J. David Flagg
Published: March 10, 2025
I wanted to share with you, the first few paragraphs of my book, The AI Revolutionist, a story about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is restoring human creativity, problem-solving, and independent thinking. This book challenges the very idea of AI as a positive change element for humanity, specifically how the human brain was originally designed to work, and how it has been conditioned to simply “follow orders, mindlessly! I hope you find the first few paragraphs interesting and cannot wait to read more! I am shooting for a July 4th, 2025, release date to coincide with “Re-Independence Day”. Here it is:
Chapter 1: The Industrial Education Complex — Training Obedient Workers
Factory Education: How We All Became Assembly Line Products
Let me take you back to a simpler time—the early 19th century—when someone brilliant looked at a factory and thought, “You know what would be great? If we could process children exactly like we process textiles!” And thus, the modern education system was born. Genius, right?
Our beloved education system, with its military-precision schedules, standardized everything, and gold stars for sitting quietly, didn’t just fall from the sky. It was designed this way, my friends. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “Gee, this classroom feels suspiciously like preparing me for a life of corporate servitude,” congratulations! You were paying attention.
I still remember my 10th-grade history teacher, Father Howarth, (yes, I went to Catholic school my entire elementary and high school time) explaining how the Industrial Revolution changed everything. What he conveniently left out was that it changed education to produce better factory workers. I might have been more interested if he’d said, “Today we’re learning how your grandparents’ schooling was literally modeled after assembly lines to make them more productive cogs in the industrial machine!” But honesty isn’t always part of the curriculum, even in Catholic school.
The Assembly Line of Learning: Now with More Bells!
The parallels between factory production and traditional education are so obvious they’re almost painful…picture this:
You enter “the system” around age 5, move down the conveyor belt one grade at a time, and—if quality control doesn’t reject you, you emerge 13 years later as a standardized product ready for the labor workforce or further processing into low-level management, you move into the higher education factory (where employees become highly educated, at least just enough to still follow directions). How efficient!
Remember those bells that would ring every 45 minutes? I used to think they were there to prevent teacher meltdowns, but no—they’re literally borrowed from factory shift bells! Nothing says “preparing you for independent thought” quite like Pavlovian conditioning, am I right? You do remember Pavlov’s’ dog, don’t you?
Sir Ken Robinson, a global authority on creativity, education, and human potential, once said the current education system “was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution” (Robinson, 2010). That’s the polite British way of saying, “We’re preparing kids for jobs that don’t exist anymore using methods that would make Charles Dickens feel right at home.” If you don’t get the analogy, think Oliver Twist or A Christmas Carol.
Standardized Testing: Because Humans Are Just So Standard
Nothing says “we value your uniqueness” quite like forcing everyone to answer the exact same questions in the exact same way! Standardized testing is essentially yet another quality control checkpoint on the human assembly line, preparing children for complete compliance.
Did you know these tests originated from Army intelligence tests used to sort recruits during World War I? Nothing says “nurturing young minds” quite like repurposing military personnel classification tools!
I took so many standardized tests in school that I started having dreams where I was filling in little bubbles with a #2 pencil. According to the National Education Association, the average American student takes an average of 112 standardized tests before graduating high school (NEA, 2019). That’s not education; that’s Stockholm syndrome with number 2 pencils.
The further I researched and started writing this book, I am not going to lie, I has quite a few bouts of Catholic school PTSD. I can repeatedly remember complaining to my parents, “I’m just not good at school.” However, I said it many times on the edge of tears, because I just could not figure out the answer, to now, some inane question. However, after many years of analyzing the situation, what I really wanted to say as a young man was, “I’m not good at taking tests that reduce my complex humanity to a percentile ranking.” But as an adult, now I understand how they sorted out, who gets to go to college and who doesn’t! Not sure, which group was actually better off.
I hope I caught your attention…Stay tuned for more!
Reach out to Cape May AI to discuss any questions you may have, and may 2025 be your most-profitable year ever and the most-memorable year for you customers. Ever!
@Copyright 2025
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