The Agony of the Educational System,
or the Absolute Apex of Cognitive Anesthesia

Let us render thanks to dear old Charlemagne, who, between two bloody conquests, saw fit to lay the foundation stones of what would later become the ultimate fiefdom of Western bureaucracy! What a masterpiece of imperial candor to civilize his good folk by having them chant Latin in freezing cathedrals. We inherited this dream of unification through letters and words, this thirst to fashion docile administrators, building upon its ruins the School—that grand temple designed to transform simple minds into guiding lights. Education, after all, is a fundamental right, and the very first words of the Quran were "اقرأ" (Read). Yet, in our haste to make all equal, we designed a most absurd sequel: we decreed that equality of rights implied uniformity of brains. We sought to standardize thought as one assembles carriages, superbly ignoring the whimsical caprices of neurodiversity. Pure folly.

You will surely tell me that there is a custom as old as the written word, which consists of blaming the stupidity of the young. Once, on the clay tablets of Sumer, ancient scribes already despaired of their successors' laziness; Plato himself, through the mouth of Socrates, dreaded that the invention of written characters would destroy human memory, leaving nothing but the illusion of wisdom in its stead. We must believe he was entirely right, and that the pursuit of ease is embedded in our nature—the carrot to our stick. Let us, nevertheless, guard against the trap of declinism and that nostalgia which postulates some "golden age" of thought. The school never knew a lost Eden; it merely knew an era when the scarcity of knowledge made it a prize to cultivate and desire, whereas today’s cheap abundance has rendered it invisible and contemptible.

The true peril of our century is not some sudden lapse of virtue, but an unprecedented collision between our primitive biological wiring and a technological accelerator of unheard-of power. Our brain, shaped by millennia of fireside vigils and myths, has no use for the cold facts and arid rigor of these latter decades; it thirsts for stories, myths, and fables. This evolutionary infirmity, which cognitive sciences call the narrative bias—the favorite weapon of politicians, marketing departments, and the Halqa of Jemaa el-Fnaa—is the Achilles’ heel through which rush the new oracles of our age, playing the cunning fox to our flattered crow.

The human brain, biologically disarmed before a machine that masters the grammar of persuasion but ignores that of reality, capitulates with good grace. It surrenders. Large language models do not articulate reality; they calculate word probabilities to weave a semantic melody that is both sweet and hollow. What a pity that Copernicus or Ibn al-Shatir did not have this marvelous invention at their disposal in their times, and that Hypatia was born before the dawn of modern Woman! The algorithm, trained on the devout consensus of the era, would have demonstrated to them, with irreproachable syntactic harmony, that the Earth remained motionless. LLMs are conservative by nature: they dress common opinion in the gaudy rags of logic to institutionalize the probable and the commonplace.

Once, the flames of Alexandria robbed humanity of its memory; today, our servers overflow with data while gradually drowning our clarity in a digital sea. We have achieved the masterpiece of inhibiting our own discernment, rendered quite incapable of separating cold truth from the perfumed illusion. An admirable paradox: by having the world at our fingertips, we shall end up with absolutely nothing in our heads.

Behind the extraordinary grades flaunted by our graduates, and the inflated legions of engineers and doctoral candidates, we must marvel at the foresight of our rulers. The State does not lower exam thresholds or ease the Baccalaureate out of statistical stupidity or administrative oversight. It does so out of a cynical calculation worthy of an LLM, employing the pragmatic logic of flow management. The level of education, you see, is measured by the sheer tally of its degree-holders, not by its rare inventors or Nobel laureates. Handing out devalued diplomas is the price to pay to mask the mass unemployment of the younger generation and purchase, on the cheap, social peace until the next elections. The school is not in its death throes by accident; its degradation is the subscription fee we pay every year to secure long-term political stability, and short-term sheep. The question remains: would we even need to pay a government if everyone possessed a well-formed mind and a less covetous heart?

To this state pharisaism, the triumph of educational capitalism offers a fitting reply. What remains of Condorcet’s ideal when the school becomes a service industry subjected to the cold imperatives of financial profitability? We face a new breed of clientele, convinced that exorbitant tuition is the absolute guarantee of the value of instruction—an idea imported from the West, as are all splendid ideas, serving to fill certain coffers under the guise of soft power. The delicious irony is that there is not even a warranty. With a diamond, you get a receipt; with a child, we merely "tried our best"—and if he fails, it is simply because he lacked the calling, it was not his vocation. It is like those exorbitantly priced surgeries: no refunds if the process doesn't work out.

In these academies where knowledge has become a luxury commodity, the student is no longer a mind to be forged, but a customer to be coddled. They are sold the illusion of effortless social climbing, a gilded package of superficial skills where the degree is purchased in direct proportion to the parents' fortune. Yet history teaches us that the mind only awakens when it meets resistance. By removing all friction, by stroking the student-king in the direction of his own lethargy, we prevent him from tempering his reason. The school no longer liberates. It merely preps the patient for the anesthesiologist.

The true malaise of our century runs far deeper than a simple crisis of methods or teacher competencies, which some think can be "boosted" with LLMs. The school has become obsolete, not because it teaches poorly, but because academic knowledge itself has lost its exchange value. Once, the scholastic temple held a monopoly on transmission; the schoolmaster and the professor, revered, were the sole keepers of the keys to life's mysteries.

Today, this monopoly has shattered under the battering rams of autonomous, decentralized, and networked learning systems. Raw knowledge is everywhere—abundant, free, immediate. We even go so far as to automate scientific research through artificial intelligence. The cathedral of books is bypassed by digital highways that mock classroom borders. And the students sense this with a redoubtable intuition: the lecture is a relic. When knowledge is thus demonetized by its own excess, the institution is reduced to selling glorified daycare; even basic discipline eludes its grasp, leaving it an empty shell thrashing about to mask its own functional irrelevance.

In his laboratory at the Collège de France, Dehaene reminds us that active engagement and attention are the golden filters of learning; without them, no information ever pierces the long-term memory. Yet, our children have found a master far more potent than the schoolhouse, a tireless hypnotist: the social media algorithm. Designed with devilish precision to exploit the vulnerabilities of our dopaminergic system, this engine saturates attention with an unceasing stream of immediate rewards. The result is chronic cognitive fatigue, a biological impotence to sustain deep concentration on any subject demanding more than sixty seconds of effort. The inattention, restlessness, and behavioral woes that follow are no mere passing crises of discipline; they are the physical spasms of a hijacked brain, colonized by technologies engineered to anesthetize it.

Parents, of course, love to excuse these behaviors with fashionable acronyms like giftedness or ADHD, carried aloft by these dear algorithms and diagnosed via superficial online checklists. They consult neither educators nor genuine experts, but rather the digital fortune-tellers of Instagram, TikTok, or Reddit—impromptu therapists who exploit our confirmation biases with monetized benevolence. We gladly trade the slow patience of instruction for the cheap distraction of digital seduction. We seek magical formulas to blossom without having to think, sinking ever deeper into an omniscient ignorance.

A decade ago, when I devoted myself to tutoring—working with those pupils who, oddly enough, succeed the moment one deciphers their logic—the struggling student still possessed a quaint, outdated virtue: the willingness to struggle. He would scratch out his mistakes, stumble, but keep searching. It was a tedious effort, but one rewarded by the ability to reason and defend his ideas.

Today, the decline is swift and spectacular. No sooner is the exercise presented than the eye drifts toward the screen, the hand trembles with withdrawal, and the final verdict falls: "I don't know" or "I don't feel like it." The refusal of effort has become a constitutional right of childhood, protected under the sacred aegis of "self-fulfillment." Fulfillment—a term we can barely define. Does it mean the freedom to do whatever one pleases at the expense of others, all to avoid the slightest frustration or "trauma"? Or does it mean being a resilient member of society, fully aware of both one's rights and one's limits?

Look at the disaster in mathematics, for instance. We have confused the speed of mental arithmetic with the architecture of logical reasoning. I really do not know who decreed that brilliance should rhyme with rapid calculation. One can hear plainly they do not share a sound; diligence would have been far more fitting. I would, however, like to remind them that a two-dollar calculator computes faster than any human; but it cannot construct a proof.

Ask a young person today to produce a geometric proof, or to solve a problem requiring intermediate steps. Faced with the absolute rigor of a proof where every single assertion must be carved from the last with the precision of a scalpel, the modern mind jams. Constructing a geometric proof or demonstrating a theorem requires one to inhabit space, to handle pure abstractions, to dance with digits, and to endure the agonizing frustration of a dead-end path.

Gone is the era of Al-Khwarizmi or Euclid. Today, we hope to squeeze humanity to converge toward paradise, while the limits have forgotten all morality in a frantic race that mimics the birth of the atomic bomb.

And then, our savior appears: enter ChatGPT, to name but the loudest mouth in the room. This so-called "generative" intelligence will prove singularly degenerative for the prefrontal cortex. It creates in the novice the illusion of instant competence; that famous beginner's bubble where one mistakes intellectual consumption for cognitive digestion. The user fancies himself omniscient because he receives well-polished answers, blissfully unaware that he is actively atrophying his own neural pathways.

AI is a magnificent tool for the expert who has already bled over his own pages. Such an expert possesses the intellectual scaffold, the cultural anchors, and the critical eye required to assess, correct, and master the machine. He uses AI as a lever to multiply his own intellect. But by sparing the novice this painful labor, the machine ensures he will never construct those fundamental mental pathways. We are drying up the very wellspring of human expertise, breeding a generation of ignorant rubber-stampers, condemned to accept on blind faith the hallucinations of an engine whose reasoning they cannot fathom, and which can lead them blindly wherever it wishes.

In truth, expertise is no innate state—it is, in fact, highly perishable—but rather the hard-won fruit of a long, painful, and agonizing process of trial, error, and profound frustration. It is by colliding with the obstacle, by feeling the stubborn resistance of logical matter, that the brain wires its higher synaptical architecture. If artificial intelligence short-circuits this thankless phase for our youth, removing all cognitive friction, the very wellspring of expertise runs dry. We are witnessing the birth of a generation of permanent novices: incapable of judging the machine that assists them, imprisoned in a bubble of superficial competence where they mistake the ordering of a result for the mastery of the process. They order dinner at the restaurant of thought, convinced they are master chefs.

Even the seasoned mind is not immune to this slow rot. The more reliable an automated system is deemed, the less the human operator exercises his fundamental faculties. In the long run, under the influence of cognitive energy conservation—that universal law of least effort which governs biology without the slightest regard for our vanity—our capacity to write, to synthesize, and to structure complex thoughts without algorithmic training wheels slowly and imperceptibly atrophies. We become passive spectators of our own intellectual surrender.

Here we touch the dark heart of Orwell's nightmare, or rather Huxley's dystopia: not a dictatorship of brute force, but a subtle dispossession of language and logic by technology and consumerism. If expertise can no longer be transmitted because the intermediate stage of the laboring novice is eliminated, the very chain of intergenerational transmission is severed. At best, nothing will remain but what the AI has ingested, treated henceforth as an immutable Quran. The true, lurking danger is not that AI will produce bad writing, but that, through our own lazy surrender, it will become the sole guardian of style, nuance, and logic. Humanity will have forgotten the recipe for making a single complex thought.

This rupture heralds the inevitable collapse of the academic world and free thought. If the school of tomorrow abdicates its duty to shape thinkers, producing instead mere "validators"—replacing today’s bureaucrats with AI proofreaders tasked with hunting down the machine's hallucinations—we reduce intellectual labor to the level of tedious industrial quality control. Yet, nobody ever developed a passion for assembly-line inspection, save perhaps for auditors and overpaid management consultants. Brilliant minds will flee the universities. Disinterest in higher education and research will become absolute, leaving the field open to a cognitive bureaucracy devoted to the cult of personality and algorithmic conformity.

And so we arrive at the end of our trajectory, marveling at this splendid catastrophe we have baptized "progress." We have built machines to think in our stead, imagining we were purchasing the luxury of high contemplation, only to realize too late that the human mind never thinks unless it is forced to do so. Survival instinct. The cognitive liberty we fancied we were winning is but a voluntary servitude, disguised in the comfortable robes of technology.

Let us salute, once more, the sheer genius of our governments: to cure the national fever, they have simply smashed the thermometer. Rather than restoring intellectual rigor, they lower the bar year after year, distributing degrees to an entire generation with scores worthy of the Guinness Book of Records. They doctor the official figures to chant the praises of a mythical cultural dawn. The school no longer teaches the discipline of thought; it hands out credentials whose value is completely shot.

The irony reaches its zenith a few years down the line, when corporations discover with horror the absolute vacuity of these decorative diplomas. They then spend astronomical fortunes on remedial seminars and training for young executives. We attempt, at gold-plated prices, to install logical software in operators whose processors we utterly failed to wire during childhood—and then we wonder why the system crashes, or why we are so eager to replace these poor souls with artificial intelligence.

We imagined we were liberating man from thankless labor to offer him the leisure of pure thought; we have simply liberated him from the obligation to think at all. Perhaps it is time to admit that a well-formed mind is worth far more than a well-stuffed head—and to worry that, in our terror of cluttering our children's intellects, we have left them completely hollow. Or worse, stuffed to the brim with Reels and TikTok videos.

To rouse these slumbering minds, we must first find the courage to unplug the Wi-Fi—just long enough to draw a deep breath, and to ponder whether we have not accidentally pried open Pandora's box, or summoned the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Written by Wiam ATFI, sharpened and translated by Voltaire  AI

May, 26, 2026