What is it GOOD for, these days? The answer is not “hurrr to get a good job”.

The best that can be said for what we do is: There is an inherent good in the process of learning itself. However, what is being learned, and why, does matter.

Tonight I learned that N*S and A can also stand for Network Security Appliance. My students will do so later in the week.

Big fucking deal.

If we loved them, here’s three things we’d be teaching them instead.

1) At the personal, intimate, micro daily level of the existence of everyone who carries a phone around, surveillance capitalism is insidiously taking over everything and destroying democracy and personal autonomy.

Anarchy now.

2) At the level of this region, the fictional border and what the pinhead politicians are doing regarding it is the most important story, and Scott Warren, the public-facing hero of it, is being legally martyred in our names.

What should we do about that, students?

3) At the global level, after the hottest July on record, it is time to ‘panic like the house is on fire’, just as the child Greta Thunberg* urges, before it’s too late if it isn’t already.

Your children will burn and drown unless you panic, master the panic, and embrace both fundamental structural change and a politics that recognizes it too.

* See especially 5:51-6:51

Or you know, see what’s new on the Facebook. Sure.