Chris Camillo says AI is accelerating so fast that going to school might not be worth it anymore

"One of my kids is 16 years old and he drives himself to school, and one day he slept in and I was so astonished. I was like, how is that even possible? If I would have done that as… pic.twitter.com/C37UTiT1QE

— Mikli (@CryptoMikli) February 26, 2026

Today in the car Klara and I were memorizing lines from Scripture for her Memory lesson. They have Memory every day, and as a result, she now probably knows more Scripture by heart than I do. Outside of religious considerations, I can say as a literary critic that there’s no better exercise for literacy and the capacity to appreciate great works of literature than this. It would be much easier for me to teach if my students knew their Bible. It’s tiresome to have to explain Cain and Abel every time I teach Unamuno, for example. One keeps wishing for some basic level of shared culture when one teaches.

Tomorrow, Klara’s class is performing an operetta for which they memorized some lines in Greek. This gave me an opening to talk about antiquity and Greek roots of some words.

This kind of school does make sense. It’s not AI’s fault that in many places school has been perverted through the use of education fads and application of inane ideology. You can make school useful. It’s not hard. Simply throw away all the fads and go back to the basics.

I asked AI to create 20 fill-in-the-blanks sentences to practice a grammar concept in Spanish.

Out of the 20, I had to throw away 6 because they illustrated a completely different concept.

Out of the remaining 14, eight needed heavy editing.

Three more needed light editing.

In the end, I spent slightly more time rewriting than it would have taken me to do the whole thing myself.

On the subject of AI, here’s a disturbing news item:

Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in employees’ headsets to check if they say “please” and “thank you” to customers.

(Source: https://t.co/T59XkM6cP3) pic.twitter.com/xbfJTwWWo7

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) February 26, 2026

The next step is to put headsets on professors to see how many woke slogans they emit during class times. You can set a goal and punish everybody who doesn’t reach it.

In times of epochal transformations, change happens gradually. The only place where you can observe dramatic change is the language. That is why philologists are the first to notice it. Others only begin to notice when it’s too late.

Arkady Belinkov.

After the State of the Union, I once again started hearing the argument that Iryna Zarutska’s murder is being “politicized.” This is a misuse of the term that I want to address.

You cannot politicize something that is already by its nature a political issue. We seek political redress to the cause of the murder because it is unavailable through any other means. We seek a change in the criminal justice system that will culminate in isolating from society people with a lengthy history of arrests. This is not unprecedented. California had a very successful three-strikes law that, before it was effectively destroyed, provided a life sentence for the third felony crime whatever it was, even if that crime by itself did not merit a life sentence.

The issue now is whether it is justified to impose a life sentence on people who represent a habitual danger to society. Before murdering Iryna, Decarlos Brown had been arrested 14 times. Was that enough to put him in jail permanently? What about criminals with 30 arrests? 40 arrests? Should there be a limit on how much disorder at the hands of a single individual society is willing to tolerate?

It’s not unreasonable to argue that no, there shouldn’t be a limit, and every crime should be treated in isolation from what preceded it. It is also not unreasonable to argue the opposite. This is a discussion that must happen because it’s crucial to the life of the polity. Thus, by its nature it’s political.

Let’s abandon the approach that some things should not be discussed and should be left outside the realm of political discourse. Silencing concern does not lead in a good direction.

Did you hear that medal winners at the winter Olympics were given plushies in addition to medals?

Matt Walsh had a whole segment about why it was done but never mentioned the explanation that to me is obvious.

Corruption.

One of the organizer has a relative who sells plushies. This was a way to kick back a large sum ostensibly in payment for the toys.

BREAKING: JD Vance announces the U.S. has evidence Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon.

— Polymarket (@Polymarket) February 25, 2026

I’m sorry, is it me having a hallucination or have we heard this before?

I’d be very happy to be told it’s a hallucination.

Is she doing this on purpose?

She's still got it: Kamala Harris, speaking to left-wing influencer Aaron Parnas, recounts a woman she met while promoting her book:

"I have met with—I met with a parent—of, of, of children." pic.twitter.com/GjrkRqIuME

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) February 25, 2026

This is better than “deadlines in regards to time” that she came up with during the previous campaign.

Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite is a wonderful novel. It’s also probably one of the easiest to read, so if you want to start your acquaintance with this author but are put off by long novels with a lot of dated political content, this can be a great entry into Trollope’s world.

Sir Harry is a primer on good, positive Victorian masculinity. I shouldn’t even use the word Victorian because this is masculinity for the ages. It’s also a filled with insights on parenting. Trollope feels so strongly on the subject of parenting that he does something unusual to him, briefly breaking the narrative flow and offering advice on how to deal with recalcitrant children. Sir Harry is a good man and a loving, wonderful father. But he loves his daughter Emily so much that he can’t tolerate her sulking. His incapacity to say a decisive no to Emily and his failure to keep his bumbling, overly emotional wife in check lead to disaster.

Sometimes you have to say no to your children, Trollope explains. Say it kindly but then move on. There’s no need to maintain a constant dialogue about it. If they sulk, let them. It’s not your duty to keep them constantly happy. Emily self-destructs because her father can’t find the strength to withstand her bickering. Situational kindness can turn out to be an existential cruelty. Sir Harry isn’t confident in his authority, he vacillates. This lack of a firm parental presence creates an opening into which a confident but evil man snakes to destroy Sir Harry’s family.

Aside from the plot of the novel and the excellent cast of characters, Trollope’s language is a delight. If you love the English language, you can’t fail to enjoy his writing. We are all fortunate in that this was an extremely prolific author. One could spend a lifetime reading him.

After 20 years of administering our computer-based proficiency tests with no problem, we now have an avalanche of students cheating on these tests.

I’ve been proposing for years that we administer these tests in person, removing the digital component altogether. I administered all the Spanish proficiency tests like this during COVID, and it wasn’t a big deal. How long does it take to chat to a person in a language and determine if they can speak it?

We need to move away from digital workbooks and digital testing because AI does it for students without students even needing to answer any prompts. The only reason we are using digital workbooks and testing is to work less. Well, that gig is now up, like I’ve been warning people for a long time.

Of course, nobody will listen to me

I promise that I won’t become one of those people and torture everybody with endless cat updates but this morning Klara left the garage door open, the cat escaped, and I spent my morning running around the neighborhood, yelling pitifully, “Misty! Misty! Where are you?”

Misty came back with a guilty look on her face but not covered in blood or guts of murdered birds, so I’m hopeful she didn’t get into too much mischief.