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Your kid didn’t write their essay last night.
ChatGPT did.
And that might be the most honest thing happening in school today.
They’re copying essays from AI, running them through “humanizing” tools, and handing in work they’ve barely read. They’re having AI listen to lectures so they don’t have to. They’re sneaking AI via their mobile phones into tests.
They’re using ChatGPT for everything from math homework to history essays to college applications.
And they should be.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for AI in real learning. AI is only useful right now as a stress test as it reveals how hollow adolescent work has become. If it pushes schools toward offering work with relevance, impact, and agency and away from hopeless busywork (“When will I ever use this?”), that is a win.
Because AI isn’t the problem.
It’s just a light revealing how fake and pointless school has become.
The Death Spiral Has Already Begun
Walk into any high school classroom. A majority of the work is written by AI.
Everyone knows. Most say nothing.
Teachers pretend to grade.
Students pretend to write.
It’s as much about learning as taking your shoes off at the airport is about security.
Teachers and professors acknowledge it is rampant, but there is little they can do as evidenced by this post.
The author of this post ended it with this humorous conclusion.
So yeah. ChatGPT is my best student now. It hands in perfect work, never complains, and never asks for an extension. And the worst part? I think I like it better.
And as highlighted above, this is “every single paper”, i.e., this isn’t a few bad apples.
Parents who found their daughter cheating on multiple assignments heard:
“Everyone is doing this” and that it’s the only way to stay competitive.
McCabe’s research confirms this: once cheating becomes normalized and the system loses legitimacy, defection becomes the dominant strategy.
This is the classic prisoner’s dilemma.
- If everyone plays fair, all benefit.
- But if others cheat and you don’t, you fall behind.
- So even the “good” students feel forced to cheat just to stay even.
This, however, isn’t a moral collapse.
It’s a design failure.
The real revelation?
AI exposed that a lot of school work isn’t worth the effort.
Maria Montessori said it a century ago:
“The work must be something the child feels is worth doing.”
Schools forgot and flipped that.
They assign work and expect kids to value it merely because it was assigned.
The Predictable Crackdown
Some schools and teachers unhappy with the theater chose not to look the other way and responded exactly as you’d expect.
First came the guilt: “You’re only cheating yourself.”
When that inevitably didn’t work, they escalated to AI detectors that don’t work, forced handwritten essays, laptop bans, surveillance tools.
They made classrooms, places where you’re already told to sit still and do as you’re told, even more prison-like. Not surprisingly, this same strategy is being used at universities as Princeton University professor D. Graham Burnett reveals in this response on the Hard Fork podcast who states:
We’re like the sheriffs. and so the concern is all my assignments are now useless. I can’t assign papers. Am I going to have do a blue book exam?
Their strategies, as you can see, are almost all punitive.
As one lecturer inspiringly put it:
“Catch what you can, no mercy for the damned.”
And then they wonder why students check out even more.
Here’s what they never admit: AI didn’t create the problem. It just revealed it.
The Coming Collapse
Follow the money.
What happens when a 4.0 GPA means nothing because half the work was done by AI?
We’ve seen this before.
During COVID, when school went virtual, parents saw what was really going on.
The result?
Public school enrollment dropped by 1.3 million. States like Oregon and New York lost over 5% of their students.
And it will similarly accelerate when parents realize they’re paying (via taxes or tuition) for education theater and their students are actually learning very little.
Colleges will then quietly start ignoring GPAs.
Employers will stop trusting transcripts.
And when everyone acknowledges that the product is worthless, the economic foundation collapses.
What Survives the Stress Test?
AI is a filter.
It strips away everything that can be automated, leaving only what requires actual thinking: creativity, collaboration, real-world problem-solving.
Deci & Ryan’s research says people engage when they have autonomy, competence, and purpose.
School as we’ve constructed it for hundreds of years kills all three.
But some are adapting.
- At High Tech High, students tackle real community problems.
- At Forney ISD in Texas, students run actual businesses inside their school.
- At the School of Entrepreneuring, students identify and solve real problems on behalf of others while working together.
Boalar’s research confirms this: when work is relevant and challenging, cheating drops dramatically.
Not because it’s harder, but because students actually want to do the work.
We need to move to education that prioritizes engagement (note: school need not be easy or fun. It requires productive struggle)
Let It Burn
AI cheating highlights that much of what passes for education today has no value.
So let AI burn down and reveal how inane this work is.
Let it break the model so we can finally build something better.
Because the students have already figured it out.
The next time a teacher complains about AI cheating, ask: If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?And then we can replace it with education and work that actually matters.