A Digression on Authenticity

Or, Public School is Fake and Gay and Also Everything

As the sole provider for a family of four, I work a number of jobs. In a kinder world I could focus on one to the exclusion of the others, but the salient characteristic of our modern economy is ruthless extraction on the part of proliferating managerial elites, their greed and incompetence necessitating both ever-more creative rent seeking and crushing inflation to counter their stupid, leveraged wars. Thus, I teach full time at an independent boys’ school and in my off-duty hours I work as an online instructor for a number of colleges, some in other states. Much of the latter work is for dual-enrollment- high school students taking college classes while still at the secondary level. I create modules, most involving a great deal of reading and writing, the students complete them within the stipulated time, I grade their work, and they get a college credit if they pass.

I believe very strongly in DE, as it gives students who might otherwise be chained to the lowest common denominator the ability to move forward at a pace more suited to their skill. Granted, online learning is far from ideal, but I do what I can while shoving as hard as I can against the constraints I work within. We’ve all seen the memes with Tim Walz’ wife giving a schizo-Karen stare as she lambasts some anon with a wall of white text about his toxically-masculine unwillingness to slow down his reading for the sake of his dimwit peers. Dual enrollment, in theory, is a way to fight that.

12,000 people remember that look from 4th grade.

The vast majority of the students that I deal with in these programs are in public schools. They are theoretically the brightest of the lot, as these classes are both (again, theoretically) challenging and wholly voluntary. You don’t need college classes to graduate high school, and students with no interest in earning college credit- the overwhelming majority- can simply take their normal course load and finish their formal education before taking on a job. When I first began teaching DE classes nearly ten years ago that was indeed the case; the kids were motivated, and if they weren’t, they dropped the class- no harm no foul.

Unfortunately, what should have been a rebuke to the mediocrity and forced homogeneity of the public school system has instead been largely co-opted by it. Once dual enrollment became widely known as both selective and demanding the Eye of Sauron fell upon it and the system bent its every effort into turning it into something more suited to its own cruel lust for domination and conformity. Liberals of all types understand man as a mass of individuals undifferentiated by anything save superficial characteristics, and know, despite all evidence, that anyone can achieve anything. Thus, DE had to become something anyone could do, so that everyone could excel.

Fool! No man can kill me… DEI now!

This has coincided with trends that more thoughtful members of the teaching profession have noticed for a long time, but especially since the lockdowns. There has been a profound cultural shift at work among the youth, fostered by widespread access to the internet and an all-pervasive consumerism, manifesting as a wholesale indifference to learning, while embracing a humane education in any traditional sense has lost all meaning. It’s not everywhere- not yet- but I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks it isn’t a growing problem, and of a scale not seen before. And it’s reflected most obviously in the increasingly heavy recourse students have to AI.

For any essay assignment I give, I can count on at least 1/4 of submissions being obvious products of Chat-GPT, another 1/4 being probable- edited after the fact but still bearing the hallmarks, and yet another 1/4 showing some evidence of AI assistance without the whole thing being fake. Only a quarter would I say are wholly genuine. The colleges I work with determine grading policy and they mandate zeros for such cheating, a policy I fully support, though I would go further and remove the offenders from DE. That’s the theory anyway; I lost out on getting a contract from a college where the cheating was especially bad and I’d given out a great deal of zeros. They never said it’s why they didn’t hire me back as an adjunct, but I’ve never been let go by anyone before. I suspect it won’t be the last time.

Colleges are in decline, and they need new customers. From their perspective, dual enrollment isn’t just a great way to increase education opportunities; it’s a necessary revenue stream. State governments generally pay tuition through lottery funds or other sources meant for secondary education, so in a sense DE is a kind of back-door government-funded college program that will supplant student loans and backstop declining university numbers. But for all that to work, they need seats to be kept warm, and the more the better.

What this means in practice is that the mores of public schools start to pervade colleges, like a virus that spreads through close contact. College instructors, once having total academic freedom to teach as they see fit, now are given pre-made syllabi that they can customize to an ever-more limited extent each year. At one school, my entire teaching role is giving a grade of 1-4 on discussion posts- everything else is pre-programmed and automated, the product on an online curriculum mass-produced by a large corporation. Are they cheating on the computer-generated tests “I” give them? I don’t know and can’t know, but given what they do when I can, I’d say almost totally. Does anyone care? Not apart from me, so far as I can tell.

When learning is reduced to checking the right boxes in order to generate a number within a system which in aggregate will ultimately produce a credential allowing access to a middle-class revenue stream, degraded though it is, what can young people think but that my essays are so many obnoxious obstacles to getting enough money to buy grown-up toys? When I catch them, their first response is to ask if they can make up the assignment, as though, having failed to cheat the first time, I should give them a chance to figure out how they got caught and produce something more convincing. They never apologize and never evince any guilt or sense of dishonor. It doesn’t mean anything to them and they regard my expectations as burdensome cant.

If only they took reading this seriously.

But of course, it would be unfair to blame them totally. They are responding to real incentives they perceive among the adults in their lives- their parents, their teachers, their favorite celebrities, etc. By way of example, I assigned an essay on Alexis de Tocqueville’s concept of soft despotism for one of my political science classes. The usual liberal recourse to Chat-GPT ensued. One of the girls I dinged for cheating denied having done so and enlisted one of her in-person public school teachers to write to me on her behalf. This is a redacted copy of that email:

Read this a few times, reminding yourself that the woman who wrote this is paid by the government to teach young people how to write English, and that she sent this missive to a college instructor in order to convince him- I think- that the student in question wrote a grammatically perfect and thematically coherent essay under her tutelage. I say “I think” because nowhere does she actually directly state that the student didn’t use AI (or AL). I’m really not especially clear exactly what she’s asking me to do. I actually checked the sender address to make sure the student didn’t just put one of her friends up to sending it while pretending to be a teacher (it’s a teacher email account).

The easy thing to do here would be to roast this teacher for her manifestly poor ability to put to use the subject in which she’s supposed to be instructing others and make her some kind of synecdoche for the system. If even the people who are paid to teach writing don’t care enough to do it well, why should the student I chastised bother either? The author of that email was hired to teach at a school by people who didn’t care that she couldn’t write because she’d earned a degree from a university that didn’t care that she couldn’t write, who presumably admitted her despite her inability to evince any ability to write at the outset. She’ll retire at 55 with a decent salary, probably having been given raises and promotions in the meantime, perhaps to a position where she can hire others who can’t read, do math, explain science, or- if they’re history teachers- coach sports.

As I’ve pointed out before, even commie Eric Foner thinks it’s getting ridiculous.

If you think that’s an indictment of the public school system, you should get out more. The same mediocrity, the same indifference, the same fakeness and fraud, pervades every aspect of our society. Everywhere there is form over substance. If you don’t think so, ask yourself what profession you would advise a young person to enter where the standards are high and honor prevails. If some kid said to you, “I want to do a job I can be proud of, where the culture encourages you to be a man or woman of integrity,” what would you say? Right now you’re probably thinking, “well, I certainly wouldn’t tell them to do [my job] but perhaps be a doctor?” At which point some doctor will read and advise against it, suggesting instead the military; this will then attract the disillusioned retort of a veteran, who will encourage the youth instead to go into a trade, which will invite a contractor lamenting the lowered standards of his field, imploring the young person instead to go into finance, which will induce some banker to shake his head and say, why not be a teacher..?

I still remember my last week of high school as a kid. I told one of my teachers, a man I respected, that I was considering becoming a teacher myself. I can still recall the look of horror on his face. He launched into a diatribe about what a terrible idea that was, and summoned a passing colleague for a concurring opinion. Another man joined the pair with a similar rant. By the end, I had five men standing around me in a semi-circle, as though it were an intervention, each of them lambasting my plan. They told me I should join the army instead; this was 1997, and had I done so, I would have certainly ended up in the War on Terror. They probably still would have maintained that I’d made the better choice. In fairness to them, everything they said about the job was true. Their only mistake was imagining I could escape the degeneracy by doing something else.

I own up to my part in all of it. Every day it gets faker and faker. Every time I get a new class some small bit of my academic freedom is chipped away, some new conformity demanded, some standard reduced. I make the choice to put up with it. At my private school the same mores of managerial science and neoliberal sacralized quantification that have consumed everything else eat away at what should be solid foundations like so much cancer. It’s subtle stuff to those not attuned to it- the indifference to academics, the therapeutic medicalization of laziness and poor discipline, the relaxing of standards in the interest of “helping young men succeed,” and, most tellingly, a culture that makes it challenging to tell uncomfortable truths.

For students who are failing, teachers have to email parents, email resident advisors, email other teachers- explaining to each in detail why the student is failing- as well as signing the student up for morning tutoring. Then again, if he’s barely passing, you don’t have to do any of that- hint and nudge. Outside of schools, our approach to education in America is best reflected in our military’s training of the various client armies we created during the War on Terror, where reporting that one had successfully trained a battalion of Afghan National Army soldiers would get one promoted and reporting the truth would result in demands for explanatory paperwork and reprimands. The results speak for themselves, and are exactly the same as with our schools, simply more conspicuous for having been revealed so quickly and dramatically.

It turns out they were all on heroin. Who knew?

I believe in what I do. Students do learn, not all, perhaps not even most, but some. It’s the only thing in my working life that mitigates all the compromises, all the rationalizations, perhaps. You find ways to preserve your self in the midst of it all, like the anarch in Eumeswil. Every teacher at my high school has to sponsor an “enrichment activity” for the kids, something they do on Fridays to theoretically foster connections with the kids. Most teachers choose board games or some discussion group. I teach Biblical Greek. Hardly anyone wants to do it, but that’s the plan, really. Since it’s the only thing I do that attracts pure volunteers with no expectation of reward, I take advantage of that to offer something especially worthwhile. Those few who show up are exactly who I’m looking for. We spend the semester going over as much as I can, and the last thing we read is the Parable of the Sower. The sower scattered seeds even knowing some would land on barren rocks, while others would get choked by weeds. That didn’t matter; the sower’s efforts were for those few shoots that would mature and bear fruit. Everything else was worth putting up for for the sake of that end.

My career as a writer is my other penance for all my compromises with the world. Here I am fully free of any constraints other than those imposed from within. Here I can write for the sake of writing, purging what I do from any mercenary consideration. It’s why I don’t paywall anything. Though I’m extremely grateful for my patrons, I never want to think of my writing as any form of exchange if I can help it (not that I judge anyone else). It’s 11:33 and I’m on my phone again, lying on the couch, hoping I don’t wake anyone, and I’m glad. This is authentic; this is real.

My girls are asleep in their room nearby. The jobs I do pay for their food and their schooling and their medicine and everything else. My writing is how I satisfy the debt I owe myself for the compromises I make in the course of all that. As I said to

The Starfire Codes

earlier today, authenticity can’t be owned, only rented. And much like physical fitness, it’s only through great toil that such a toll can be paid.