In the time I’ve spent learning about U.S. education, first as a student in public schools and later as a graduate student and school psychologist, I’ve witnessed shifts in what makes a successful student. I attended high school way back when the SAT and ACT were essentially a de facto requirement of college applications. Since the pandemic, this policy has shifted, even among top universities, to a “test-optional” approach or even one of “test-blindness”. The reduced focus on the big standard aptitude tests—which I’ve written in a previous essay are as reliably representative of the socio-economic status of one’s family as of a test-taker’s intellectual abilities—has augmented the importance of extracurricular activity involvement and academic success in college applications. While you’ll hear no argument from me in support of the SAT, extracurricular activities and academic achievement as measurements of college readiness are problematic in their own right. For one, involvement in resume-enhancing extracurricular activities is dependent on one’s access to extracurricular programs—access that is deeply dependent on socio-economic status. A large part of someone’s ability to invest time in extracurriculars involves the absence of responsibilities at home that would limit their available time, e.g. taking care of younger siblings, cooking, or working to help support their family. At first glance, academic achievement as measured by grades provides the most convincingly unbiased method for assessing college readiness (and legitimating the myth of merit in college admissions). After all, cognitive scores are the single best predictor of grade-point average1. However, multiple studies have attested to the centrality of specific personality traits to academic achievement2—personality traits that are eerily in-line with those that make a good employee. In particular, students’ display of personality traits like “Punctual,” “Perseverant,” “Externally Motivated,” “Consistent,” “Predictable,” “Empathizes Orders,” “Defers Gratification,” and “Dependable” is significantly correlated with higher grade-point averages. In contrast, the expression of “Independent,” “Aggressive,” and “Creative” traits have been shown to be negatively associated with academic success.

While we would love to think of our methodologies for evaluating students in schools as impartial, the structural nature of U.S. schools as centers of class reproduction ensures that the metrics we use to evaluate students will be informed by the perspectives of employers, not the best interests of students and families. Low-income public schools and community colleges focus on teaching working-class students how to be productive on the job, while private academies and prestigious universities prepare children of the ruling class to manage and lead. The evaluation regimes at these two particular types of institutions reflect those objectives: in public schools, obedience, consistency, rule-following, and hard work are highly valued just as initiative, inventiveness, independence, and creativity are rewarded at exclusive private schools and elite universities. When new evaluation regimes come about that do not attempt to undermine these structural objectives and the economic structures which determine them, we’d do well to be skeptical about claims that these new systems put the students first.

The Strengths-Based Assessment Model

The identifying characteristic of “strengths-based” or “student-centered” models is their emphasis on the assessment and cultivation of specific personal skills, as opposed to straightforward achievement on aptitude tests (think cognitive-heavy aptitude tests like the SAT). While these paradigms are not (perhaps yet) employed in place of grades, they are increasingly incorporated into grading procedures by separating grades into “process” and “product” components. Their approaches are presently used to problem-solve for students who are struggling academically and behaviorally, and their language is used to frame discussions of whole-school approaches to student success. In the summary statement of Patricia Noonan and Amy Gaumer Erickson’s 2018 book The Skills That Matter: Teaching Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Competencies in Any Classroom, the authors paint a picture of skill-based assessment in the context of an evolving educational landscape:

Across the country, education efforts are shifting from a narrow focus on accountability and testing to a broader focus of better preparing students to be college and career ready. The trend of high academic expectations and measurement to the exclusion of all other skills is being displaced by discussions of meaning and relevance in rigorous academics, allowing an opportunity for innovation and creativity in how and what we teach students. [Emphasis added]

While this appears a magnanimous approach at first glance, the student-centered approach does precious little to free students from the model of impersonalized evaluation. In fact, the model still upholds the longstanding dual functions of the US education system: producer of labor power for a profit-oriented economy and scapegoat for the social ills that such an economy produces. The student-centered model accomplishes this, perhaps inadvertently from the perspective of progressive educators, by portraying qualities desirable for employers as college- and career-ready “life skills” that schools are helping students cultivate for themselves. The “student-centered,” “skills-based” paradigm is, at the end of the day, a new framework for justifying the administrative direction of student behavior and development toward the ends of a stable and profitable economic system.

To be clear: I want students to be successful too. Academic and behavioral success are fairly good outcomes for a student, and I would much rather have a student succeed academically than drop out. If I didn’t value academic success, I would be truly awful at my job. My gripe with this approach is that it claims to put students first while sneakily ensuring that at the end of the day, personal development on the part of students is directed toward their productive employment in a capitalist society.

An examination of the strategic choice of skills to include in discussion of “skill-based” approaches to education reveals some patterns. In a “Skills Wheel” adapted from The Skills That Matter and utilized by the Center for High School Success, educators are oriented toward four “high-leverage lifelong competency skills” to help “[9th-grade success] teams in identifying students’ skill-based strengths and barriers—particularly those that may be contributing to academic or behavioral challenges.”

In this particular visual depiction of strengths-based education (of which there are many—just image-search “strength-based education” and you’ll be inundated with diagrams), it is fairly apparent that the four primary skill areas—Self-Efficacy, Self-Advocacy, Self-Regulation, and Content/Technical—are deeply informed by productivity and job performance. In addition, the four highlighted skill areas have next to nothing to do with personal wellbeing—that is, the type of wellbeing that is distinct from effective occupation in capitalist production. Note the lack of consideration for traits not immediately translatable to productivity—compassion, empathy, consideration, passion, moral thinking, calmness, etc.—or the presence of any value system which extends beyond simple “achievement” in the school or workplace context. Every single skill in this skill wheel is one that describes the dream employee of a capitalist employer. Critical and Creative Thinking are the two traits most likely to be problematic to the stability of the capitalist enterprise, but even then the inclusion of these two traits is hedged by the narrow specificity of their proposed application: “a specific learning, work, or life situation.” Not the type of critical or creative thinking used in open-ended contemplation, and definitely not the type conducive to the restructuring of political or organizational arrangements.

Student-centric language serves the function of responding to the mountains of criticism which accuses the US school system of not serving its students, but rather the social control and labor production needs of a corporate capitalist economy. Reframing the language of assessment from a focus on performance and academic accountability to individual skill-based strengths, while maintaining the unpopular objective of the much-maligned accountability era—the preparation of students for the labor market—allows its proponents to retain the image of Progressive politics while continuing to dutifully serve the interests of capitalist accumulation. This is a clever frame: describing classroom behavior or academic failure in terms of a student’s skills, rather than their outright compliance with directives (or their general intelligence), makes it difficult to argue that an intervention is not in a child’s best interest, even if the underlying reasons for evaluation and intervention have remained the same.

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A Brief History of Social Control and Economic Influence on U.S. Education

To illustrate the capitalist economy’s dependence on the education system for the creation of its workers as well as the evolving methods of social control that the education system has employed to do so, it is useful (and, I think, interesting) to describe a brief history of key moments of educational change.

From its inception, formal schooling in the US has primarily been about social control—in particular the type of social control which maintains a political landscape stable enough to accommodate capitalist production. This pattern of social control in service of political stability and the production of laborers is the pattern that emerges when you compare the form of capitalist production during a given time period and observe how its structure is reflected in the schoolhouses of the day.

The original common school movement emerged as the factory became the dominant form of production in the early 19th century. Forms of schooling such as dame schools and writing schools that mirrored the structure of the nuclear family—the prevailing unit of economic production at the time—were replaced by mass common education as formerly independent craftsmen were pushed out of self- or guild-employment and into factory labor by the consolidation of capital and the growing economic dominance of the factory. Leaders of industry began to see the structure and scale of education as it then existed as unsuitable for the continued production of a large number of skilled factory workers and poured resources into the promotion and proliferation of public common schools. These common schools, they thought, would more effectively ready children for the social relations of the factory, with bonus points if it tamed the rowdy and problematic elements of working class and immigrant families, giving their children some sorely needed discipline. The methods these schools used to instill a sense of discipline mirrored the often-brutal conditions of the factory itself. You may already have some idea of how this was done: paramilitary-style drill exercises and rote recital readied students for the repetitive and fragmented nature of factory work. Children were indoctrinated early into relations of strict hierarchical obedience to authority figures outside their immediate family and community in preparation for meek deference to their foremen and factory managers.

The common school movement, which actually saw strong opposition from many immigrant groups and grassroots movements of working-class people, was a smashing success as far as factory owners and high-status professionals were concerned. Common school enrollment ballooned in the early decades of the 19th century, and so did factory employment. It was no coincidence that the movement was politically bolstered and financially bankrolled by capitalist elites, and that the schoolhouses it produced adopted hierarchical authority structures based on non-familial skill and professionalism that were reminiscent of the factory, rather than the more informal familial authority structures of community esteem that had been commonplace in the decades preceding them.

The structure of the educational system continued to evolve over the following centuries in close coordination with the evolving form of capitalist production. When marginalized and oppressed groups of people (e.g. women, Black people) organized movements for economic freedom, a major part of the economic elite’s pacification strategy was greater incorporation of the given group into the labor market and increased inclusion in mainstream public schools. Inclusion in public schools usually served as a handy political device for the ruling elite—schooling is commonly conceived as the Great Equalizer and the ticket to economic opportunity for the enterprising young student. It is telling that wide-sweeping democratization in access to school for children of oppressed minority backgrounds in the mid-20th century did very little to affect the distribution of wealth across those same demographic lines3. The inclusion of oppressed classes into white public schools represented more of a concession by the predominately white capitalist ruling class to manage the behavior of minority children via inclusion and soft control instead of exclusion and forceful, violent control. They agreed to a policy of “equal opportunity”, at least in theory, on the condition that the economic class structures which created wildly unequal outcomes remained untouched.

As the factory method of production expanded ubiquity and sheer size, it became more difficult for employers to instill discipline into, and squeeze production out of, their workers through direct supervisory practices. Enter Frederick Winslow Taylor and the art of scientific management in the early 20th century, wherein control over the actions of workers was exerted by complex and rigid vertical stratification of authority over the production process. Vertical fragmentation of positions within the enterprise was supplemented by dividing the process of manufacturing into component tasks issued by explicit directives whose progress could be easily tracked and monitored, often down to the second. The Taylorist school of production and its business-oriented focus on efficiency was adopted wholeheartedly by increasingly centralized school districts whose school boards were overwhelmingly staffed by businesspeople and highly paid doctors and lawyers. Correspondingly, there was a massive increase in the number of school administrators—the educational equivalent of corporate middle management—many of whom worked out of central district offices. In line with the vertical fragmentation of work, the executive tiers of large, centralized school districts began to command long chains of cascading authority. In the school district in which I currently work, teachers are buried six layers of command deep, with the district superintendent presiding over the chain. This stands in stark contrast to the social conditions of work in schools during the initial common school movement, in which a schoolteacher usually reported to their principal, who acted more or less autonomously to administer to the immediate needs of the school, and who left decisions on classroom curriculum to the expertise of teachers.

In the classroom, scientific management practices called for the fragmentation of curriculum into discrete lessons and assignments, coupled with the close monitoring of academic performance—an analogue to the quantification of worker productivity in the workplace. Grades and standardized assessments were increasingly relied upon to rate, sort, and rank students according to their capacities in the classroom. Teachers retained direct authority over students, but control over students at the school level shifted away from the personal impressions and feedback of teachers and toward the indirect and highly systematized incentives and punishments of impersonal performance assessment.

In contemporary schools, business-oriented notions of productivity, achievement, and efficiency still abound. However, their mimetic form these days among school professionals, in my experience, tends to take a softer, more psychology- and mental health-informed frame. This individualistic self-care-coded focus is right in line with the self-supervision called for by contemporary corporate workplaces and the rhetoric of the gig economy, that everyone is a self-contained, self-regulated entrepreneur in a global marketplace.

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On Executive Functioning

In most progressive school districts, like the one in which I work, educators typically respond warily, or even outright defensively, when allusions are made to the social control and wage-labor-readiness functions of schools. And understandably so: many of us are powerless to make profound systemic change on our own, and it’s painful to think, for a person who went into education to help children become the best versions of themselves, that the system they serve not only does not share their humanitarian values of personal development but is actively antagonistic to them. Nowadays, the new “meta,” if you will, among education professionals, is to avoid discussion of the personal development-suppressing nature of impartial evaluation and job preparation in schools by framing behavior control and management in the context of building individual skills ostensibly for the student’s benefit. IQ testing and the brutal and indifferent early 20th century sortation of students into select career paths that it facilitated has soured in popularity for good reason and has been replaced by testing for specific cognitive variables such as Processing Speed, Working Memory, and Fluid Reasoning. These cognitive skill measures are much more specific than “intelligence,” and less easily abused as notions of general worthiness as IQ. It follows that students who routinely stand out from the uniformity of acceptable conduct and scholastic achievement are often assessed, using rating scales such as the Conners and the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC), on such behavioral traits as Hyperactivity, Aggression, Impulsivity, Inattention, and Executive Functioning. It is the latter of these examples that is the focus of the remainder of this essay.

According to the BASC’s manual, Executive Functioning indices measure “the ability to control behavior by planning, anticipating, inhibiting, or maintaining goal-directed activity, and by reacting appropriately to environmental feedback in a purposeful, meaningful way.” In the school setting, this looks like directing attention to salient information, initiating tasks, independently minimizing distractions, tracking progress, and completing assigned work. Deficits in Executive Functioning are associated with psychopathologies like ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder, PTSD, and conduct disorders. A critical reader may have, from the aforementioned list of skills which make up an Executive Functioning index, noted that these skills are remarkably in line with a subordinate’s diligent and deferential response to the request of an authority figure. If that sounds like too big a stretch, it is useful to remember that Executive Functioning deficits are, in practice, identified in students who show difficulty following directives in school, not students who fail to initiate, persevere through, and ultimately finish personal pet projects outside of school. This is the crux of the problem with Executive Functioning: there is nothing “executive” about it. If the word “executive” refers to a central entity which directs and plans the action of a contrasting “peripheral” body—the “top” in a “top-down” organizational structure—then most mentions of Executive Functioning in the school context are, in a more precise sociological perspective, cases of unreliable Peripheral Functioning. For it is the teacher (and more precisely for the current moment, the administrators who direct the teachers), in a U.S. classroom context, that decides the direction of the class and the tasks it must carry out relative to the student. It is the student who must then take in these objectives and affect them at the directive of the classroom authority figure, like the fingers of a hand responding to the motor cortex.

The psychological mythos of the “self as executive” has served the function in capitalist production of problem-solving for the owner’s inability to closely supervise every single worker in a given enterprise (a category which includes public schools) by installing an internalized supervisor in the mind of each worker. You may have heard the term, “the boss in your head”: the exclusive domain of the Internal Boss is Executive Functioning. The internal monitor that is acquired through conditioning, whose values match those of the exterior Boss, is not the proprietary executive of the student. It is an extension of the Boss’s executive power, a colony within the mental territory of the student, an internalized executive to which a student’s relationship is that of a peripheral organ. The student, in the periphery, responds to the needs of the external executive, which has set up an outpost—a colony—inside the mind of the student.

Why is this distinction important? Because the portrayal of what amounts to diligent subordination to authority in schools as the exercising of an ostensibly agency-based personal skill is a new way that the forces of corporate capitalist progress that direct education can repackage the same old objectives of social control and production of a docile and productive labor force for capitalist production under fresh “student-centric” and “skill-building” labels. Students who get up and leave a classroom environment that they find distasteful are not credited on their Task Initiation skills (the task being Get Up and Leave). Students who zone out while filling out a worksheet that they do not perceive as interesting or voluntary may be described as having below-average Task Completion or Self-Monitor skills, both of which would negatively factor into an evaluation of Executive Functioning index, as if there was anything executive about their assumption of the task in the first place. In this view, the executive is only legitimate if it results in predictable, controllable action by the student.

Executive Functioning, though its stated ideal has positive implications for free and independent life (I utilized Executive Functioning when I conceived of, started, persevered through, and finished this essay, for example), is used in practice as an ostensibly student-centered label to describe the specific flavor of subordination to authority, self-supervision, and diligence which is the desired disposition of a laborer in contemporary corporate capitalism. The efforts of Neo-Progressive educators to rethink and repackage basic obedience in the new contexts of capitalist production and contemporary social opinion has yielded the student-centric “skills” model, a model which, consciously or unconsciously, omits acknowledgement that the ultimate goal of such skills is the thoroughly uninspiring and highly unequal servile status of waged employment.

This is the hallmark of Progressive education reform, both political and mimetic: efforts to build a truly egalitarian school system—or at the very least the appearance of one through statistical representation and language—are continually unsuccessful at creating real equality writ large because their efforts do not address the structural inequality that is necessary for the smooth functioning of capitalist production, and do not acknowledge that it is the imperatives of this unequal system of production which shapes the direction of the schools which are tasked with readying their students for the social realities of labor within it. Until the conflicting objectives of education—the holistic development of a child’s intellectual, spiritual, physical, and aesthetic abilities and the preparation for the uninspiring social reality of waged labor—are addressed through action to fundamentally reshape the oppressive and hierarchical social relations of the present economy, conflicts in schools will continue, and Progressive reform in schools will continue to take largely symbolic forms.

This article was originally published in Generation Magazine on January 30, 2026 under the title “The Man In The Grey Suit”. You can read the original article here.

Although people are working the fewest number of hours per year that they have in centuries—down to around 1,800 hours per year in 2023 compared to over 3,000 in the late 19th century—my experience has been that a feeling of frantic Urgency increasingly permeates every portion of our lives. Screens are the customary target of pointed fingers, what with the seamless integration of the home and workplace they afford and the access to the social panopticon that they grant. It’s possible that phones and related digital technologies are to blame for the incursion of Urgency into our lives, but it’s more accurate to say that these new technologies have simply played a facilitative role for extant factors; long-tenured cultural understandings of work based on exploitative labor relations existed long before the ubiquity of personal computers.

It’s tempting to think that smartphones, streaming, and apps like TikTok are the source of all our Urgency-related woes. People cite the desiccated attention spans of short-form video doomscrollers as evidence that technology is to blame for our collective inability to relax, but attention companies like Meta were only able to colonize our life’s time this successfully because the social/political/economic table was set so nicely for them to begin with. In an imagined world where cities are eminently walkable and access to quality public transportation is widespread, where people have diverse and abundant opportunities for play and feel as if they have plenty of leisure time to enjoy it—not to mention they feel that their work is meaningful—a person feeling so much Urgency that their entertainment time takes the form of scrolling endlessly on an algorithmically-curated entertainment feed would be considered downright pathological. Our proclivity toward Urgency is social, not technological. Phones and personal computers have been recruited to spread Urgency, but they cannot be credited with creating Urgency itself. Taylorist1 factory managers of the late 19th century would have fawned over the surveillance systems Amazon uses to squeeze every drop of productivity out of its workers. Post-modern entertainment, surveillance, and labor management technologies did not create Urgency ex nihilo. Advancements in technology have historically been the most accessible to those already in power, and these technologies of Urgency were devised and recruited by those who were already in a position to profit off of Urgency to begin with. For a factory manager or CEO, Urgency in the workplace means greater productivity and control over your workers. And if your workers return home and their Urgency to take their mind off of what they just experienced is satisfied by a curated feed of endless entertainment, even better.

But let’s be more specific: what do we mean by Urgency? In an experiential sense, Urgency is the feeling of racing against the clock, the feeling that time itself is an opponent to fight against, a jealous god who must be placated with offerings of timeliness and haste.

Urgency is the experience of time not on your side, a state of being against-time.

Urgency is a man in a dreary grey suit off in the corner of a room, just inside your peripheral vision, glancing between you and a pocketwatch with an eyebrow cocked and foot tap-tap-tapping.

Urgency, inside and outside this embodied representation, feels akin to being watched. And this is no surprise—our first encounters with Urgency come from someone watching and telling us to move faster. The dynamic of the teacher and the student, the taskmaster and the laborer, the timekeeper and the timed, is introduced in Kindergarten or Pre-K and deepened year upon year. The result is that we’re mostly inoculated to the inherent repellency of authoritarian relationships and, more insidiously, we’re taught to internalize them. For those who profit from Urgency, it is more efficient to embed the sense in a collective psyche than to try to impose it externally. Built-in systems of rewards and punishments for promptness and productivity in our schools and workplaces condition us from a young age to internalize the ticking clock. Though I have a supervisor at my place of employment, these days it’s mostly myself who is doing the me-watching. I become the man in the grey suit, watching my progress from over my own shoulder like some C-list god of time, checking my pocketwatch and tapping my foot impatiently.

In the presence of Urgency, the experience of time constricts and becomes bracketed between the ever-advancing present moment and an obscured but approaching wall of temporal concrete. Urgency renders life as it is meant to be lived unlivable—there can be no relaxation, no mind-wandering, no reflective unconstrained time, nor any other sine qua non requisite for human spiritual life in its presence. Entire classes of questions which demand unbracketed reflection, like the ones relating to our values as individuals or purpose as a people, are erased from responsive feasibility. Urgency’s intrusion into the most intimate areas of our lives deprives us of the growth and experiences which can only occur in the fertile zoetic soil of the unobserved and unbothered. This is, incidentally, extremely convenient for Urgency profiteers. Urgency keeps us from asking questions of our status quo. It keeps us from forming and nurturing relationships and building community. Urgency keeps us locked in a cycle of production and distraction, the fruits of which trickle upward and out of our reach.

For many of us, it no longer feels like we have the luxury of time to figure things out. How does this impact the lives of young people today? Does the temporal carpet of time rolled out before them appear foreshortened? Does it feel like it is moving against them underfoot like a belligerent airport walkway, forcing them into a run?

The party that the man in the grey suit crashes most tragically is young people’s—the single group who is supposed to have time on their side. This great advantage of young people and children is stolen away by Urgency, which is often arbitrarily imposed. We believe, or operate as if we believe, that children must learn certain skills by certain ages. In my experience as a school psychologist, most of these markers have to do with ensuring conformity to a pre-planned trajectory and not with concern for a child’s well-being. The Urgency that we believe is necessary to get children up to speed—informed by the fear we feel regarding their wellbeing in our society should they fail—comes at the price of their childhood’s integrity, their freedom to explore and to take their time doing it. Not many people know that the word school is derived from the Greek schole, or leisure. The Greeks were one of many societies to honor the implicit understanding that learning is something that can only happen in a safe, calm, and relaxed environment; this is an understanding that we have thoroughly misplaced. Learning does not happen on a deadline basis—it cannot be rushed. Simple, short-term memorization, maybe. You can affect the steps of a choreography after a pedagogical rush job, but you will learn nothing about what it means to dance. The conditioning to adopt a sense of Urgency without protest begins in the classroom. If we are going to create an education system grounded in the values of a sustainable shared future, we cannot allow Urgency, the man in the grey suit, within 100 meters of a school.

The next time you see this man or feel yourself racing against one clock or another, I invite you to ask the simple question of Why. Why must this be urgent? When you have gathered your response, ask Why again. Why does the answer you provided necessitate Urgency? Follow the thread all the way through. Get to the root of it, find out from whom the invitation to the man in the grey suit came. When you probe deep enough, answers to the persistent Why resolve either to a congruence to some seasonal change—these nuts must be harvested before the solstice, for example—or an adherence to some arbitrary, man-made, usually bureaucratic timetable—quarterly reviews are due on November 15 and not a day later.

Is your Urgency organic, free-range, grass-fed and sun-soaked? Is your Urgency GMO, industrial monoculture, a cash crop? We must pay less attention to the synthetic variety of Urgency, and be more selective with the Urgencies we honor. Because while it is tempting to believe that a to-do list completed with Urgency will generate more “free” time than one completed at a leisurely pace, it’s more common that the Urgency employed to dispatch the list will simply beget more Urgency. When a to-do list is frantically dispatched, the same Urgency is usually applied to the leisure time that it was supposed to afford. When we spend most of our waking lives rushing from task to task, how can we be expected to treat our leisure time any differently? We are simply not used to taking our time to do things; it makes us uncomfortable in a deep way to not complete a task efficiently or to not find a speedy resolution. Thus when we are afforded time to ourselves, instant, uncomplicated, on-demand entertainment is preferred to reflection, simple perception, and quiet. Instantaneous and hyper-curated entertainment will become the dominant form of entertainment of any society that applies the principles of Urgency to leisure. This is our blood-price for giving credence to manufactured Urgency: Urgency comes to colonize our lives. There is nothing, the message goes, that all else being equal is better done slowly than quickly and efficiently. How can our relationship to time remain untainted when this message is pre-eminent?

The funny catch-22 about Urgency is that there is so much riding, ecologically speaking, on our ability to create new and rediscover old ways of living that there becomes an Urgency about non-Urgency. The death-plunge trajectory of the biosphere demands immediate action, and that action looks in a lot of ways like Doing Nothing: turning off the drill, mindfully redistributing resources, looking up. We need to slow down, and we need to do it fast. This Urgency is tremendously stressful. It is brutal to go to work day after day and to try to do my part to keep the wheels on a bus that desperately needs to change direction. However, and crucially, this anxiety does not contain even a shred of the spiritually-effacing ennui that I experience when urgently filling out paperwork before its deadline, hustling my ass into work by 7:30 a.m. on the dot, or checking off preparatory tasks for the upcoming work week on a late Sunday afternoon. In stark contrast, the former Urgency feels worthwhile because it is in service of leisure, and I will accept the anxiety that comes with that. The Urgency for change, for love, for Revolution, is organic. And to me that’s the healthy kind.

“In college they don’t allow late work.”

“When your boss tells you to do something you don’t want to, are you just going to react like that?”

When does preparation for the labor force begin in the timeline of a student’s education? It’s certainly not an afterthought. There is no, “Oh yeah, before you go, you’re about to enter a rigidly hierarchical and exploitative labor market. Let’s just get you up to speed real quick.” It starts much, much earlier than that.

While explicit mention of job readiness may not be made until late secondary school, conversations about what students want to do after high school—conversations which are usually occupation-oriented—begin earlier. And even before we get kids thinking about their next steps, the cultivation of traits valued by the job market has long been under way. Preparation for the job market begins as soon as the structure of education starts to mimic the structure of wage labor. It has begun the first time someone sits you down and tells you to work on a topic of their choosing for a time of their choosing. It has most definitely begun when the products of said work are scrutinized and evaluated for their quality. These days, in the US, that’s usually in Kindergarten—4 to 5 years old. Shortly after a child speaks their first full sentences, the first seeds of wage labor are sown in their minds.

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With the frontier of training for the labor market encroaching closer and closer on what used to be “protected” time for self-directed exploration and play (the current Kindergarten curriculum closely resembles the 1st grade curriculum of even a decade ago), the society-wide conception of what education truly is warps further beyond recognition. Is education about learning for its own sake? Is it about self-discovery, or training for the real world? This is a redux of the classic “conservative” vs. “progressive” education debate: Is the purpose of an education to teach kids how to fulfill traditional roles and values of society, or to give them the skills to create and rebuild society in their vision? Like every one of these questions, the only real answer involves a little bit of both. I personally lean heavily toward the latter—I believe in the value of tradition and morality, and I know that the only way they can be effectively reproduced is to be skillfully modeled—placed on offer for students to adopt based on their own merit—not taught in prescriptive fashion. Conservative ideas can be taught in a progressive manner, and vice versa. But a key distinction here is the difference between “fulfilling traditional roles and values” and fulfilling roles in a capitalist economy. One has a social, generative basis—honesty, honor, faith, whatever it may be, are values that humans have decided are good. The other is responsive to the needs of a system that is draining the Earth of its life and funneling wealth directly into the hands of A Few Guys. When we prepare students for roles as cogs in this machine, even with good intentions, we are complicit in its maintenance.

The idea of job training as a necessary component of education is a greedy one. Once it is legitimized through a foothold in the final years of secondary education, its voracious appetite for achievement sees it working its way backward through the grade levels, colonizing new age ranges with its rigorous, performance-based approach. High school becomes a boot camp for the type of heavily supervised hierarchical relationships experienced in the secondary labor market—jobs characterized by low pay, high job insecurity, and little to no autonomy over the labor process. As the shape of high schools changes, middle schools are forced to adapt. If they fail to do so, the transition from 8th to 9th grade becomes concussive. In my experience as a psychologist in a high school, 9th grade boys tend to have an especially hard time. Behavioral issues, disciplinary involvement, failed classes, and mental health struggles are par for the course when unfamiliar academic rigor is layered atop profound social transition at a particularly vulnerable time in their lives. Instead of high schools relaxing their standards, which are often effectively set in stone by state legislation, middle schools take up the burden of preparation.

“They won’t let you get away with this next year.”

How often has this sentence been the basis of arbitrary harshness? Logic of this type prompts schools to intensify academic and behavioral demands at increasingly younger ages, not because doing so has value in itself, but because not doing so may lead to academic failure at the next level, whose demands have just increased. As one grade level tightens up to prepare students for the next thing, preceding grades are forced to tighten up to accommodate for the change, and the cycle continues until grade levels formerly reserved exclusively for play-based learning begin to incorporate academic demands and the systems of evaluation and discipline that are necessary to enforce them. For a grade whose name translates literally to “garden of children”, Kindergarten bears a peculiar resemblance to industrial agriculture.

The prospect of schools preparing kids for the workforce may sound like a sensible thing, and I’ve heard the idea promoted with good intentions. After all, economic life is a reality of the world we live in, and what are schools for if not to prepare us for the world? But let us be careful to not confuse job training with education. If schools are to be for job training, then let them be for job training. Do away with notions of critical thinking, whole-child development, and self-realization. Job training and the doctrine of Preparedness For The Next Level are cancers in the body of real education—a process of discovery which takes place at the pace of the individual, is directed by the individual, and is for the purpose of expanding the mind and the understanding of the world. This process has no end date. Job training, on the other hand, is a process of forgetting and alienating. It demands that these basic principles of education are put aside, if indeed they were ever learned. In their place, the labor market requires the worker’s mind to be placed in a box the size and shape of which is prescribed by instruments of hierarchical organization—replacing creativity and autonomy with adherence to protocols, procedures, and codes of conduct stated and unstated. “Best practices” is the newest permutation. In the labor market where most spend the majority of their waking lives selling themselves, compliance with directives and predictability are prized above critical thought, a negative attribute given its proclivity to get in the way of obedience. These traits, which are valued by the labor market, are trained and rewarded in schools. They are antithetical to education.

The fundamental contradiction in terms of US schools—their paradoxical association with the concept of education and their function as reproductive engines of existing class structures through the preparation of students for the labor market—is the cause of so much consternation on the part of parents bewildered and frustrated by schools’ inabilities to accommodate their children’s unique needs, as well as proponents of liberal education reform. This contradiction is why the diversification of school access has done so little to democratize the distribution of wealth in the US. It’s why no matter how equitable schools become in their provision of services to students, the oppressive class structures maintained by economic stratification that govern our lives the moment we leave school remain unchanged. Every time we entertain the notion of preparing students for the social demands of wage labor (often disguised as preparation for the “real world”), we are being subtly complicit in the maintenance of oppression. We are recognizing structures of arbitrary authority and rigid hierarchy—profoundly undemocratic structures—as legitimate and inevitable, and doing work to ensure their continued existence.

If we are interested in maintaining transparency in our system of education, we must either let go of our expectation that schools are for education and accept their purpose as training centers for initiation into the labor market; or we can remove “job readiness” from consideration entirely, asserting that our schools are places to learn and discover on our own terms, not places to neglect our personal inclinations in service of integration into a predefined niche within the capitalist machine. These two roles are incompatible—it must be one or the other if we are to understand what schools are really for, and avoid confusion when they perpetuate injustice. As long as schools remain responsive to the needs of a capitalist economy, they will be antagonistic to the type of personal empowerment that remains associated with education in the public consciousness, and will continue to create dismay for children and families when they prove themselves hostile to personal development and diversity of expression.

The purpose of this essay is not to proffer solutions to the education problem, or to suggest that democratizing schools and insulating them from the demands of the market will magically reshape society in its image. The purpose of this essay is to identify the foundational contradiction in the functions of the US education system, which continues to present itself as an unsolvable problem. Understanding this allows us to see more clearly that what we originally thought were “failures” of the school system are in fact natural byproducts of a contradiction: schools’ imagined role as facilitators of personal development—education—and their material roles as locations of preparation for the undemocratic reality of economic life.

He vaguely recalls writing an essay on a similar topic when he was in secondary school. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s use of symbolism in The Great Gatsby: a bit of a tired topic to be sure, but surely worthy of some consideration? He lays his glasses on his desk, suddenly lost in reflection on times long past. What kind of student was he, 20 years ago? Not a model example, he would be the first to admit. Besides, that was why he became a teacher in the first place. Sure, his essay submission at that age may have been poorly written and trite, belying the most rudimentary understanding of the classic American novel. He may have even fluffed his prose to meet the word count. But AI? Would he really have been so averse to original thought, so unconcerned with appearances, as to shamelessly pass off the work of ChatGPT as his own?

No no, he thinks, that’s a boundary I wouldn’t have crossed. He blinks as he becomes aware of his moment of reverie. Grateful to have his crisis of integrity defused, he leans forward to resume grading. But as soon as his eyes meet the screen, a whirl of newfound doubt catches in his chest.

No, there’s no way I would have been so brazen. Besides, it’s not just dishonest, it’s plain wrong.

The second bullet point on the wretched list catches his attention. The Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg. That disembodied gaze, none the less piercing in its moral appraisal for the paint peeling off its neglected billboard home. At once, the teacher becomes aware of the eyes gazing back at him. Ghostly apparitions a screen’s length from his face, superimposed on posters as he quickly looks about his classroom, frantic. God’s detached judgement, emanating from his post overlooking The Valley of Ashes, turned upon him now. All-seeing, all-knowing. Eckleberg’s eyes, already knowing the answer, seem to ask, “Are you quite sure you wouldn’t?”

There’s been a flood of moral panic over the use of AI in education; every third post on Substack seems to be about how ChatGPT is ruining minds. Alarm over the prospect of kids not able to write simple paragraphs and college students not able to sit through popular novels has proliferated amongst parents, cultural commentators, and solemn English professors. “Is AI rotting kids’ brains?” is a provocative question and guarantees engagement in the current online climate. The problem is that it is, unfortunately, a dumb question.

Besides the tiredness of the “is [insert technology here] making kids dumber?” conversation, this particular iteration is especially irksome to me because it precludes much more interesting conversations about the future of schooling (which, coincidentally, I’m always thinking about) and the continued legitimacy of academic assignments which can be completed in fewer than 30 seconds by machines.

In my experience as both a student and school psychologist in public schools, writing assignments have borne striking resemblances to math. They began with a standard prompt for the class. There were right answers—at least it felt like it—and there were formulas for arriving at them. There was little personal writing and even less writing that felt personal—writing that felt voluntary and reflective, carried on the wings of intellectual exploration rather than adherence to a rubric. In this sense the writing and math we did felt very similar. The same prompts were doled out year after year, giving us the notion that nothing we wrote could possibly be new or interesting. So we stuck to the script, churning out the essays we thought our teachers would like, wishing we just knew what the right answer was.

I attended a competitive public high school in Silicon Valley. The schools in my district—like every other around the country, but perhaps more blatantly—functioned as sorting hats for socioeconomic class. To provide a generalized representation, my school was divided into children of predominantly Asian immigrant and white parents who had upper-middle class managerial and engineering jobs, and children of Latin American immigrant parents with blue-collar jobs. The school’s environment of academic rigor sorted kids into categories, ostensibly merit-based, which bore suspicious resemblance to the ones occupied by our parents.

Standardized test scores and grades served as the instruments of sortation. By the time I was in high school in the late 2010s, the ACT and SAT had long been boiled down to their essences. Shrewd entrepreneurs identified that these exams have much more to do with specific ways of thinking—strategies useful only during 3-hour proctored tests—than with cognitive abilities. Accordingly, there was (and is) a booming industry of test-prep academies which promised to impart these esoteric skills for a hefty hourly. These courses were largely occupied by the wealthy, and that was reflected in the scores. Unsurprisingly, scores on the SAT and ACT are more reliable representations of socio-economic status than cognitive acumen.

At my school, it was probably more widely recognized than usual that grades meant everything. Learning (real learning, the type where information is incorporated into your holistic understanding of the world) was extraneous, and something to be employed in service of grades. You may label this overly cynical; it struck me then and now as astute, a cogent observation of educational dynamics. If you learned a great deal about the natural world and your place within it in your AP Biology course but were inconsistent with submitting work products, you would receive a poor grade in the class. On the other hand, if you mindlessly grade-chased, crammed for exams, and turned in every assignment on time, you would be rewarded with an impressive grade in the class—even if you retained nothing. The latter was abundant. It seemed to be the norm for kids who needed excellent grades to attend their desired schools, which was to say, just about everyone.

What then, does this have to do with AI essays?

Everything.

It is this type of attitude toward education, this educational realism, that leads students to use every tool at their disposal. They are hustlers forced to play a game they know is rigged, doing what they have to do in a completely transactionalized educational landscape in service of obtaining academic currency—which is, they are told, to be later exchanged for economic currency.

Let’s simplify. A teacher sends a student home with a packet of three-digit multiplication problems to solve for homework. That student now has a choice: they can attempt, laboriously, to solve all the problems by hand and risk their grade in the process, or they can cut their labor time significantly, use a calculator, and ensure a perfect grade. The second option may strike you as dishonest, but I’m convinced that it is more honest. When would someone ever find themselves in the position of desperately needing to multiply large numbers without a calculator? If the stakes of such an inane task were so high, calculator use would be mandated.

The use of AI for school essays is a parallel phenomenon. ChatGPT is a calculator for high school and college essays. Every time that a teacher assigns a graded essay, they acknowledge and exercise the power they hold over students to coerce them into work, with the implicit threat of academic and economic punishment held in reserve. With the threat of academic failure, there is little reason to pay lip service to convincing students of the utility of an assignment. Bilaterally, the social relationship degrades. Teachers begin to see students as not-quite-people who do as they are told or else, and students begin to see teachers as the first in a long line of gatekeepers to economic opportunity who must be appeased before they grant passage. With learning for its own sake out of the equation, given its complete material subordinacy to the measurable hard logic of grades, savvy students choose the calculator every time.

The reality of the capitalist education system is that providing desired answers for the purpose of positive evaluation is rewarded. Pursuing knowledge for its own sake and, crucially, at its own pace, is punished by comparison. When we give assignments to students with no thought to their agency or interests, we should consider their use of AI to satisfy the assignment’s requirements as a natural adaptive response. Students are given no choice but to write the essay and be evaluated on it; why should they dignify a disrespect to their agency with the intimacy of their reflections, not to mention their life’s time? Why would they not give the teacher exactly what they think the teacher wants to hear? If we’re being honest, ChatGPT can write that essay better than 90% of people, not just high school students. If that is the case, maybe we should leave those essays to the chatbots. If anything, we should be celebrating students’ resourcefulness: finding a way to not waste time writing an essay not volunteered for in the first place is the type of canny self-advancement prized by an every-man-for-himself economic system.

We are in a new era: AI chatbots have perfected the writing of the perfunctory, formulaic academic essay. AI’s exposure of cracks in the foundations of the capitalist education system is not due to inherent insidiousness of the technology or a pathology in the new generation of students. Tools which grant students the ability to affect the power imbalance in schools, reducing work for themselves while maintaining the quality of the academic product, will always create uproars about brain-rotting and accountability. As far as I can see, we have two options. We can either fundamentally change the way we conduct economic life and its corresponding initiation via evaluation-based education, or we can put our heads back down and decide how we are going to absorb this new disruption into the curriculum in a way that restores the stability of the old order. Until the next disruption comes around, that is.

Data, unfortunately, is not our savior. It is not the oracle we think it is.

Data’s veneration in today’s society is thoroughly, tragically misplaced. Vast edifices of data, monuments to the exalted quantifiable, are erected again and again in the data centers of feudally-powerful tech conglomerates, scrappy AI upstarts with multibillion-dollar valuations, and state intelligence agencies. When data of this quantity–and intimacy–is put to use, its outputs mimic reality so closely as to be stomach-churning. One feels exposed; are we so easily predicted?

Algorithms equipped with staggering amounts of data and their very own pedagogical processes construct facsimiles of reality from thin air (and billions of tons of liquid coolant) that, in their resemblance to real life, are impressive if not exactly inspiring. The constructions of these algorithms–high school and college essays, Seldon-esque psychohistorical election predictions, 3D animation and porn–mimic the forms of their references faithfully enough to leapfrog the uncanny valley and provide passability for one’s purposes, even if they are not always entirely convincing as the real thing. In this fashion, data creates useful tools, which can occasionally be insightful, and are good in a pinch.

When data–quantified representations of reality in informational form–is overlaid atop reality, its clean, discrete matrices can help simplify real-world problems. In the micro, data provides scaffolding–artificial guardrails whose parametric handholds constrain human thought in a manner conducive to the making of decisions. However, when the discarnate stencil of the quantified is applied in systematic fashion to reality, the understanding of an interconnected whole–and often the acknowledgement of nuance–is sacrificed at the altar of outcome optimization.

In an example of this flavor of sacrifice, data-driven agricultural methods based on maximizing output are used to discover and employ the optimal spacing grids and nutrient schedules for monoculture crops like soybeans, corn, or sugar beets. With these methods, farmers and Big Ag corporations can maximize the yield–measured in pounds, tons, or dollars–of their crops, at the catastrophic expense of long-term soil health, which is considered only as a variable to be kept to minimum functional levels. This is data-based decision-making in action.

In schools, my primary area of interest, educational specialists use Pavlovian behaviorist techniques like classical reward-and-punishment conditioning and objectivist perspectives which allow the intricacies of students’ lives to be reduced to variables in an equation. Such variables are manipulated when possible to optimize for specific outcomes without the need of the student’s equal participation, and at the expense of their autonomy. The counterargument to these norms is deceivingly hard to make. When autonomy means throwing chairs and running out of classrooms, maybe it’s not a bad idea to manipulate their environment to minimize these occurrences. I would even tend to agree. Besides, who wouldn’t want to optimize educational outcomes? In these scenarios, the presentation of downward-sloping line graphs of chair-throwing incidents can be especially convincing.

Unfortunately, these methods are ultimately limited in that they answer no question of direction. In a broad sense they are responsive to a perceived immediate need, but their logic contains no philosophy, no direction, beyond “more of this” or “less of that”. Data can say very little regarding a student’s inner attitude toward learning, nor their capacity for critical thinking. Every time we educators pull out our protractors and our steel compasses in an attempt to measure a student’s progress toward some goal, we set aside consideration for the ultimate aims of education and constrain learning by holding down the writhing young mind to take its measurements.

Though it was not always this way, modern educators often experience existential crises when faced with the abolition of measures of success–namely grades. Emerging in the 18th century as a means of publicly ranking and broadcasting student “achievement” and perfected in Stanford University think tanks as a way of ensuring that the brightest, whitest young minds would be sat in officers’ chairs instead of lost to the front lines of battle1, the letter-grading system has entrenched itself so deeply in our conceptions of education as to feel inextricable from learning itself. It is ironic that a concept designed with the express purpose of creating, perpetuating, and providing a rational basis for inequity remains an untouchable object of dispute for educators who spend their careers fighting for equity in schools.

The concept of data-based decision-making (DBDM) in schools arose as a response to the inequity that grew so blatantly sinister in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. Before this framework, educators and school administrators were commonly marrying strict regimes of student evaluation (still present today) and unilaterally-derived codes of school conduct with unchecked racism, ableism, and bias, which essentially weaponized school discipline and special education programs against the most marginalized populations. DBDM improved accountability, illuminating the grotesque statistical disparities resulting from this style of school administration. Shocking incarceration rates for students for students who have been suspended or expelled, profound over-identification of Black and Brown students in special education programs (many of which sanction segregation from majority-white general education populations), are just two examples from an array of injustices. The previous regime featured mostly-white school administrators acting without accountability, leveraging structures in schools like exclusionary (and previously, corporeal) punishment and special education to enact their biases. Data turned a mirror to the practice, and played a vindicating role in the educational zeitgeist for those who witnessed this injustice and those who were subject to it. Data ultimately echoed their pleas, and it was data that was listened to when their voices were ignored.

You may be tempted, as many in mainstream education are, to profess data as a savior, a looking-glass through which all inequity can be identified and systematically minimized. Maybe you see it as the way forward; many people do. I do not. I do not, for the critical reason that DBDM, at its best, is algorithmic. Identify some phenomenon, flatten it to make it quantifiable, track progress, fiddle with variable knobs to optimize quantitative outcomes. Document every detail for posterity, or to cover your posterior. There is no room, no consideration, for learning in this framework, precisely because the unquantifiable cannot be quantified. The transcendent magic of discovery is taken to no account. When educators and specialists like school psychologists think of “enthusiasm for learning”, it is telling that our minds go immediately to evidence-based self-report surveys of the variable of the same name. DBDM promotes the phenomenon articulated so succinctly by the artist billy woods:

Education’s path into the unstable, uncertain future will not, must not, be charted by data. The path may be paved with it, but it will be human ideas, human values, understandings of what is important, and human decisions that will chart its course. Conceiving data-based thinking as a guiding light, as anything more than a useful tool for simplifying what are ultimately small-scale problems, is to zombify society and recruit it in service of the ever-manipulable, often-unreliable indifferent narration of data. In the example of schools perpetuating inequity I described earlier, a data-based lens identifies accountability and non-transparency as the issues of focus. In my opinion, the real driver of said inequity, what made it possible in the first place, is the power structure baked into schools that allows administrators to suspend, expel, and make educational decisions for children–indeed to control their movements for seven hours a day and evaluate their adherence to measurable standards of success–without the equal participation of the communities that they are ostensibly a part of, not just the ones they “serve”.

Immediate-community-based (i.e. not state- or nationally-based) curriculum; education based on the cultivation of students’ individual interests and abilities; equal participation of students in education (compulsory education is not voluntary, and therefore not equal): these are just some of the educational principles that our time in the world calls for. How we get there will be the deeply human and profoundly unquantifiable work of conversation, challenging ideas, and decisions. Data will not show us the way.

Welch has popped up in a few pieces recently about Gen Z’s alleged unemployability, positioning herself as a kind of cultural interpreter for Boomer and Gen X bosses who are bewildered by Gen Z’s apparent reluctance to throw themselves into wage labor. In her features, she highlights a difference in “values” as the main sticking point between prospective Gen Z employees and their older bosses. Welch and her co-researchers primarily use Values Bridge, a survey tool eerily reminiscent of the oft-maligned Enneagram and Myers-Briggs personality tests. Values Bridge invites users to “invite a partner, friend, or colleague to take the tool and see where your values align—or diverge”, to survey and identify differences in values between Gen Z respondents and hiring managers. To no one’s great surprise, Welch is a co-creator of and investor in the paywall-accessed Values Bridge tool, which she lists under the “products” section of her personal website.

The common thread between these authors (Welch has not yet published her book at the time of this article’s writing but trust me on this) is that while they claim to cut through the noise to highlight some objective truth, the frameworks they propose are built on oversimplifying human psychology and the world around them. Grit eventually received these critiques following initial rave reviews, and Atomic Habits was a study in egregious oversimplification of behavior and habit-forming. These authors depend on marketing their frameworks as scientific even while they misuse statistics and rest their persuasive power heavily on the power of the anecdote.

Welch’s assessment of the difference in values between prospective Gen Z employees and older hiring managers is limited to the “16 Human Values” identified in the Values Bridge tool. She blithely interprets these values as preferences so limp and superficial in Gen Z minds that the same traditional waged-labor workplace could produce them satisfactorily without changing. The common “values” Welch highlights as characteristic of Gen Z include “‘eudemonia’, or self-care or well-being; ‘non-sibi,’ or helping others; and ‘voice,’ or authenticity of expression”. There is no consideration for the possibility that these values are in direct contradiction with those of the waged-labor workplace, and that they arise out of contempt for its existence. A crucial mistake Welch makes is in assuming that these “values” can be adopted and effectively co-opted by managers; that eye-rolling bosses can hack Gen Z brains into blissful productivity by appealing to their collective sense of “voice” and “eudemonia”.

On Gen Z Values

Contrary to the impressions of dismayed corporate hiring managers and would-be business psychology gurus, it’s not that the younger generations are lazy, apathetic, or simply desire a change in values in the corporate workplace. As a member of this younger generation, the reality is much closer to a feeling of being sick of the excuses for why we cannot all have what we need. We have known for a minute now that there are more than enough resources in the world to meet everyone’s needs, perhaps multiple times over, and yet we are continually expected to swallow the old logic that the best way to go about the distribution of said resources is to entrust 99+% of the bounty to a microscopic group of people for safekeeping, and then spend most of our waking hours working to further enrich them in exchange for our share.

We’re expected to believe that this arrangement ensures that resources only go to those who “earn” them, and that that is supposed to be a good thing. We’re expected to accept the cynical moralism of this logic, that work itself is a virtue no matter how pointless or harmful it is, and that a human being who does not wish to spend their life working for someone else’s enrichment does not deserve the means to live a secure and happy life. The people who stand to be enriched even further beyond imagination depend heavily on a popular sense of moral disdain for “freeloaders,” entitled people who want “something for nothing.” A lot of young people find this logic unconvincing and uninspiring.

When I entered this world, I was engulfed in the profoundly unconditional love of my parents. I got “something for nothing”. In my daily life, I crave opportunities to give “something for nothing”. I crave the opportunity to give my time, my skills and abilities, my love—in short, to be useful—for nothing in return but the simple pleasure of having chosen to be useful, pleasure that is contaminated by the exchange of a flat rate for my usefulness. We are tired of the overblown emphasis on “survival of the fittest” logic that justifies industrialized mass suffering and deprivation. We’re tired of applying pseudoscientific and economic analyses to the worth and contributions to society of real people, which are blind to nuance and often function as thinly veiled proxies for ableist, racist, sexist rhetoric beneath scientific veneers.

I know I am not alone amongst young people when I say that I would rather support a billion people who “take” more than they “give” in an economic sense, than accept the systems currently in place that facilitate massive accumulation for a “deserving” few at the expense of the rest. I, among many others of my generation, am prepared to hospice the tired old notion that resources should go (or presently go) to those who “earn” them, and not to those who need them, because ultimately the people who hoard those resources are the ones who decide what “earning” them means. Spoiler alert: it always involves sacrificing ourselves for their enrichment.

So no, it’s not that young people simply want our workplaces to be more “dynamic”, “inclusive”, or “horizontal”. We will certainly take those qualities over “rigid”, “dehumanizing”, and “hierarchical”, but we grew up in an age of global pandemics, fascist ascendency, and looming ecological collapse—we are skeptical as to the long-term viability of the traditional 9-to-5. For someone to paint the younger generation’s desires as being slightly more humane versions of the same inhumane and dysfunctional systems they have inherited is to project onto them the same myopia that afflicted many of those in the generations before them. Give their collective imagination the credit it deserves. Give them the trust and space to remake the world around them and you might just like what they come up with.

In popular culture and on social media, it’s generally accepted that Impostor Syndrome can affect just about anyone, and the glut of research in this field shows that it presents across gender and culture, and across a wide range of populations, including academics, doctors, veterans, students, and business marketing executives. A paper published in 2023 proposing a new assessment to evaluate Impostor Syndrome defined it as "the subjective experience of perceived self-doubt in one's abilities and accomplishments compared with others, despite evidence to suggest the contrary"1. This definition, while academically diplomatic enough to avoid directly placing accountability for the experience of Impostor Syndrome on the individual, does little to challenge the notion that it is a personal problem. The name itself is revealing. While no one is under any illusion that Impostor Syndrome is a bona fide genetic syndrome (though there is plenty of research on its correlations with genetic factors like anxiety and depression), referring to it as such ensures that its mention in conversation implies an individual problem or pathology. The limitation of this understanding of Impostor Syndrome is that in placing its occurrence within the individual, we tend not to acknowledge, let alone examine or critique, the systems present in our lives that directly contribute to the feelings of insecurity and inadequacy often described under the Impostor Syndrome umbrella. While there is certainly an individual component—it’s been suggested that those with specific psychological traits including inclinations toward perfectionism and clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders and depression may experience Impostor Syndrome at higher rates and greater intensities (though this says nothing about the environmental factors which contribute to so-called “individual” disorders like depression and anxiety). The presence however of people experiencing Impostor Syndrome who do not share these traits supports the notion that Impostor Syndrome is more general, a systemic phenomenon which may be exacerbated by individual dispositions. This article is an effort to rethink the feelings associated with Impostor Syndrome as being natural responses to a specific set of unnatural conditions–conditions that are commonplace in the modern work environment, education, and in the various roles we occupy in our personal lives.

To place Impostor Syndrome within this systemic frame, I will attempt to highlight three conditions which may act as precursors: the rain, soil, and sunshine for the seeds of Impostor Syndrome. Unlike in this botanical analogy, all three need not necessarily be co-occurring to induce Impostor Syndrome, though it certainly would be a potent combination if they were. These three considerations are: comparative security, bullshit work, and ambiguous performance evaluation.

The first condition, comparative security, may be the most crucial ingredient of Impostor Syndrome. Comparative security refers to a person’s perceived status relative to others, and their awareness of the existence of people below, and far, far, far below, their own social/economic standing. If a society was arranged with the primary goal of meeting material needs without reservation, the playing field would be leveled, and any fear of exposure would be dulled. Without belief in the type of scarcity–of food, resources, housing, opportunity–that a capitalist economy creates and thrives on to drive production and consumption, there would be no looming fear of material deprivation. "Exposure" in the impostor sense, without this scarcity, would not mean anything more than a temporary embarrassment amongst one's peers. One’s ability to meet their immediate needs would be unaffected by this exposure. Daily experience under the current economic system, however, makes it abundantly clear to us that artificial or not, the scarcity of these essential resources has real implications.

Under the myth of meritocracy—that idea that it is only the worthy in society who succeed, and that a society is stronger, better off, when it lets its unsuccessful struggle and suffer—there is a justifiable reason for anyone who possesses a modicum of security to be fearful and paranoid of it being taken away at any moment. If you are exposed as a fraud under our present conditions, it might mean worse than simple embarrassment; it could mean losing your job, losing healthcare coverage, losing the ability to pay your rent. In a very real sense it could mean eviction, starvation, disease, and death.

In the workplace, the intensity of Impostor Syndrome seems to be crucially linked to bullshit jobs and bullshittified jobs. Bullshit jobs are those which have no clear benefit on society or are actively pernicious. Bullshittified jobs are otherwise useful professions which have become laden with bullshit tasks and procedures, often of an administrative or bureaucratic nature. In a profession where it is unclear exactly what one’s benefit to society is, or in a job where the stated benefit is theoretically more clear but most of the day-to-day work’s immediate value is unclear (think: an educator who spends more of their time sending emails and attending meetings than actually educating), a sense of confusion about the social value of one’s work can react in a volatile way with an awareness of comparative security to create undeserving feelings and impostordom. Additionally, I would venture that most people have had or know someone who has had a job in which they doubted whether anything at all would change in the world or in the organization they work for if their position was dissolved. If you experience financial security thanks to a job that you felt could be easily outsourced, automated, or deleted entirely with little consequence, all while confronting daily examples of extremely hard-working people struggling to survive, wouldn't you feel like an impostor?

An additional factor in the bullshit job category is alienation from subsistence work. How many steps are in between the work you do, and the production of the things humans need to survive and thrive–namely food, water, shelter, art, education, music? How many steps removed are you from the gratitude that providing those essentials elicits? I would venture that the greater that number is, the easier it will be to doubt your own worth. In a highly financialized economy, fewer and fewer people work with the consideration of meeting human and environmental needs, let alone to intentionally serve human or ecological well-being.

Let's say you work in the marketing department for some business. Your job consists of creating slide decks to pitch ideas and discuss strategy in marketing meetings. Occasionally, ideas from your pitch deck may be incorporated into some larger marketing strategy for the business. In this case, the fruits of your labor may or may not be used to help create a market for a product that the business is selling, and then to sell that product at as large a scale as possible to maximize value for the company’s shareholders. Hopefully you received some validation along the way from your coworkers or superiors, because in this situation, how the hell else would you know if you were actually helping anyone? You’re not likely to have consumers of your company’s product approaching you on the street to shake your hand and thank you profusely for the marketing strategy that facilitated their most recent online purchase. "Am I even helping anyone?" is a question that is riddled with impostor sentiment. If you doubt your own contribution to a team, a company, or society as a whole, then it follows that you would be afraid that one of your superiors could at any time come to ask the same question.

The final consideration I’ll mention here is the presence of ambiguous systems of performance evaluation. This point pertains to those who may work full-time jobs and still may not have a clue how, or by whom, their work is being evaluated. Especially common in large bureaucracies, the systems that authority figures use to evaluate job performance are often so unclear to those subject to them or rely on such subjective interpretation that it is difficult for an employee to determine where they stand at any given time. These uncertainties often bear a direct relationship to the alienation of one’s work from the provision of human needs discussed earlier. As a rule of thumb, the further removed your work is from the creation and distribution of life essentials, the more convoluted and inscrutable the systems by which your work is evaluated will tend to be. In the example of employment at a marketing firm wherein your work consists of manufacturing demand for a product that people may not ultimately need, it is likely that your performance will be evaluated based on your contributions to company-wide directives or “strategic vision plans” that you had no hand in creating. Because these goals and corresponding performance criteria are unique to your specific company and, in essence, completely made up, at any given moment you can be much less sure that you are meeting the company’s expectations. When you do not know if the people who hold the power to fire you are satisfied with your performance, and are aware that what they consider to be a “good job” is subject to change at any time with little to no justification, a natural response is the insecurity and validation-deprivation that nurtures Impostor Syndrome.

When the markers of performance are ambiguous, whether by nature of the position or made so by a bureaucracy which upholds abstract markers of performance for mass evaluation purposes, spatial and temporal distance is also created between individuals and their potential evaluators. Essentially, when evaluation of your job performance becomes based on “deliverables” or other symbolic markers of your work, it allows your work to be evaluated impersonally from afar. Under these conditions, performance evaluations can be conducted by individuals who need not work alongside you or even know who you are. Now, the hallmark paranoia of Impostor Syndrome begins not to seem so irrational. That the overwhelming vagueness of Impostor Syndrome, the irrational-seeming fear that someone, anyone, will drop in at any time and expose someone’s supposed incompetence, does not exclude it from the realm of imagined possibilities speaks to the bewildering nature of performance evaluation that so many people experience.

When it comes to our capacity to comfort and care for ourselves and others when we experience Impostor Syndrome, the common understanding of the experience stacks the odds against us. The name itself implies personal pathology, as if it were a function of genetics, and those in academic circles tend to talk about it as if it was an indelible part of the human experience, an unfortunate glitch in our collective psychology. I would like for us to challenge this conception. It serves our mental well-being and our critical understanding of the world around us to consider the experience of Impostor Syndrome as less a personal flaw, more a natural psychological reaction to industrial pollutants like gross inequality and abusive labor relations. Less inherent and ingrained, more created and maintained. It is time to rethink Impostor Syndrome as a set of psychological symptoms which arise in the presence of certain poisonous environmental conditions–comparative security, bullshit work, and ambiguous performance evaluation, to name a few–analogous to the way lung cancer arises in those living in close proximity to a coal-fired power plant.

It is my hope that those reading this can use the framing of Impostor Syndrome as a natural reaction to inhumane conditions to put just a little more space between the experience and themselves. I’m not expecting that looking at it in this way will make the symptoms go away; it certainly didn’t for me. The onus is ultimately on us to self-soothe, to celebrate our accomplishments and those of others while at the same time keeping in mind that we are deserving of unconditional love regardless of accomplishment. A hallmark injustice of abusive systems is that the burden to comfort and care for those in need so often falls on people who themselves have been hurt, but this is a burden that can build resilience and unique capacities for care and compassion. If understanding Impostor Syndrome as something done to us helps even a little to heal and forgive ourselves for experiencing it, and to begin thinking about ways of organizing that prevent it, then it seems worthwhile to me.