety, depression, belonging,” said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford and one of the world’s leading student-engagement researchers.
Many teachers now seem to be in a state of despair. In the fall, Sam Williams was a teaching assistant for a writing-intensive class on music and social change at the University of Iowa that, officially, didn’t allow students to use AI at all. Williams enjoyed reading and grading the class’s first assignment: a personal essay that asked the students to write about their own music tastes. Then, on the second assignment, an essay on the New Orleans jazz era (1890 to 1920), many of his students’ writing styles changed drastically. Worse were the ridiculous factual errors. Multiple essays contained entire paragraphs on Elvis Presley (born in 1935). “I literally told my class, ‘Hey, don’t use AI. But if you’re going to cheat, you have to cheat in a way that’s intelligent. You can’t just copy exactly what it spits out,’” Williams said.
Williams knew most of the students in this general-education class were not destined to be writers, but he thought the work of getting from a blank page to a few semi-coherent pages was, above all else, a lesson in effort. In that sense, most of his students utterly failed. “They’re using AI because it’s a simple solution and it’s an easy way for them not to put in time writing essays. And I get it, because I hated writing essays when I was in school,” Williams said. “But now, whenever they encounter a little bit of difficulty, instead of fighting their way through that and growing from it, they retreat to something that makes it a lot easier for them.”
By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones. “Every time I brought it up with the professor, I got the sense he was underestimating the power of ChatGPT, and the departmental stance was, ‘Well, it’s a slippery slope, and we can’t really prove they’re using AI,’” Williams said. “I was told to grade based on what the essay would’ve gotten if it were a ‘true attempt at a paper.’ So I was grading people on their ability to use ChatGPT.”
The “true attempt at a paper” policy ruined Williams’s grading scale. If he gave a solid paper that was obviously written with AI a B, what should he give a paper written by someone who actually wrote their own paper but submitted, in his words, “a barely literate essay”? The confusion was enough to sour Williams on education as a whole. By the end of the semester, he was so disillusioned that he decided to drop out of graduate school altogether. “We’re in a new generation, a new time, and I just don’t think that’s what I want to do,” he said.
“The students kind of recognize that the system is broken and that there’s not really a point in doing this.”
The students are right. There is no point in doing this, because the only reason they’re doing it is to acquire a golden ticket to higher income and higher social status that increasingly no longer exists.
Whatever could be causing the increase in Austrian illiteracy and innumeracy?
Almost a third of the population in Austria has poor reading skills, signaling an alarming trend, the EU country’s government statistics office has said. The decline is particularly noticeable among those with jobs that require medium or low qualifications, Statistics Austria said in a statement earlier this week.
In Austria, which has a population of nine million, a total of 29.0% or around 2.6 million people have a low level of literacy, according to data on the agency’s website. The number of those who have problems with reading increased by 11.9% between 2012 and 2023, the figures show.
According to Statistics Austria, the number of those with low day-to-day math skills also grew by 6.7% between 2012 and 2023, amounting to 22.6% of the population.
Well, that’s nothing that importing more low-IQ foreigners can’t fix, right? Just a little public education is all they need, and they’ll be just as product as any native Austrian, right?
Fencing Bear points out that the extreme decline of literacy should have been obvious, less due to the various technological and demographic changes, but because of the way in which the value of reading has been deprecated by the schools and universities:
Why should we expect our students to be able to read for scriptural allusions and figures of speech, images and cross-references and patterns of meaning, for symbolism and beauty and the resonance of phonemes, when everything in their education is telling them that reading is a skill that they need to make money, and making money means filling in the right forms to get shipments from China or contracts from India? Why should we expect our students to enjoy reading when we have reduced their education to a series of bullet points that they might as well get from SparkNotes or chatGPT? Why should they care about reading when their souls have been rendered statistics in the calculation of our national GDP?
It’s true that reading, and the liberal arts in general, have been massively devalued since the early 1980s, as a part of the quantization that has followed the adoption of a purely materialist philosophy by the education system and society at large.
James Delingpole actually reads Machiavelli for the first time and discovers that the generally accepted narrative about the Florentine is almost completely false:
Machiavelli was the victim of a Europe-wide hit job. By the time anyone outside Italy had read The Prince – it wasn’t translated into English til 1640 – Machiavelli’s name had long since become a byword for evil. England’s last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury Cardinal Pole, who resented his anti-clericism and his rudery towards the Pope, set the ball rolling by declaring him an ‘Enemy of the human race’. Machiavelli’s Christian name – Niccolo – was said to have given the devil his nickname, “Old Nick”. Elizabethan dramatists blamed him as the inspiration for all the scheming and murder that took place in Renaissance Italy. They hated him in France, too, where he was blamed for inspiring the behaviour of Catherine de Medici.
But what had Machiavelli actually done to deserve all this? Not a lot, as it happens. But enough Renaissance history and literary criticism. I want to conclude by extrapolating a more general truth about the nature of our understanding of the world. And about how the dark rulers who currently lord it over us – the modern equivalent of the Medicis, the Pope, Charles V and the various Italian city states, I suppose – get away so easily with doing to us what they do.
One of the things we Awake types are often lamenting is the way in which the tiniest, smallest sliver of a fraction of the world’s population – the Cabal; the Predator Class; The Powers That Be; the Satanic Bloodlines; call them what you will – has yet been able to treat us like cattle, or worse than cattle, for generation upon generation. And while obviously, I’m not letting the Cabal off the hook – they really are evil – I do think there’s a degree to which we have invited our own destruction by being so complacent and lazy.
I’m blaming myself as much as anyone. Especially the person I was before I woke up. There I was, blessed with one of the best educations the world supposedly offers, and yet still, mostly, I remained mired in ignorance because I took too easily for granted what I had been told by my imagined superiors – parents, teachers, the government, ‘experts’, whoever.
The Machiavelli thing is just one tiny example of this. Here, briefly, I have with luck demonstrated that everything 99.99 per cent of the people who’ve heard of Machiavelli know about one of the bigger names in history, or political philosophy anyway, is a caricature of a travesty of complete nonsense. It’s at best a crass simplification; at worst – probably for the usual reasons of propaganda and political intrigue – a cynical misrepresentation.
And it happened because, as usual, none of us did our homework. We regurgitated what teacher wanted to hear – Machiavelli bad, m’kay – and the reason teacher wanted to hear it was because he or she hadn’t bothered to do the homework either. Rather than read the actual book, we all went with the received idea of people who hadn’t read the book and took it on trust that the generally accepted narrative was the correct one.
I am aware that some are dubious about my contention about the importance of the Junior Classics, Castalia Library, UATV, and preserving knowledge for the future. But when one considers the fact that every single backer of the Junior Classics, and every subscriber to Castalia Library, are observably better informed with regards to history, philosophy, science, and religion than even the graduates of some of the most elite college educations in the West, that contention suddenly appears much more soundly based on the available evidence.
This is why we are correct to laugh at the intellectually-challenged elites of Clown World. They’re literally too stupid to read books:
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
Of course, this inability to perform a simple intellectual task doesn’t prevent them from believing in their own superiority as well as their right to tell everyone else how to live on the basis of something they dimly recall a professor saying in class once.
The average university student today cannot even read.
What I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.
Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.
I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever. No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read,2 and most certainly not the attention span to finish. For them to sit down and try to read a book like The Overstory might as well be me attempting an Iron Man triathlon: much suffering with zero chance of success.
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn’t even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided.
They also lie about it. I wrote the textbook for a course I regularly teach. It’s a fairly popular textbook, so I’m assuming it is not terribly written. I did everything I could to make the writing lively and packed with my most engaging examples. The majority of students don’t read it. Oh, they will come to my office hours (occasionally) because they are bombing the course, and tell me that they have been doing the reading, but it’s obvious they are lying. The most charitable interpretation is that they looked at some of the words, didn’t understand anything, pretended that counted as reading, and returned to looking at TikTok.
This study says that 65% of college students reported that they skipped buying or renting a textbook because of cost. I believe they didn’t buy the books, but I’m skeptical that cost is the true reason, as opposed to just the excuse they offer. Yes, I know some texts, especially in the sciences, are expensive. However, the books I assign are low-priced. All texts combined for one of my courses is between $35-$100 and they still don’t buy them. Why buy what you aren’t going to read anyway? Just google it.
Even in upper-division courses that students supposedly take out of genuine interest they won’t read. I’m teaching Existentialism this semester. It is entirely primary texts—Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre. The reading ranges from accessible but challenging to extremely difficult but we’re making a go of it anyway (looking at you, Being and Nothingness). This is a close textual analysis course. My students come to class without the books, which they probably do not own and definitely did not read…
This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem. What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs.
Keep this in mind the next time you’re thinking of passing over a perfectly good candidate for a job because he doesn’t have a university degree. The reality is that not more than 10 percent of an average European population can benefit from a college education.
The God-Emperor 2.0 can’t just stop with banning the Department of Education. The entire public school system needs to go:
A new report has found that Illinois has 60 public schools at which zero students reported grade-level proficiency in either reading or math. Across the Prairie State, there are 23 schools, including 18 in Chicago, where no student demonstrated proficiency in either subject in 2022, according to an analysis of state data by Wirepoints. Another seven Illinois schools had zero proficiency in reading alone, and 30 had no students with proficiency in math alone, the study found.
Even calling these institutions “schools” is a misnomer. They’re Uneducation Factories. The children would be better off if they were just allowed to play all day, unsupervised, in the nearest park or field. More of them would learn how to read too.
The latest rumor about the God-Emperor 2.0’s next executive order bodes well. This bodes very, very well for the state of education in the USA.
US President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at dismantling the Department of Education, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. The move, which is part of the Trump administration’s effort to overhaul US government agencies in a bid to eliminate wasteful state spending, has been expected since early February, when the White House revealed its intentions.
A draft of the order, reviewed by the outlet, instructs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Education Department” to the fullest extent allowed by law. The order could reportedly be issued on Thursday.
“The experiment of controlling American education through Federal programs and dollars – and the unaccountable bureaucrats those programs and dollars support – has failed our children, our teachers, and our families,” the WSJ cited the draft order as reading. The order justifies the department’s closure by stating that “since its founding in 1979, the Department of Education has spent more than $1 trillion without producing virtually any improvement in student reading and mathematics scores.”
The Department of Education, established in 1979 under President Carter, has been a complete and abject failure by every single possible metric. We can be optimistic that the elimination of Federal control will be a net positive, particularly if it is followed by Federal support for the elimination of all state and local restrictions on homeschooling.
Once the states and local schools discover that interference in the way of homeschooling parents will cost them their Federal funding, they’ll rapidly change their tune.
One proposal for a new law: all government programs with a budget over X must be established on the basis of a solid, unalterable metric which cannot be redefined, and, if it is not met, will trigger the immediate elimination of the program. Yes, of course the relevant bureaucrats and their allies in the media will fight tooth and nail to redefine and otherwise marginalize the metric, but their very efforts to do so will be an obvious signal that the program is unsuccessful and should be shut down.
Call it the Accountability in Government Act.
This tragedy is a specific parental failure, not a general systemic one:
The parents of a 10-year-old boy who took his own life after being bullied at school for his glasses and teeth have filed a lawsuit that includes photos of his injuries. Sammy Teusch’s family moved to Greenfield, Indiana, in November 2022, where he was relentlessly bullied at Weston Elementary and later at Greenfield Intermediate
Sammy repeatedly sought help from teachers, but no action was taken
Sammy took his own life in May. His 13-year-old brother discovered his asphyxiated body at home
The lawsuit includes photos of injuries and a text message from a bully appearing to confess to driving Sammy to suicide. The parents accuse the school district of showing “callous indifference” and failing to protect Sammy despite their repeated pleas for intervention.
It’s bad enough that parents force their children to go to public schools, in which “callous indifference” is designed from the start. But to ignore the suffering of a child who is a square peg in the round hole, and expect the school to eliminate it, or even mitigate it, is a complete dereliction of parental duty. Especially when homeschooling the child is an easy and legal option.
Indiana homeschool families are not required to register with the state and do not have to do any testing or reporting.
If your child is being bullied at school, don’t hesitate to pull him or her out of school immediately and keep him out until the matter is well and truly sorted. And never, ever, rely upon the school authorities to do anything whatsoever to defend your child; even the kindest-hearted schoolteacher or school administrator has responsibilities that do not permit them to do much, if anything, to prevent one or more schoolchildren from bullying or otherwise preying upon another child.
Far too many parents are quite happy to abandon their own responsibilities in the false belief that the schools operate in loco parentis. They never have and they never will.