AI Completed the System We Built
Why students using AI is the most rational response in 2026
The Patrick Dempsey: #0110
I write weekly articles for educators who are ready to get unstuck from outdated curriculum, resistant institutions, and a career that was built for a world that no longer exists.
If you’re in the AI+consulting biz, you know every engagement can go in one of two ways.
😁 You show folks how to vibe code and they’re hooked. They can’t wait for more.
🤬 You ask folks to rethink the essay they’ve assigned the past 15 years, and they grab their pitch forks.
These folks are predictably indignant that since I “know so much about AI” I should be able to give them a pat answer about how to have students continue to engage with the assignments they’ve always used and not be “tempted” to use AI instead.
“We tell them not to use AI, but they still are using it for their essays. We tell them we value the process but I’m still seeing AI-generated paragraphs.”
And somehow I’m supposed to solve this?!
The reality is: your students are right to use AI. They don’t believe you. And they have every reason not to.
The Essay
Here’s how I know the students are right to use AI for their work.
These folks who are pissed at me aren’t really describing an AI problem as much as they’re describing a motivation and trust problem.
Students don’t believe the essay matters. That was true before AI!
But now AI makes any belief in the value of the essay completely implausible.
They can see that AI can write the essay. Better, in many cases, than they did last year when you gave them a 93 on their writing.
Now you’re saying that essay isn’t what you actually wanted. It never was. You always and only assigned the essay because it developed these other skills—the deep and slow thinking, the logical structuring of argumentation, the false starts and messy middles.
And so now you’re claiming this thing was about the process, never the product.
To which, I ask a question which only gets them more upset!
“Okay what sort of paper did you traditionally give an A to, then? The unpolished and incomplete work that someone submitted or the student who checked all the boxes on the rubric in terms of producing a product as close to perfect as possible?”
People don’t like that question. At all.
Because we all know no one is giving that messy, incomplete, incoherent essay an A! They’re giving polished finished products A’s and probably rightly so. Because a process is only good if we assume it leads to a better product!
Now I don’t think students are getting this part of the argument as I’m articulating it. But they are getting something more fundamental and foundational about what’s happening here.
Something More Sinister
In the last few pieces we traced how the words of education—learning, teaching, school, education—all originally implied motion, movement, becoming. And we traced how that motion was stripped out systematically over 400 years in service of producing obedient soldiers and useful workers.
That’s the documented history. That’s the story of the education system.
But something more sinister happened inside that history, and in particular to the children that were inside the system that that history produced.
From Economics to Emotions
Apart from some rough beginnings where children were typically treated as costs and liabilities, for most of recent human history, children were genuine economic contributors. Their labor kept families alive. They worked alongside adults, learned through participation, and their contribution was real and visible and mattered.
The Industrial Revolution changed that. Factories and mines took children and put them to work in dangerous conditions. Those small hands and tiny frames made for cheap and effective labor.
Child labor laws were introduced to protect the safety and wellbeing of children. As a result, children were increasingly removed from mines and factories and were instead conscripted into compulsory schooling.
And this is where it gets really interesting.
The sociologist Viviana Zelizer documented that between 1870 and 1930 the child moved from being economically useful to being emotionally priceless.
Children stopped contributing to the family economy and started providing emotional satisfaction to their parents. The new job of the child was to achieve, and their labor was redirected from production to performance, specifically in school (and eventually sports and every kind of extracurricular activity).
Sputnik in 1957 intensified this trend, making the child’s intellectual performance a matter of national security. Test scores became patriotic. Homework became the mechanism through which parents received their value back from their children. Academic achievement was the contribution children were allowed to make.
And it seemed to work(ish), for a while at least.
Then AI
That’s the section. That’s the punchline. That’s the challenge.
Then AI!
AI brings the goal of maximal efficiency and scale in education to a close.
It does the work of completing assignments perfectly and to every expectation we had prior to November 30th, 2022.
And students get it. They see it. “This is what you wanted. This is exactly how you wanted it. That was the point, right?”
And in that they realize, again perhaps not articulating in this way, that there is nothing left for them to do.
So they don’t believe the educator who’s trying to tell them, “Oh no, no, there’s actually value in the work that it takes to do the thing that you can see AI is doing easily.”
What if This Was You
Here’s a thought experiment.
I like to use this to help (annoy?) educators understand why students don’t want to do the work we think is so important.
Imagine you’re a teacher. You spend your summer, your planning periods, your weekends building the best lesson plans you’ve ever made. You’re proud. You’re ready to change hearts and minds.
But, you don’t get to teach them.
Your job, it turns out, is to submit the lesson plans to your department chair. They’ll read them—skim if we’re honest. And in two weeks hand them back to you with a few notes in the margins and a grade on the top.
How long do you stay motivated?
How long before you start applying for other jobs?
How long before you just start using AI to do the work since it doesn’t matter anyway?
That’s what we do to students. Every single day. We ask them to produce work for an audience of one, graded against a standard they didn’t set, with no authentic stake in the outcome, and no compelling reason why the work even matters in the first place, so no compelling reason to not use AI for it!
And then we’re surprised when they have AI do the work for them?!
The Existential Moment
Tracing where we’ve been, this seems to be a logical outworking of everything we’ve seen.
Students are right to be unmotivated because they have literally no value to offer in the society that we’ve built.
They have no value to offer in an educational system designed for maximal efficiency at scale when AI can achieve that for them.
Here’s a question.
If a child asked you why they matter, what could you tell them?
STOP!
Think about that for a minute. Really!
I’m willing to guess if it isn’t pragmatic (e.g., you do this thing which directly and essentially supports your family, the community etc.) then your response had to do with something spiritual, or religious, or something totally outside the bounds of modern educational systems.
That’s important to note.
The reality is, we have made it so children have no real contribution to make. The one thing that perhaps they could contribute to, the emotional support of their parents through their academic performance, has now been completed by AI.
And I think they get it.
A Counterrevolution
Ultimately, I’d say this is a good thing. Ultimately.
I think children’s value shouldn’t be the emotional worth their parents give them or the grades that they get on assignments. It has to be something real, but I’m not sure we figured out what that something is yet.
I want to believe that in the educational system the most natural of human tendencies, which is to learn, is something that we can make genuinely valuable such that students feel they are making genuine contributions to it and others through it in some way.
Honestly, this is less a hope, and more a retrace of history.
Because in the same decade the Committee of Ten were dictating what school would like look for the next 150 years, a man in New Hampshire looked at what the industrial education system was doing to children and set out to build something different.
Next time we’ll see what it was and what that vision has to say about learning, teaching, school, and education today, and what that could mean for purpose and meaning for children living in the AI era.
The Sputnik-to-ChatGPT arc you draw lands, but the Zelizer angle is what makes the post: moving children from economic to sentimental value left no frame for them to participate as cultural contributors. The Committee of Ten reference does more work than most readers will notice, since the assignment economy you're describing started there. theaifounder.substack.com sees this same erosion in adult professional work, where AI completes what was already empty performance. What does the New Hampshire reformer's alternative model involve, and how scalable does it look from where you sit?
Typo in paragraph that starts “To which I ask…“