Thu Jul 02 2026 18:51:27 GMT+0300 (Moscow Standard Time) · Education
Training for a factory that left
School built a runway for the factory. Sit in rows, follow the bell, do the repetitive thing on cue, don't ask why. That was the job once, so we shaped children for it. Then the factory left — the monotonous, rule-following work is exactly what robots took first. The runway's still here, and the bell still rings for planes that stopped coming.
We know what school teaches, because we tested it. Show a child how to open a box and add a pointless tap on the lid, and the child copies the tap — even after calling it silly. Twelve years of that is the curriculum: copy the ritual, never separate the load-bearing step from the decoration. School doesn't grow foragers. It over-imitates them into farmers.
There's a group that won't copy the pointless tap — the kids who can't sit in the rows, who ask why, whom we diagnose and medicate. There's a gene under it: DRD4-7R, tied to novelty-seeking and ADHD. Same allele, opposite fate — in nomadic herders it tracks with better nourishment; in the ones who settled, worse. It's a forager's trait, and we built a farm. The world is against them the way a desert is against a fish — not malice, wrong medium. The measured pattern is divergent, exploratory: better at finding a new path, worse at grinding a known one. Which is precisely the half school grades.
AI is now taking the monotony — the exact farm-work the runway drills for. So we automate the thing we still teach. The factory left, and we're still training children for the shift.
Nobody planned this. The state counts two workers and one educated kid, and the numbers look fine. A conveyor can't stop and wait for a child to walk up to the tool that catches their eye — so it doesn't. Topology, not malice.
Seeing the pointless step isn't a superpower. It's a tax: the forager skips the empty ritual and gets marked down for it. We build for the ones who ask why — the core is open, so you can read how it works, not just that it works.