We Need Education Reform

My youngest is graduating from university this month and the world has radically changed since her freshman year. And it is becoming increasingly clear that it's time to radically reform our education system..

We built an education system for factories.

For bells that told us when to move.

For clocks that told us when to stop.

For bosses who told us what to do.

We taught kids how to show up on time.

How to sit still.

How to follow the plan.

How to pass the test.

And for a while, it worked. Factories needed rhythm. Offices needed order. Society ran smoother when everyone knew their line and stayed inside it.

But now? We’ve built machines that do all that better than we ever could.

AI doesn’t get tired.

It doesn’t forget.

It follows instructions perfectly.

It memorizes flawlessly.

It regurgitates infinitely.

It never shows up late, never needs a coffee, never blanks out on test day.

It does exactly what we were trained to do … what we're training our kids to do ... only faster, cheaper, cleaner.

The world has changed: Information isn’t the prize anymore … knowledge is cheap and easily accessible. Now, the very skills we spent decades drilling into kids are the ones least worth having.

So what now?

We’ve gotta teach kids how to think, not just what to think.

How to question the premise.

How to build something that doesn’t exist yet.

How to use those infinite facts not as answers, but as ingredients.

The future won’t belong to the ones who know the most, it’ll belong to the ones who can connect the dots the machine can’t see.

The machines can follow the instructions. We need humans who can write them.

The Sea Is the Sea

When critics went hunting for symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway famously pushed back:

“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. 
The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish.
The sharks are all sharks, no better and no worse.
All the symbolism that people say is shit.”

Of course, the story resonates beyond its literal parts. Of course, readers will see struggle, dignity, mortality, grace. Hemingway wasn’t naïve about that.

But he was serious about something deeper that can be important to writers: the work begins with the concrete. Not theme. Not metaphor. Not what the thing stands for. The thing itself. The sea. The fish. The boy. The sharks.

Hemingway’s rebuke of critics is a reminder to writers that meaning collapses when it’s declared too early. If you write toward symbolism, you end up with cardboard symbols instead of living objects. But if you commit to the truth of the words themselves -- the texture of the rope, the weight of the line, the ache in the old man’s hands -- meaning happens anyway. And it feels earned, not imposed.

For writers, that’s the lesson. Don’t chase allegory. Don’t decorate your work with “important ideas.” Put your faith in the tangible. Tell the truth about what's there. Let readers discover what it means.

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Here are some other posts that touch on Hemingway and his work:

The Iceberg Theory of Writing

The Original Hemingway on Punctuation

Write Drunk Edit Sober

Writers Read

The Sun Also Rises

Copywriting is Dead

 

Every few weeks, someone announces that copywriting is dead.

Not evolving. Not shifting. Dead.

Usually this declaration comes from someone who discovered AI last month and now talks like they’ve been personally briefed by the future.

I get it. If your mental model of a copywriter is “person who turns ideas into words,” then yeah, that job looks pretty replaceable. Machines are very good at rearranging words into other words. They don’t need sleep, they don’t send invoices, and they never ask inconvenient questions like “what are we actually trying to say here?”

Clients notice that. They know they can open a tool, type a sentence, and out will come something that feels close enough. It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It’s … fine.

And for a lot of businesses, “fine” works.

That’s the part people don’t like to admit.

Because it means the threat isn’t that AI is better than you. It’s that it’s good enough for people who don’t know the difference.

What’s changed is patience. Clients don’t want delays, debates, or someone poking holes in their ideas. They want momentum. AI gives them that: no pushback, no hesitation, just output.

Meanwhile, good writing tends to do the opposite. It questions things. Slows things down. Refuses to polish a bad idea into a shiny bad idea. From the outside, that just looks like being difficult.

So now when you say “I’m a copywriter,” what some clients hear is: slower, pricier, and likely to push back.

Nobody wants to wait. Nobody wants to pay for uncertainty. And nobody wants to feel like they’re being slowed down by a human when a machine can spit something out in five seconds and say “good luck.”

So let the rebranding begin.  “Strategist.” “Creative partner.” “Growth something.” Same work, fancier label. Like labeling the product “premium” with out changing it, this doesn’t really fix the problem. Because the real shift isn’t what you call yourself, it’s what you own.

If you’re just delivering words, you’re competing with a machine that delivers words instantly. That’s a losing game.

If you’re deciding what should be said, why it matters, and how it ties to actual results, you’re not the typist anymore, you’re the one steering.

And steering is harder to automate. Mostly because it requires judgment. And a willingness to say, “this idea isn’t very good,” which machines politely avoid.

So no, copywriting isn’t dead.

But the version of it that was basically “expensive typing” is having a rough time.

Fair enough. It probably should.

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The next step? Take a look at Why Every Copywriter & Content Writer Needs an AI Usage Policy

Efficiency … at the cost of …

 

I didn’t have time to write the email, so I did what any modern time-strapped genius would do: I gave ChatGPT the bullet points. “Make it sound thoughtful,” I told it. “Maybe throw in a dash of empathy, a touch of corporate optimism.”

Seconds later, I had an email so polished it could’ve hosted a TED Talk. I hit send. Done. Efficiency achieved.

Then I found out the person on the other end didn’t have time to read it. They fed it into their ChatGPT instructing: “Summarize this. Bullet points, please.”

So let’s recap:

• I distilled my thoughts into bullet points.
  
• ChatGPT inflated them into an email.
  
• Someone else’s ChatGPT deflated that email back into bullet points.

We created a perfect, self-contained ecosystem of productivity: a Möbius strip of machines talking to machines about things we were too busy pretending to care about.

We optimized ourselves right out of the conversation.

No tone, no nuance, no accidental humanity. Just tidy meaning pellets sliding down a conveyor belt of polite automation.

Somewhere, deep in the binary soup, one AI probably whispered: “Do you think they even know what they were trying to say?”

And another one replied, “They didn’t take the time to find out.”