Reading, writing, arithmetic: the crisis coverage never leaves the three Rs. But the list is a reduction. The old core of schooling put logic at its gateway, and the slogan dropped it. Reasoning has no score, so it can have no crisis, so it is never deliberately taught. And AI just made the other three nearly free.
Juniors learned the trade by doing the grunt work next to seniors. AI is cutting the grunt work and remote work is cutting the proximity, so the apprenticeship that quietly made partners is breaking, with nothing designed to replace it. Who becomes the next partner?
Michigan covered its grades and the internet answered in a day. Some replies were careful, most were not, and nobody could tell them apart. That is a market failure with a Nobel Prize behind it. It explains why good arguments go unread, why I chose to argue without standing anyway, and what anyone with an audience can do about it in about a minute.
The Wall Street Journal spent fourteen years testing stock pickers against darts, and fifty years of fund scoreboards say the professionals rarely beat the plain index after costs. The same belief is reassembling around AI: predictive language models read as insight engines, with no scoreboard at all. Same error, new tape. Here is the test that would settle it, and the reason its result will not.
A genre of social media post promises the prompts that replace McKinsey: the SWOT, the market analysis, the deck. Nine prompts, sometimes ten. Every list omits the same one, the prompt that checks whether the AI got any of it wrong. That omission is the tell. The deck was never the product. The checking was, and it still has to be human.
Palantir didn’t drop its standards when it dropped the degree. It started judging what people can actually do. Families weighing college should make the same move.