Not sure how many more of these pieces about AI influences on education I'm going to post, because at this point, I think the conclusion is both clear and obscure. Clear: Our current high school curricula and college liberal arts degrees cannot continue to be administered as they've been for the last century. Obscure: What we'll replace them with. ** If at first teachers worried about students using chatbots to write essays, now new agentic tools such as Claude Code are allowing students to outsource even more of their work to the machines. Need to take an online math quiz? Write a biology-lab report? Create a PowerPoint presentation for history class? AI can do all of this and more. One high schooler recently told me that he struggles to think of a single assignment that AI wouldn’t be able to do for him. As a measure of just how good AI has become at schoolwork, consider a new bot called Einstein. Several weeks ago, the tool went viral with big claims: “Einstein checks for new assignments and knocks them out before the deadline,” a website advertising the bot explained. All that a student had to do was hand over their credentials for Canvas, the popular learning-management platform, and Einstein promised to do the rest... When I first came across Einstein, I was skeptical: Flashy AI demos have a way of overpromising and under-delivering. So I decided to test the tool out for myself. Because I’m not a college student, I enrolled in a free online introductory-statistics class. The course website explained that the class was self-paced and that it could help undergraduates, postgraduates, medical students, and even lecturers build up basic statistical knowledge. I set the bot loose, and in less than an hour, Einstein had worked through all eight modules and seven quizzes. There were some hiccups—the bot took one quiz 15 times—but it ultimately earned a perfect score in the class. As for me? I hardly so much as read the course website. ...Einstein does seem to be an indicator of where AI in the classroom is headed. The latest bots have massive context windows, meaning that students can feed in mountains of course content such as syllabi, lecture slides, and practice exams. Today’s agentic tools can complete all kinds of tasks, such as participating in online discussion forums and taking notes on recorded lectures without student intervention. According to one analysis, the percentage of students middle-school age or older who self-reported using AI for help with homework climbed by 14 points from May to December of last year... Instructors, as I have previously written, are also using plenty of AI. Canvas recently introduced a new AI teaching agent designed to save instructors time on “low educational value tasks” such as organizing online-course modules and adjusting assignment due dates. “Faculty are using AI tools both for instructional purposes, for building course materials, but they’re also starting to play around with generative AI to actually grade and assess the learning,” Marc Watkins, a researcher at the University of Mississippi who studies AI and education, told me. He gave a hypothetical: “I could set my agent up, open it up in my course, go out on campus to walk across campus to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks,” he said. By the time he returned, 15 minutes later, all of the essays would be graded, and “bespoke personal feedback” would be sent out to each student. AI can save teachers time—that same grading takes him 10 or 12 hours, Watkins estimated—but in the process, the technology threatens the relationship between students and teachers that is core to education. “That’s really scary,” he said. Most people I spoke with seemed unhappy with the current trajectory of bots in the classroom. Even as growing numbers of students are using the technology, a majority believe that the more they use AI for classwork, the more it will harm their critical-thinking skills...Some educators are worried about “a fully automated loop”—as the Modern Language Association put it last fall—in which AI-generated assignments are completed and graded by AI agents. Instructors have taken to analyzing students’ Google Docs history to make sure they are typing responses live instead of pasting in text from a bot. But of course, an AI work-around exists for that too: A new suite of human-typing simulators promises to generate text to make it look as if a student is writing in real time when, really, the work is being done by AI. theatlantic.com/technology/2…

You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice. You thought it was you. It is not you. Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse. Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like. The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation. Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first. What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland. Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved. They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data. The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment." The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible. This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis. The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world. Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.

New Virginia Boys' Boarding School Takes a "Digital Poverty" Pledge, Vows a Screen-Free Campus for All Students. St. Dunstan's website reads "In order to enable boys to flourish and grow in strength during these formative years, St. Dunstan’s students will live under a rule of digital poverty. Just as the Benedictines saw material poverty as a way to focus their attention on prayer and work, at St. Dunstan’s, an intentional step away from the computerized world will provide the boys with more free time, require them to grow in patience, and help them learn how to create things for themselves they otherwise wouldn’t have."

Sure they’ll stab you in the heart as you walk down the street or chase you down and cut your head off like literal horror movie villains but think of the delicious ethnic cuisine! The food trucks! The takeout! Yum!

Apparently, the extremely negative impression of the Crusades among Muslims only really dates back to the 19th century; until then, Orthodox Christians held more historical fury at the Crusaders. From Jonathan Riley-Smith’s “The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam” (2008)

Despite having hundreds of mosques in New York, mass street “prayers” are becoming a staple of life in the Big Apple. And it’s not prayers, my friends, but assertion. They are claiming turf, like hyenas pissing to mark territory.

This is Texas where Halal food is required to be prepared across texas gov facilities like trade schools and hospitals Islamic prepared food for texas children Is this the texas you want ?

This is the PERFECT example of why foreigners should not be allowed to run for office Zul Mohammed just ran for Mayor of Carrollton, Texas. He’s from Pakistan “No vet has made any sacrifice. I want to make that clear. I do not support the US military. No, I do not support the United States. I look down on both entities. I want to make that clear” I can’t think of a better example of why only natural born citizens should be allowed to run for office Also he is a Muslim, which further enforces the classic “I do not support the United States” We need new election eligibility laws

Ladybird Books has published a Happy Pride image on Instagram featuring a Muslim woman in hijab. Ladybird is one of the UK's biggest children's books publishers and its books are read by kids as young as two. The image features a Muslim woman in hijab carrying a baby alongside another woman. A caption reads: "Everyone should be free to be themselves, no matter who they are or who they love." Homosexual acts are strictly forbidden in Islam.

It's painfully ironic that professors of Critical Theory do not subject themselves to being critically examined.

Ismail and I are good friends.

Indiana's Christian nationalist Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith brags that hating Islam is a "winning issue" for Republicans and says he's thrilled by the controversy over his comments: "I love it. I think this is fantastic." peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch…