The Future Of Education Is An Interactive Laptop Screen That Destroys All Hope And Joy
The world is changing at a rapid rate, and our K-12 educational system must adapt to meet the demands of our new global hellscape. The old ways — developing interpersonal skills, self-knowledge, and familiarity with the natural world — simply don’t make sense in our current context of dehumanizing monopolistic hegemons. So we can act like showing up to school, being inspired by teachers, and talking face-to-face with other humans is the best way forward, or we can admit that the future of education is an interactive laptop screen that converts whatever joy and hope you have into all-consuming loneliness and dread.
As the saying goes, it takes a village — of faceless digital power structures that we must succumb to or perish.
We know how children learn best: modeling, providing scaffolding, targeted assessment, and the profound isolation of late capitalism. With the help of our programmers, we at Assent Academy are providing at least one of those.
Whether it’s youngsters learning colors in the absence of paint and markers or high schoolers learning to write an essay from a series of dreary textual bubbles, our digital environment can tailor any lesson so that it can be measured by a robotic interface. To paraphrase Plato: to learn about virtue, tap the V button now.
Take our lesson on the Civil War. The fourteen hours of self-guided content has most students checking Instagram three times per minute by hour two, and by hour eleven they’ve successfully internalized the dreariness and boredom it takes most people until the age of twenty-six to accept as life. With practice, students are able to correctly identify which side of the Civil War is more responsible for how broken and empty they feel inside.
Of course, if all Assent Academy did was make your children experience a kind of bleak soul-imprisonment by forcing them stare at a screen for far longer than any reasonable person would recommend, then we wouldn’t be all that different from our competitors like Vista Horizons and Sad University, would we? But we take it a step further.
With lessons such as “What the Hell Am I Doing Here?,” “Life Is an Empty Series of Gestures, Devoid of Inherent Meaning,” and “The Best Way to Deal with Pain is By Distracting Yourself, But the Distractions Create New Forms of Pain, Which Only Compound the Original Pain,” our platform will teach your children early and often that their existence will be circumscribed by large and imposing structures they have no control over and that their limited freedom is a cruel joke; they have enough freedom to question their lifestyle but not enough freedom to change it.
Assent Academy goes beyond simple differentiation and offers atomized submission to the ultimate truth of existential terror. It’s all about fostering curiosity after acquiescing to a master narrative about the primacy of the individual and the embrace of the digital environment as the only legitimate sphere of experience. “Be yourself,” our motto is, “after adopting our dogma.”
Some may wonder if reading Nietzsche or watching six hours in a row of televised golf while eating a wheel of cheese can better nourish the weedy desolation that thrives in the shadowy vineyard of soul-death. Indeed, for past generations perhaps sipping absinthe while analyzing nihilistic missives about the essential horror required to sustain human life may have been enough to convince students that consciousness is itself a form of vague panic.
But today’s wired students need more than traditional lesson plans in order to thrive in a nightmare world defined by anxiety, aggression, dislocation, and distrust. They need to sit in front of a screen for eight, ten, maybe even sixteen hours per day to realize their full potential as commodified human products whose dull clicks constitute a personality. They need video lectures, chats, and colorful displays all designed by people with dead eyes in order to come to the realization that day after day after day stretching toward infinity is a cruel joke perpetrated by a sadistic God, culminating in the only question we ask: “Why?”
The graduates of our pilot program have gone on to do great things in a variety of sectors, whether that’s being scared all the time or not knowing how to nourish healthy relationships. I have had so many graduates thank me for teaching them to cope with suffering by living at an ironic distance from their own lives.
I’m proud that, through our lack of a mentorship program, our graduates have learned to equate success with the ability to humble themselves before an unjust succubus that gorges on their free time and emotional well-being.
As we say at Assent Academy, “Tomorrow is a bright new day, for today we must ignore the national disaster that is our young people’s fraught mental health.”
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