If it frustrates you that there appears to be widespread resistance to understanding basic facts, ponder the…

If it frustrates you that there appears to be widespread resistance to understanding basic facts, ponder the status of teachers in 2025. Teachers know what most of the rest of us don’t know. That learning is a socialisation, not transferring data points into brains. /1 https://t.co/ojdCanKcYV

There are a lot of very smart people on this platform, many of whom spend a lot of time tearing out their hair while sharing fantastic knowledge that most of society ignores. People will pay no attention to knowledge unless knowledge becomes socialised as part of life. /2

That’s the job of a teacher. To socialise knowledge itself, to work with people in their social raw state and incorporate knowledge into that sociality. All of civilisation today is an ongoing battle between classroom and playground . /3

The playground, where kids mix according to rules of status, in groups or teams, is absolutely winning in 2025. Social media recreates exactly the culture of the playground. The culture of the classroom is probably terminally damaged. /4

These aren’t analogies. Culture is created in very specific, empirical ways and locations. For modern people this is schools. The culture we create in schools becomes the culture we live as adults, kids take it from school and remake the adult world. /5

Social media as a technology has allowed human culture itself to regress to a permanent school playground. An entire culture run on social status games, on imitative rivalries. Everybody from children to seniors now transact their lives increasingly on these platforms. /6

Teachers are treated with contempt, and are now even physically assaulted. Because the playground is winning, and the classroom is dead. In the pandemic I’ve seen not one example of a teacher even being asked about Covid control in schools. The contempt is absolute. /7

It’s teachers who allow societies to escape social status games and introduce knowledge into how civilisation operates. By socialising knowledge, hardest job in the world. The terminal toxicity of the culture can be seen in the collapse in status for this role. /end