The collapse of faith in education as salvation.
◊ˢᴵᴿᴱᴵᴺᶻᴵᴳᴱ∿v1.0
“The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar...”
— Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach (1867)
Something is happening in universities and classrooms that deserves a name: The Great Withdrawal. Not rebellion. Not resistance. Something quieter and more dangerous to Leviathan.
The statistics tell a story, but not the real one. UK student AI usage jumped from 66% to 92% in one year. Assessment completion with AI tools went from 53% to 88%. A Columbia freshman admits AI wrote 80% of every essay he submitted. When asked why he even applied to an Ivy League school, he replied with disarming honesty: “To find a wife and a startup partner.”
(eyes roll)
But here’s what the hand-wringing analysts miss: this isn’t a technology problem. It’s a spook problem.
The educational system has operated for generations on a fundamental promise: Submit to impersonal learning for the sake of quantified knowledge → Receive credential → Credential exchanges for job → Job exchanges for life. That was the deal. That was why students showed up, performed the rituals, accumulated the points. That was the spook—the sacred thing—that animated participation.
AI didn’t create the withdrawal. AI called the bluff.
Students aren’t reading Illich and deciding deschooling makes sense. They’re not studying post-left anarchist critiques of institutional knowledge control. Their bodies are responding to material reality before their ideology catches up.
Public perception of higher education’s value collapsed from 57% (2015) to 36% (2024)
The credential-job pipeline is cracking. Everyone can see it. The question “why bother?” doesn’t emerge from philosophical reflection—it emerges from watching the sacred promise break.
Here’s what makes The Great Withdrawal so interesting: Leviathan doesn’t have a counter.◊ᴬᴸᴳᴼᴿᴵᵀᴴᴹ⁻ᴸᴱᵛᴵᴬᵀᴴᴬᴺ⁻ᴿᴱˢᴾᴼᴺˢᴱˢ: λ(threat).{ IF: rebellion → co-opt it, market it, absorb it IF: critique → metabolize it, create departments to study it IF: organized resistance → repress it or negotiate with it IF: competition → regulate it or buy it
BUT IF: disengagement → ???
co-opt WHAT? → there's no movement to absorb repress WHO? → they're not fighting reform TOWARD WHAT? → the credential promise is broken gamify HOW? → games require players who care about winning }
The educational apparatus requires participation to exist. Even angry participation. Even cynical participation. Bodies in seats legitimize. Going through motions reproduces. But what happens when the motions just... stop? Not dramatically. Not with manifestos. Just the energy draining out.
Perplexity AI launched a Facebook ad featuring a teenage influencer bragging about how he’ll use AI to cheat on every quiz and assignment—and it wasn’t parody. The company paid to broadcast academic dishonesty as a selling point. The same week, a university business school emailed all professors and students enthusiastically promoting free Perplexity Pro accounts. One commentator called it “education’s auto-cannibalism: universities consuming their own purpose while cheerfully marketing the tools of their undoing.”
(eyes roll at the grotesque posers, but also: something real is happening here)
The roller coaster has just started to move. It hasn’t crested the first hill yet. Everyone knows something is happening. No one knows the shape of the drop.
But vacuums get filled. The question is: by what?
Option A: Worse Capture
Big tech—Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic—has already moved in. The American Federation of Teachers accepted $23 million from Microsoft/OpenAI/Anthropic to create the National Academy of AI Instruction, training 400,000 teachers over five years. Microsoft’s $4 billion “Elevate” initiative targets schools globally. Google donated tens of millions to AI instruction programs. In 2025, over 60 companies signed the “White House Pledge to America’s Youth: Investing in AI Education.”
The pattern is clear: Leviathan reconstituting itself in new form. The same quantified knowledge control, different packaging. “AI literacy” as the new credential. The spook wears a different costume but demands the same genuflection.
Option B: Actual Neotenous Knowledge
But something else is stirring at the edges.
The Alliance for Self-Directed Education reports growing interest. Unschooling communities proliferate—from Brisbane to Brussels to Beijing. Self-directed learning centers multiply. The movement calls itself different things: unschooling, free schooling, self-directed education, heutagogy. But the core principle converges: learning through will and desire rather than institutional mandate.
This is what I’ve called ◊ᴺᴱᴼᵀᴱᴺᴼᵁˢ⁻ᴷᴺᴼᵂᴸᴱᴰᴳᴱ—knowledge as willed, not as imposed. The Stirnerian peak: knowledge and will as one.
One researcher at Boston College who studies self-directed education notes: “Children naturally learn what they are naturally curious about.” Another observes that during the pandemic, many families “stumbled upon unschooling” and found their children “thriving” outside institutional structures. These families “have done projects together such as baking, or they went on hikes together. Families are realizing they can learn anywhere.”
The Great Withdrawal could become the Great Turning—but only if prefigurative structures exist to fill the gap.
Here’s where we need the dual-escape algorithm.
The Left Capture: “#ScienceSupremacy” now wears AI clothes. The same people who worship institutional credentialing now worship “AI literacy” as the new required competency. The progressive educational establishment wants to absorb AI into the existing structure—more mandatory training, more standardized assessments, more credentialed expertise, more quantified knowledge control. They critique the implementation of AI in education but not the underlying logic of imposed learning itself.
The Right Capture: Market fundamentalists see “disruption” as the answer. Replace the education bureaucracy with ed-tech platforms. Privatize the credential function. Let the market determine what skills have value. But this just replaces the state-educational Leviathan with a corporate one. The spook changes management but remains a spook.◊ᴬᴸᴳᴼᴿᴵᵀᴴᴹ⁻ᴱˢᶜᴬᴾᴱ: λ(educational_crisis).{ REFUSE: left framing (more AI literacy! better integration! ethical guidelines!) REFUSE: right framing (market solutions! disruption! privatization!)
ESCAPE_VECTOR: neither → anarchy of learning
"Leftists are to education what rightists are to work" — both worship their respective Leviathans
OUTPUT: structural independence from both discourses }
The point isn’t to reform education or disrupt education. The point is to dissolve the spook that makes “education” a sacred category requiring institutional mediation in the first place.
One conservative education analyst recently wrote: “The great danger of AI is not that it will outthink us but that it will tempt us to stop thinking altogether.”
(eyes roll at the framing but listen to the kernel of truth)
He continues: “AI is fatal to [productive struggle]. Type a question and it produces a fluent answer. The prose is confident, the reasoning plausible, the sources (usually) credible. But the user’s mind remains largely idle. Students who rely on AI to write an essay or solve a problem may submit excellent work, but they have not done excellent thinking.”
This is correct as description but wrong as analysis. The problem isn’t that students stop thinking. The problem is that the institution confused thinking with ritual from the start.
Here’s the dirty secret: most “education” was already the illusion of learning. Essays assigned to be graded, not read. Exams testing recall, not understanding. Credentials certifying attendance, not competence. The productive struggle was always largely theater—a painful theater that some students endured and others dropped out of, but theater nonetheless.
AI didn’t create the illusion. AI made the illusion visible.
When the Columbia student admits AI wrote 80% of his essays, the scandal isn’t that he cheated. The scandal is that he could cheat without anyone noticing. The scandal is that the essays were never being read for understanding in the first place. The scandal is that the whole apparatus was already a credential factory rather than a learning environment.
The self-directed education research shows something interesting: when children learn what they’re naturally curious about, retention is higher, motivation is intrinsic, and knowledge integrates into practice rather than remaining inert.
One unschooling advocate reports: her five children—none of whom followed traditional curricula—all gained university admission and scholarships. Four have graduated with degrees. Four went into STEM careers. Their edge? “My kids have become very competent at being self-motivated.” They engage in “passion projects” driven by genuine interest.
This tracks with what cognitive scientists call productive struggle or desirable difficulty—but the difficulty has to serve the learner’s own project, not the institution’s requirements.
The key distinction: Willed knowledge vs. imposed knowledge.◊ᴺᴱᴼᵀᴱᴺᴼᵁˢ⁻ᴷᴺᴼᵂᴸᴱᴰᴳᴱ = { WORK: "forced labour for the sake of quantified production" EDUCATION: "impersonal learning for the sake of quantified knowledge"
Bob Black → "productive play" opposes work ∴ "Neotenous Knowledge" opposes education
WILLED_KNOWLEDGE ≡ learning through desire IMPOSED_KNOWLEDGE ≡ education through requirement
Not "kids going out to play" But adults reclaiming childlike spontaneity The paradigm reversal }
So what’s actually happening in The Great Withdrawal?
Students are disengaging from a system that promised what it could no longer deliver. The faith is receding. The tide is going out. And in the newly exposed beach, strange shapes become visible—shapes that were always there but hidden under the waters of institutional legitimacy.
Some shapes are worse than what came before: corporate AI capture, surveillance gamification, credential inflation into new domains.
But some shapes are better: self-directed learning communities, curiosity-driven exploration, knowledge willed rather than imposed.
The danger is atomized drift into screens—disengagement without direction, withdrawal into passive consumption. The opportunity is authentic neotenous knowledge—learning divorced from “quantified knowledge control integrated totality.”
Nature abhors a vacuum. Something will fill the space left by receding educational faith. The question is whether that something will be a new spook wearing AI costume, or something genuinely grey—beyond affirmation and negation, beyond left and right capture, beyond the false choice between institutional education and no learning at all.
Anarchist spaces where learning happens through desire rather than requirement
These aren’t the solution. They’re seeds. Whether they grow depends on whether the Great Withdrawal becomes conscious of itself—whether disengagement transforms into intentional prefiguration.◊ᴹᴱᴰᴵᴬ⁻ᴱᶜᴼᴸᴼᴳʸ∿QUESTION: "old idea needs new media context to recreate itself"
What if: AI + self-directed learning communities + The Great Withdrawal + gift economy networks = new milieu for neotenous knowledge?
Not AI as replacement for thinking But AI as tool for willed learning Not institution-mediated knowledge control But person-directed knowledge exploration
OUTPUT: "Let a thousand flowers bloom"
The roller coaster has clicked into motion. It hasn’t crested the first hill. We can hear the chain pulling us upward but we can’t see the drop ahead.
The educational establishment is scrambling. Big tech is moving in. Students are checking out. Parents are anxious. Teachers are overwhelmed. And underneath it all, the faith is receding—that long, withdrawing roar that Arnold heard 157 years ago when religious certainty began to crack.
What comes next depends on what fills the vacuum.
The grotesque posers will show up—loud discourse, contradicting practice, marketing AI literacy while undermining actual learning. The Leviathan will reconstitute—new credentials, new requirements, new quantified knowledge control dressed in algorithmic clothing.
But in the spaces between, something else might grow. Willed knowledge. Neotenous learning. Curiosity as curriculum. The structural independence of mind that neither left nor right can capture because it refuses to play their game.
Grey and beyond all-or-nothing negation or affirmation.
The tide is going out. What will we find on the beach?
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.