I think that what we were being taught was less a body of knowledge than a way to be in the world: orderly, organized, attentive to direction. There is nothing wrong with developing those skills—in fact, I’ve learned the hard way how useful they can be. What is wrong is their fetishization, the way they were allowed to outrank the actual body of knowledge held within algebra or English lit. The result was that “learning” felt like a kind of bait and switch. And this frustrated me because I truly did love to learn—it just so happened I learned best away from my desk, where ideas and concepts could be made tangible.
I think many of us who are teachers and professors have forgotten that the syllabus serves the student, and all around us are teachers, administrators, and columnists who seem to believe that material should be hard for the sake of it and that education itself is best when rendered not in wonder but in force.
Chasing TikTok users doesn’t build a better platform for writers. It builds a different platform entirely. The value proposition collapses when your infrastructure for thought becomes optimized for the attention economy. You can’t serve two masters. You either build a tool for writers or you build an app for dopamine hits. Once you choose the latter, you’ve already traded your audience.
