We called it education. We called it care. We called it preparation. Beneath the language, we passed down fear: fear of failure, fear of difference, fear of not being enough.
Politicians spoke of standards. Parents spoke of futures. Teachers, caught in the middle, spoke less and less. The young; those meant to imagine beyond us, learned to replicate us instead.
Artificial intelligence arrives now not as saviour or a villain, but as a mirror. It reflects our desire to automate what we no longer trust ourselves to hold or to participate in.
We say it will help and we say it will free teachers and innovators to focus on what matters. We do not say what we have already lost.
This is not dystopia; it is civic undoing, masked as progress, measured in metrics and sold as hope. We taught them to survive and now we ask them to thrive in systems built to contain them.
I remember the silence more than the lesson.
A student, bright and curious, paused midway through a discussion on climate ethics and asked, “Why do we learn things we never use?” Not with defiance, perhaps more towards confusion.
