Links and Commentary 8/8/25

Digital Necromancy, Red Social Engineering, Childcare for Kids with Disabilities, Open AI's Study Mode is Bad, Should the Humanities Be Harder?

Author

James Shanahan
August 08, 2025

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

I’m still deep in the early stages of newborn sleep disruptions, so you may find that my writing is a bit… disjointed. Apologies if sleep deprivation has noticeably impacted my writing and it will hopefully improve soon!

Digital Necromancy

If you had told me ten years ago that “digital necromancy” was going to be a career path or niche industry or whatever, I would have thought that sounded so cool. Black Mirror episodes notwithstanding, there does seem to be value in aiding loved ones to find closure and in instantiating something resembling the minds of great thinkers and scientists and leaders.

What we have today, though, seems worse.

If we can resurrect a murdered child to advocate for gun control, what stops political opponents from resurrecting him to argue the opposite? The dead cannot consent. They cannot correct the record, protest their exploitation, or demand context. They become eternal tools, their images hijacked by whatever cause finds their resurrection useful. This is not remembrance; it is exploitation, paving the way for a future where the dead are endlessly conscripted into the battles of the living.

I’m sure someone somewhere is already prepping their resurrected Laken Riley to advocate for even more draconian crackdowns on immigrants. But, Brian Merchant makes the case that this is all a cope. A way for people who have no hope of making real change in their material safety or economic conditions to feel like they are doing something while companies profit off their loss.

An American politics in thrall to the gun lobby and warrior capitalism has proved incapable of confronting the epidemic of mass death, and no matter how many children are gunned down, grieving parents form political advocacy groups to seek reform, or former mass shooting survivors attempt to enter politics only to see the establishment eject them, nothing at all changes.

To these grieving parents, maybe this AI offers at least a gesture towards a horizon where some kind of change, anything at all, is possible. Even if that promise is illusory, and the bot quite technically incapable of offering any new insights, trained as it is on corpuses of data drawn from the same gun wracked past. It is some kind of motion, forward or not.

My dissertation proposal hearing was held on the 10th anniversary of Sandy Hook. I stopped us all at the outset to hold a moment of silence and remarked, as I often have to teacher colleagues, that one of the bravest things kids do every day is show up at school.

Red Social Engineering

There are a number of conservative education initiatives that sometimes fly under the radar. For example, Trump brought back the Presidential Fitness Test. It’s probably an anti-trans thing and is another reminder that the US DOE will continue to exist in order to enforce the administration’s preferred gender identities at the very least.

Beyond that, various states are acting as laboratories of un-democracy as they seek ways to indoctrinate kids and ensure ideological compliance among staff. Oklahoma, for example, is going to require teachers from the “woke states” California and New York to take a test designed by PragerU to determine if they are beholden to “radical leftist ideology”. I wonder if the teachers Oklahoma is hiring from Mexico will also have to take this test?

I also wonder what all this stuff will look like in ten years? The reflexive answer is that schools will be worse, kids will learn less relevant stuff, our universities will be financially wrecked and uncompetitive, and our labor market will be stuck in the later 1970s, unable to escape. But maybe, just maybe, people will be mad enough to do something about it? To vote them out? Two states north of Oklahoma, some town hall attendees seemed like they’d gotten there.

Childcare for Kids with Disabilities

I’ve written before that childcare is a bipartisan issue where conservative and liberal forces in the US can find some common ground. One of the fake promises conservative proponents of school vouchers make is that children with disabilities will better be able to find services because the vouchers will pay for private providers. (Nevermind that the law already requires local schools to pay for private services if they can’t provide them locally!)

One gap for voucher proponents is childcare for kids who are not yet in school, and it seems like a great way for these programs to help working parents stay on the job while their kids are cared for. Sadly, it doesn’t come with the added bonus of taking money from traditional public schools so they’re not interested.

Let’s consider it, though! Kids with disabilities are often kicked out of childcare and childcare providers don’t feel well equipped or trained to support kids with disabilities. Seems like a win-win solution would be putting some money into a system where parents can send kids to specialized programs that would better serve their kids.

Open AI’s Study Mode is Bad

Benjamin Riley says Open AI’s Study Mode for ChatGPT is the “enshittification of education”. I am tempted to agree and want to emphasize one point: kids will simply go around it! They’ll click the drop down menu and pop back over to normal ChatGPT or to Deep Research. Or, maybe, they’ll just ask Study Mode’s Socratic Tutor to, well, stop being a tutor and give them all the answers.

From Benjamin Riley’s Substack

This doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the product’s ability to guide students rather than act as a shortcut.

Still, it’s super interesting to me that they’ve essentially used a prompt to create an entirely new feature of the platform. It’s just that like any other prompt, it seems like it can be modified or rejected entirely by users.

Should the Humanities Be Harder?

Matt Yglesias penned an essay about how university humanities degrees should be harder. It’s kind of typical Yglesias stuff but I want to point to two things.

First, he talks himself into the point that it’s probably better if there are fewer humanities graduates so long as they undergo a more rigorous education. I think we’re going to get the first half of this no matter what. Not only have we already seen a secular demographic decline in the number of college-going kids, but higher ed policy under Trump and the OBBBA, will make attending college financially harder for poor and middle-class kids while also making it harder for universities to keep humanities courses around given their inherent political bent. Neither of these are the rigor Yglesias is envisioning but it means universities might not have as much to lose if they try and ramp up rigor.

The second thing I encourage readers to do is spend time in the comments section of that article because a fair number of humanities professors, lecturers, adjuncts, are sounding off about their experiences. Here’s a snippet from one of the top entries:

My Dean has made it clear that what matters to him when making decisions (especially decisions about whether to replace professors when they leave or retire, what kinds of financial support for department activities etc.) is “metrics”. And he has said openly that the single metric that matters most in this context is class sizes - how many students the department teaches.

So if we make our courses so hard that our enrollments collapse by half, we will lose massively. So our strong incentive is to keep enrollments high, which is best done by not making it unfeasibly hard to get a good grade.

This does mean that our major looks less prestigious, for the reason Matt explained, so we attract fewer majors and probably lower quality students doing those majors. But the Dean doesn’t care about that, provided the overall undergraduate numbers hold up via our elective courses.

This is not something Matt pointed to in the post and, perhaps, not something he was fully aware of. So long as colleges are businesses run to satisfy paying customers, you won’t get rigor unless the customer demands it.

Thanks for reading!