Losing The Federal Education Mission

The official assault on the Department of Education has begun.

If it seems like there's an awful lot more talking around this compared to, say, the gutting of the IRS or USAID, that may be because the regime doesn't have the legal authority to do the stuff that they are saying they want to do. The executive order is itself pretty weak sauce-- "the secretary is to investigate a way to form a way to do stuff provided it's legal." And that apparently involves sitting down in front of every camera and microphone and trying to make a case.

A major part of that involves some lies and misdirection. The Trumpian line that we spend more than anyone and get the worst results in the world is a lie. But it is also a misdirection, a misstatement about the department's actual purpose.

Likewise, it's a misstatement when the American Federation of Children characterizes the "failed public policy" of "the centralization of American education." But the Department wasn't meant--or built--to centralize US education. 

The department's job is not to make sure that American education is great. It is expressly forbidden to exert control over the what and how of education on the state and local level. 

The Trump administration is certainly not the first to ignore any of that. One of the legacies of No Child Left Behind is the idea that feds can grab the levers of power to attempt control of education in the states. Common Core was the ultimate pretzel-- "Don't call it a curriculum because we know that would be illegal, but we are going to do our damnedest to standardize the curriculum across every school in every state." For twenty-some years, various reformsters have tried to use the levers of power in DC to reconfigure US education as a centrally planned and coordinated operation (despite the fact that there is nowhere on the globe to point to that model as a successful one). And even supporters of the department are speaking as if the department is an essential hub for the mighty wheel of US education.

Trump is just working with the tools left lying around by the bipartisan supporters of modern education reform. 

So if the department's mission is not to create central organization and coordination, then what is it?

I'd argue that the roots of the department are not the Carter administration, but the civil rights movement of the sixties and the recognition that some states and communities, left to their own devices, would try to cheat some children out of the promise of public education. Derek Black's new book Dangerous Learning traces generations of attempts to keep Black children away from education. It was (roughly) the 1960s when the country started to grapple more effectively with the need for federal power to oppose those who would stand between children and their rights. 

The programs that now rest with the department came before the department itself, programs meant to level the playing field so that the poor (Title I) and the students with special needs (IDEA) would get full access. The creation of the department stepped up that effort and, importantly, added an education-specific Civil Rights office to the effort.

And it was all created to very carefully not usurp the power of the states. When Trump says he'll return control of education to the states, he's speaking bunk, because the control of education has always remained with the states-- for better or worse. 

The federal mission was to make the field more level, to provide guardrails to keep the states playing fair with all students, to make sure that students had the best possible access to the education they were promised. 

Trump has promised that none of the grant programs or college loan programs would be cut (and you can take a Trump promise to the... well, somewhere) but if all the money is still going to keep flowing, then what would the loss of the department really mean?

For one thing, the pieces that aren't there any more. The Office of Civil Rights is now gutted and repurposed to care only about violations of white christianist rights. The National Center of Education Statistics was the source of any data about how education was working out (much of it junk, some of it not). The threat of turning grants into unregulated block grants, or being withheld from schools that dare to vaccinate or recognize diversity or keep naughty books in the library.

So the money will still flow, but the purpose will no longer be to level the playing field. It will not be about making sure every child gets the education they're entitled to-- or rather, it will rest on the MAGA foundation, the assumption that some people deserve less than others. 

That's what the loss of the department means-- a loss of a department that, however imperfectly, is supposed to protect the rights of students to an education, regardless of race, creed, zip code, special needs, or the disinterest and prejudice of a state or community. Has the department itself lost sight of that mission from time to time? Sure has. Have they always done a great job of pursuing that mission? Not at all. But if nobody at all is supposed to be pursuing that goal, what will that get us? 

AR: Attempting To Make Non-conforming Haircuts Illegal

 Arkansas state legislature is deeply worried about trans persons. Rep. Mary Bentley (R- 73rd Dist) has been trying to make trans kids go away for years as with her 2021 bill to protect teachers who used students dead names or misgender them (that's the same year she pushed a bill to require the teaching of creationism in schools).  

In 2023, Bentley successfully sponsored a bill that authorizes malpractice lawsuits against doctors who provide gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Now Bentley has proposed HB 1668, "The Vulnerable Youth Protection Act" which takes things a step or two further.

The bill authorizes lawsuits, and the language around the actual suing and collecting money part is long and complex-- complex enough to suspect that Bentley, whose work experience is running rableware manufacturer Bentley Plastics, might have had some help "writing" the bill. The part where it lists the forbidden activities is short, but raises the eyebrows. 

The bill holds anyone who "knowingly causes or contributes to the social transitioning of a minor or the castration, sterilization, or mutilation of a minor" liable to the minor or their parents. The surgical part is no shocker-- I'm not sure you could find many doctors who would perform that surgery without parental consent, and certainly not in Arkansas (see 2023 law). But social transitioning? How does the bill define that?

"Social transitioning" means any act by which a minor adopts or espouses a gender identity that differs from the minor’s biological sex as determined by the sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous profiles of the minor, including without limitation changes in clothing, pronouns, hairstyle, and name.

So a girl who wears "boy" jeans? A boy who wears his hair long? Is there an article of clothing that is so "male" that it's notably unusual to see a girl wearing it? I suppose that matters less because trans panic is more heavily weighted against male-to-female transition. But boy would I love to see a school's rules on what hair styles qualify as male or female. 

Also, parental consent doesn't make any difference. Rep. Nicole Clowney keyed on that, as reported by the Arkansas Times:

“Is there anything in the bill that addresses the parental consent piece?” Clowney asked. “Even if a parent says, ‘Please call my child by this pronoun or this name,’ it appears to me that anybody who follows the wishes of that parent … that they would be subject to the civil liability you propose here. Is that correct?”

“That is correct,” Bentley said. “I think that we’re just stating that social transitioning is excessively harmful to children and we want to change that in our state. We want to make sure that our children are no longer exposed to that danger.”

In other words, this is not a "parental rights" issue, but a "let's not have any Trans Stuff in our state" issue.  

In hearing, an attorney from the Arkansas Attorney General's office observed that this was pretty much an indefensible violation of student's First Amendment rights, and the AF office wouldn't be able to defend it. According to the Times, Bentley agreed to tweak the bill a bit, but we can already see where she wants to go with this. 

The person filing the suit against a teacher who used the wrong pronoun or congratulated the student on their haircut could be liable for $10 million or more, and they've got 20 years to file a suit.

I'm never going to pretend that these issues are simple or easy, that it's not tricky for a school to look out for the interests and rights of both parents and students when those parents and students are in conflict. But I would suggest remembering two things-- trans persons are human beings and they are not disappearing. They have always existed, they will always exist, and, to repeat, they are actual human persons. 

I was in school with trans persons in the early seventies. I have had trans students in my classroom. They are human beings, deserving of the same decency and humanity as any other human. I know there are folks among us who insist on arguing from the premise that some people aren't really people and decency and humanity are not for everyone (and empathy is a weakness). I don't get why some people on the right, particularly many who call themselves Christians, are so desperately frightened/angry about trans persons, but I do know that no human problems are solved by treating some human beings as less-than-human. And when your fear leads to policing children's haircuts to fit your meager, narrow, brittle, fragile view of how humans should be, you are a menace to everyone around you. You have lost the plot. Arkansas, be better.

FL: Replacing Immigrant Workers With Children

Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis and his right-wing legislature are ready to beat up two birds with one stone.

Florida has been cracking down on undocumented immigrants for a few years now, as well as putting some hurt on the people who employ those immigrants.

But that creates a whole other problem. Who will do the work?

Well, DeSantis and his buds have an idea--

“Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when you know, teenagers used to work at these resorts, college students should be able to do this stuff,” DeSantis said last week at a panel discussion with border czar Tom Homan, as first reported by the Tampa Bay Times.

Yep. Time to bring back child labor.  

It has been a trend for a few years now. Many states that have been busy whacking away at public education have also been getting rid of child labor laws. Some, like Arkansas, teamed up the gutting of child labor protections with laws set to kneecap public schools. Iowa removed protections that kept young workers out of more physically dangerous jobs while expanding the hours they could be asked to work. Missouri similarly shot for increasing working hours for teens. Minnesota said yes to teens working in heavy construction.

In fact, some states are so excited about bringing back child labor, they are willing to bypass parents to do it. You remember how many states require teens to get a permit signed by parents and/or school? Now Arkansas doesn't care to give parents a voice in this particular decision. Ohio's Senator Bill Reineke expressed a similar concern over child labor, arguing that kids who really want to work shouldn't be hampered because "they can't get their parents to cooperate with them." Parents--they only matter sometimes.

Some of the arguments for child labor are spectacular. In Iowa, Jessica Dunker, president of the Iowa Restaurant Association and the Iowa Hotel and Lodging Association testified.

“Nine o’clock for a 15 year old sophomore in high school, you know, I’m sure they’re doing something already and probably it’s a school opportunity,” she said, “but if it isn’t, having kids get the opportunity to work is important.

A 2016 piece by Jeffrey Tucker at the Foundation for Economic Education argued that work would be so much better for children's inner lives than school, and some jobs might be dangerous, but kids love danger, and more...

If kids were allowed to work and compulsory school attendance was abolished, the jobs of choice would be at Chick-Fil-A and WalMart. And they would be fantastic jobs too, instilling in young people a work ethic, which is the inner drive to succeed, and an awareness of attitudes that make enterprise work for all. It would give them skills and discipline that build character, and help them become part of a professional network.

A century ago, children were "civic soldiers." We should be ashamed that we ever took the opportunity to work away from kids, suggests Tucker. That piece spawned another at the Acton Institute entitled "Work is a gift our kids can handle" by Joseph Sunde, which offers more of the same. Considering the question of household allowances:

What if we were to be more intentional about creating opportunities for work for our kids, or simply to more closely disciple our children toward a full understanding of the role of their work in honoring God and serving neighbor? In our schools and educational systems, what if we stopped prioritizing “intellectual” work to the detriment of practical knowledge and physical labor, paving new paths to a more holistic approach to character formation?

 Florida has been catching up. According to the US Department of Labor Statistics, the number of child labor violations has tripled, even though just last year the legislature decided that 16 and 17-year-olds being home schooled could work any old hours.

The new bill, SB 918, would amends the applicable Florida statutes and would end pretty much any restrictions on 16 or 17-year-old employment-- number of hours, when those hours would fall, working on school nights--all night--those restrictions are all crossed out in the bill. Those teens would also lose any guaranteed meal break. Now 14 and 15-year-olds can get into the fun world of employment with barely any restrictions (and if they are homeschooled or cyber-schooled, none at all).

The bill was passed by Commerce and Tourism and goes up before the legislature next.

Teens putting in 20 hours a week (or more) are less likely to finish school. But teenagers also make for a compliant, cheap work force. At some point in the debate, someone is going to argue that some children are destined to be meat widgets anyway, so they might as well get to it. At the end of the day, some folks would much rather have access to cheap labor than foot the bill for an education that will just make the Lessers all uppity anyway. We'll see how this bill does and if Florida can catch up to other states in the child labor exploitation game. 

ID: Doubling Down On Unwelcomeness

The West Ada School District administration (the largest in Idaho) has just flunked an important quiz, pulling failing grades in student support as well as PR management.

Here's the quiz.

Assume you are a district that recently told a teacher to take down an "Everyone is welcome here" sign that shows the message with hands of various tones. Your explanation is that it's "not neutral" to suggest that students of all races are welcome. The teacher goes national, drawing all sorts of attention to you district, and the country is wondering if "Some students are unwelcome here" is an official district policy.

There are protests and letters to the editor, and over the weekend, 400 or so people turn out to put "everyone is welcome here" messages in chalk all over the sidewalks and parking lots of your district.

Do you--

A) Go public with a statement explaining that this is all just a big understanding because of course in your district everyone is welcome and the whole things is just a communication mix-up.

B) Send an administrator or two out for a photo op with one of the chalk drawings and maybe a student or two, throw in a big smile and a thumbs up to explain that of course your district endorses this message and celebration of the diversity that makes this country great.

C) Hide like a coward in your office and hope that this just blows over before some MAGA goons turn you in to the DEI police for not firing the teacher immediately.

D) Send a message to your building administrators telling them to get the "vandalism" washed away ASAP.

West Ada admins chose D. They offered as an excuse that they didn't want students tracking the chalk dust into the building, and every school in the country that ever put chalk messages on the sidewalk for the first day of school or Big Test Day responds "Cough bullshit cough." At least one West Ada student told a reporter, "They chalk all the time for student welcomes and IB exams, but they don't power wash messages off then." Which would be the least surprising thing about this whole story.

I don't know the West Ada administrators, so maybe they are not actively trying to promote a policy of "Everyone is definitely not welcome here, dammit." Knowing school administrations, it strikes me as equally likely that this is more "How dare you defy my directive, and double-damn you for making me look stupid while doing it." Maybe they're just frustrated authoritarians; there's nothing authoritarians hate worse than people who don't properly follow orders. 

Nevertheless, I hope West Ada continues to draw attention. This is what anti-diversity, anti-equity, anti-inclusion looks like-- active suppression of any attempt to express welcome or support for people who are at all different. That's a stunningly inappropriate policy for any public school district in this country to implement, even if it's what the federal regime supports. For any district to suggest that some young people are not welcome, or to buckle to other people who want the district to take that position, is unconscionable and a betrayal of what we hope public education can be.

Thanks to Mike Simpson for the image

ICYMI: Eye On The Ball Edition (3/22)

This was the week that Trump indicated he was serious about axing the Department of Education, but I want to point out that what the executive order said, what people (including Trump) say he's doing, and what the law allows him to do are all wildly different things, so now is an excellent time to tune out the noise and pay attention to what is actually happening. 

Mission (almost) Accomplished

Stephen Dyer with some astonishing numbers on how Ohio's private school students are sucking up a disproportionate amount of the taxpayer's money.

What Is A Good College?

Akil Bello takes a look at the many ways this question is answered and suggests maybe there is bunk involved. 

In Red States, Rural Voters Are Leading the Resistance to School Vouchers

Jennifer Berkshire in Barn Raiser again highlights the opposition to school vouchers in rural red areas. 

Shelter Skelter: How the Educational Choice for Children Act Would Use Tax Avoidance to Fuel School Privatization

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy breaks down some of the effects of the proposed federal school voucher bill. Surprise-- it helps out rich people with their taxes.

Trump Cannot Sharpie-kill the Department of Ed, and He Knows It.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at the executive order and notes what it doesn't say.

Florida at the White House, Applauding Disaster

Along with children, Trump also used some governors as props for the signing. Sue Kingery Woltanski takes a look at the sad scene.

White House says test scores haven’t improved since 1979. That’s not true.

Sarah Mervosh at the New York Times provides the answers for when your MAGA uncle starts talking about how Dear Leader said that US schools just keep getting worse/

Is Academic Achievement Improving or Deteriorating?

Everybody knows that text scores just keep dropping, right? Well, no.

Texas lawmaker proposes bill targeting furries; measure seeks to ban 'non-human behavior' in schools

I include this report from Fox News so that you will understand that there is still idiocy loose in the world.

How Oklahoma’s Right-Wing Superintendent Set Off a Holy War in Classrooms

Linda Wertheimer at Vanity Fair takes a look at the career of Oklahoma's Head Education Doofus, Ryan Walters. Thorough. If you've been wondering what the big deal is about this guy, this is a good entry into the discussion of his various policies--and how even religious folks wish he'd knock it off.

Three Pillars for Decimating Public Education

Jose Luis Vilson breaks down the three foundational parts of breaking public education and making the country a worse place.

Ohio's Private School Vouchers

Quick fact sheet reminding us that vouchers are a nice benefit for wealthy folks, but that's about it.

Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3

Jill Barshay at Hechinger looks at what may be one of the most devastating education cuts.

Questioning the Mississippi Miracle Again

Thomas Ultican explains why there is no Mississippi miracle, no matter how many people keep proclaiming it.

Trump and his “Aptitude for Music”

Trump wants to pretend he can hang with the band or theater kids. Nancy Flanagan knows better.

Computing versus Democracy

Audrey Watters reflects on the many crappy gifts that Bill Gates has given us, plus the usual assortment of valuable links.

"Everyone Is Welcome Here" and The Politics of Hate

Paul Thomas talks about that teacher in Idaho and the long political history of other-ing.

McTeaching: Online Instruction

Larry Cuban explains what there is to not love about online instruction, for both teachers and students.

Journalists and Advocates Share Key Resources to Address Public School Funding in Ohio Budget Debate

Jan Resseger provides a guide to some of the resources that have been published as part of Ohio's ongoing debates about education and whether or not Ohio can out-Florida Florida.

On Tyranny: Lessons for Educators 3

Speaking of Florida, Gregory Sampson uses Florida to demonstrate why a one-party state is a big problem.

The Great Education Heist

For half of forever, Big Education Ape has amplified all the voices supporting public education, but occasionally Mike Simpson writes a little something himself. Here he looks at how Trump, Musk and the DOGE boys are playing Monopoly with our schools.

The Erasure of Black History in the Name of an Assault on DEI

Julian Vasquez Heilig looks at the alarming erasure of US history because diversity is too scary for some folks.

Mystified magicians of the mind

Ben Riley talks to Paul Cisek about the nature of AI and human thinking and which parts are not magic at all.

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

AI has depended on stealing a whole lot of work from writers for "training" purposes. Now you can see what Meta stole to train their own AI bot. It's a Mount Everest of larceny.

Apparently I was busy at Forbes.com this week. I wrote about Idaho's attempt to jam the Bible into classrooms (just don't show there were brown people in it), the charter group that opposes the Catholic Charter in Oklahoma, and of course the executive order that says... something. 

For years, I have maintained a small piece of internet sanity by making a deal with myself-- no matter how much I'm stewing over stuff when I get up, I cannot post anything anywhere until I have first posted some piece of music. Music captures and expresses everything admirable and beautiful and deeply human about us, and so I remind myself of all of that first thing. I guess it's my version of a daily meditation/prayer. At any rate, I've decided to start including something with every one of these weekly digest posts. Because even though some humans have completely lost the plot and spend too much of their day being awful (and that is sad for them because good lord what is the point of being super-rich and/or super-powerful if you are still miserable and can only think to ease your gnawing emptiness by making others miserable)-- anyway, our humanity is meant as God's great gift to us and those around us and for me, at least, music is a major way to get in touch with that. 

Which is a long way of saying that I'm going to start tacking music on this list every week now.

As always, you're encouraged to join me on my newsletter, free today and always.

IL: The Sequel To The Dyett Story

Ten years ago, Dyett High School in the Chicago southside neighborhood of Bronzeville, was up against the ropes. I'll pull from some of what I wrote about it at the time (apologies if some of the links have died). 

In 2012, Chicago Public Schools decided to close Dyett, allowing the last freshman class to finish their education there if they wished. Only a handful wished (and they were reportedly pressured by CPS to wish differently), but they're done, and the time had come to decide what Dyett would become.

There were three proposals. In a poor, black neighborhood of Chicago, there was an outside proposal for entertainment industry, an outside proposal for sports, and a community proposal for science, technology and leadership. I respect athletics, and you know I love the arts, but you tell me which one of these proposals set the highest aspirations for the children of this community.

Bronzeville is poor, but they had worked hard for their school (back in 2011, just before the district dropped the hammer, they won a grant from ESPN to rebuild their athletic facilities with big fancy upgrades like working handles for doors). They were improving and growing stronger. There's no question they needed some help, but a search doesn't turn up stories suggesting that Dyett was some sort of notorious hellhole in freefall.

But Dyett was located in the northern end of Washington Park, a very desirable chunk of real estate that was one of the two locations in the running to be the location of Barack Obama's Presidential Library. In fact, the proposed location was within a stone's throw of Dyett.

In fact, Washington Park seems to have been in the crosshairs for many years. Back in 2008, when Chicago was feeling the Olympic love, Washington Park was called one of the hottest neighborhoods, a diamond in the rough, and there is still talk about turning it into a community that could attract and support business, arts, and all the trappings of gentrification. And gentrification is a concern in Bronzeville, just as many see it as a hallmark of Rahm Emanuel's tenure as mayor.

CPS stalled and hemmed and hawed and tried to avoid saying out loud "We are stripping Bronzeville of their community high school" and so a group of parents staged a hunger strike. First, they did all the right things, developing their own proposals, presenting them, petitioning, and getting ignored by Emanuel and his crew. So they moved on to a hunger strike.

The Chicago press ignored them, except when people wrote really stupid editorials about Dyett. When the new school year rolled around and the strike had been going on for a month, CPS tried to shut them up with a bogus "compromise" (for the announcement of that, the strikers were not allowed in the room). It was infuriating, and symptomatic of reformsterism at the time. As I wrote at the time:

Dyett is the worst of the reformster movement in a microcosm-- residents will be stripped of their local school, given no voice in what will replace it, because their Betters have decided what they need, what they deserve. And because small politicos want to make sure that local voices are shut out, that power is not allowed into the hands of ordinary citizens.

Dyett is all of us, sooner or later (and in some places, already)-- privatizers and profiteers shutting down democracy so that they can get their hands on those sweet sweet piles of tax money and keep their hands on the wheels of power.

Jitu Brown was a hell of a voice for the hunger strikers, and the strikers themselves were a strong statement, and the school was rescued from closure, becoming an arts-focused school with technology training. "New Century. New Needs. New Direction." 

Last week they held the third annual awards ceremony established in honor of the school's namesake, Chicago music educator Walter H. Dyett. Dyett was an accomplished musician who taught in Chicago schools in the mid-20th century. His students included Nat King Cole, Bo Diddly, Milt Hinton, Dinah Washington, and Redd Foxx. It's a big legacy.

The school's basketball team has been a state powerhouse, making it to the playoffs multiple years. But last week they made it all the way to the top-- the Walter H. Dyett Eagles beat Althoff Catholic High School to become AA state champions. Ten years ago, they were elementary students who had no idea where they might get to go to high school. Now they are state champs. You never know how these stories are going to turn. 

Content Knowledge Is Still Necessary

A couple of decades ago, we started hearing people say "You don't have to teach students that stuff. They can just google it." This was dumb, and wrong.

But now we're getting a new level of this with AI hucksters. Here's just one sample of the pitches it am sent many times a day:

In the 1967 classic The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman was advised "one word: plastics." If it was remade in 2025, the one word would be AI.

Or the people who keep pitching the idea that AI can take over the difficult parts of student writing, like coming up with ideas, or writing a thesis, or maybe, you know, just have the AI write the assignment and then the student could do the rewrite. 

Relax, they say. It's just like when calculators arrived and math teachers freaked out.

Well, no, it's not. First, it would have to involved a calculator that gave the wrong answer a significant amount of the time. Second, there is no writing prompt that can be answered with only one correct essay. 

Content knowledge matters. This is so basic to education, and tech shortcuts do not change it. All aspects of learning rest on Knowing Stuff.

You can google for information all day, but if you don't Know Stuff, you have no way to sort the information wheat from the sludge-covered chaff. "Well, that's why students need the 21st Century skill of analysis and critical thinking," say the techphiles. But you cannot teach critical thinking and analysis like they are content-free skills, waves that exist without a medium through which to move.

My critical thinking skills are fine in areas where I have some content knowledge, or can connect the new information to knowledge I already have. I cannot apply critical thinking to areas in which I am completely ignorant and cannot connect to stuff I already know. As an adult, I have the advantage of having had years to learn lots of stuff, but children do not have that advantage.

Which is why the best thing we can do for small humans is give them the chance to learn stuff. I'm going to argue that it doesn't even matter what the stuff is. For years the Board of Directors here at the Institute were deeply interested in "work trucks"-- construction vehicles of all kinds. Now in second grade, we are deep in Pokemon territory. Do I love this for us? I do not. But they have absorbed a ton of information, and they have learned to organize and categorize large chunks of information in ways that they never could have if we had tried to teach organization without using something to organize. Plus a ton of vocabulary and math that they have picked up via these damned stupid delightful cards.

You can't acquire knowledge and skill second hand, nor can you do it in a vacuum. Of all the AI-for-student-writing advice I read, the most maddening may be "Have the AI write a rough draft and then have the students rewrite." How the hell does someone who has not written know how to edit a piece of writing? And how do you edit a piece when you have no idea what the author meant to say (or, in fact, the author is incapable of intent)? How do they develop the skill of figuring out what they think about a topic by having the AI spit out some topics for them? The only way this could be worse would be if the topic assigned was something the students had no knowledge of at all.

This kind of thinking puts product over process, but it also shows a failure to fully understand the product itself, like a builder who has built a house but neglected to put a foundation under it. 

Knowing Stuff is inescapably important. Writing requires thinking about stuff. Critical thinking is thinking about stuff. Evaluating sources and materials involves thinking about stuff. And you cannot think about what you know nothing about. And neither google nor ChatGPT can change that.