Sir: When ideas have become outmoded and irrelevant, it is time to discard them honestly. Our progress is retarded by clinging to dated habits of thought that have outlived their usefulness. There was a time, for example, when flint-knapping was a vital survival skill, because it was the only way to come by the tools that everyone needed to survive. But now we live in a civilized society, where anyone with an Internet connection can just order a flint knife on Etsy. I have a drawer full of them, and I have no idea how they were made. In fact, I have no idea how they got in the drawer. I think they may have been left by the previous tenant. The point is that flint-knapping is no longer a skill we need, so we can turn our attention to more interesting and important matters.

This example shows us how to recognize when a pursuit is no longer necessary to the general population, and thus should be abandoned except by specialists. Thus we can see, when we consider the matter from an unbiased point of view, free from the shackles of sentimentalism and tradition, that it is time to abandon education.

There was a time, perhaps not so long ago, when education was a desirable and even necessary tool in a civilized society. But civilization has passed beyond that point. Just as we no longer need to knap our own tools, so the skill of thinking for ourselves is irrelevant and unnecessary. We do not need to know facts and dates in history, because our phones will instantly tell us any fact we need to know. We do not need to be able to add and subtract, because we have calculator apps on our phones. We do not need geographical knowledge, because map apps will use GPS to tell us every turn we need to make. We do not need to understand science, because the President of the United States knows enough science for all of us. We do not need to be able to express ourselves in writing, because AI will write for us. We do not need to be able to read, because our phones will narrate any written material to us, and simple pictographs convey whatever information needs to be ignored quickly on the highway.

Yet we continue to spend countless millions of dollars on educating young people, in spite of the obvious fact that no good comes of it. I assume we spend countless millions, anyway: I asked Gemini how much Americans spend on education every year, and it gave me a number, but I couldn’t even count all the digits in the number, let alone interpret how many millions it represented. So I asked it to explain the number to someone of my intellectual level, and it said, “A whole lot.”

Think of the things we could accomplish with all that money! Surely it would be enough to buy every American a new and better phone, for example. I don’t know how many Americans there are, but it has to be at least a few dozen, and yet I’ll bet the money we spend on education would be enough give them all really nice phones. Then they would have everything they needed, without spending countless hours in school surreptitiously scrolling on their phones when they could be proudly scrolling out in the open.

At present, the only thing that keeps us from abandoning education is the huge entrenched education establishment. It may be difficult to overcome so much inertia, but I have an idea. We can make the education professionals the first people to get the new and better phones. Then, when they are all properly distracted, it will be easy to close down and demolish the various schools all across the country, and ten to one the educators with shiny new phones will never even notice. —Sincerely, Brandon Pinch­mottle, President, Amer­icans Against Intel­lectual Activity.