"It is the end of learning as we know it!" and the Cycle of Techno-doomerism

January 2002, and a young Blue was sitting at the computer he cobbled together from spare parts and a few new things from his first order on NewEgg.com, watching peak SportsCenter on ESPN, poking around at this new website called Wikipedia (and shout out to Ward Cunningham for coining "wiki" — that quick, convenient Hawaiian word for quick — and to Sanger for bolting it onto "encyclopedia"). His favorite professor had abandoned her lesson plan that morning to talk about how you can't trust everything you read online, and that this new thing "Wikipedia" was going to be, yep, "the end of learning as we know it."

Of course, I'm far from the first person to point out that educational technology has always been resisted, and I'm not going to try to evaluate what was or wasn't good about the takes of the time, but when Socrates grumbles about this newfangled writing thing in the Phaedrus, I choose to believe that it's just a healthy fear of change. Socrates thought it was ridiculous that someone wouldn't just remember the most important points (and this is the guy who said in the dialogue Lysis that the best way to gain the attention of the best wrestlers was to insult them and destroy their confidence, so yeah, Socrates invented "negging"). Lead/graphite as "erasable" writing material was resisted because you shouldn't be making mistakes, and to enable mistakes is "the end of learning as we know it!" Chalkboards were crutches, as learners should just learn it when the teacher says it; why should he have to get his sleeves all dusty just to present an unneeded visual aid.

And just because I love studying Greek mythology in my free time, I see no utility in standing on my chair and reciting passages of the Iliad just to satisfy someone else's expectations of an educated person. And my two decades of using that example to talk about educational technology tells me that I've got some of you now, as a reminder that the model of education that was the standard for elite schools feels foreign and perhaps even pointless to the modern teacher. But go back and watch Dead Poets Society again and remember that Robin Williams was fired for not falling in line, for enabling a type of teaching that would be "the end of learning as we know it!"

Let's jump forward a bit, because while the history of educational technology up to this moment of AI proliferation is another of my favorite sidequests, everything before microprocessors has been ubiquitous to the modern generation of learners. The calculator has been a tool for the entirety of the Millennial and the majority of the Gen X generations (and yes, the abacus goes further back, but no one likes my "the abacus is AI" take), but Wolfram and its open-source peers were "the end of learning as we know it!"

Now AI is here, and it will undoubtedly continue to redefine what is expected of an educated or literate person. Concern about Gen Z literacy is already running high; just look at the way Jagt's recent essay "My Students Can't Read" (Chronicle of Higher Ed, paywalled) is circulating among the public scholars on LinkedIn, Substack, and elsewhere. Clickbait headline aside, Jagt wasn't talking about strict literacy, the ability to understand and produce written language, but about the attention span that sustained reading demands of the learner. Whether this is a modern take similar to the defense of the great books curriculum or an honest assessment of the current generation of college-goers, I don't really know. Is this an attention span issue, or another symptom in the malaise of a generation raised on economic catastrophe, constant war, climate anxiety, and the convenient escapism and dopamine machine that is social media? Sorry Boomers, while the war analogy fits, this isn't about you. Your generation enjoyed the incredible economic engine that was American progress since WW2. This really is about these young folks being told that the careers they are going to have will be filled with jobs that don't exist yet. Honestly, who wouldn't want to escape, one TikTok at a time? Maybe they'd be better off reading… wait, y'all are the generation of cheap back-pocket paperbacks, right? Y'all would have been all over TikTok if it had been available. At least Millennials had Myspace, and it set the bar at the right place and time (we had to learn HTML just to get our profiles to play our favorite emo song of the moment — shout out to you, Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, and of course you, Tom of Myspace, everyone's first social media friend).

In my academic career, I had to learn to forget the Dewey Decimal System and the tactile satisfaction of card catalogues. I had to navigate instructors changing essay prompts and short-answer questions that required more complex connections and critical thinking, so that Wikipedia was a resource and not the solution. Then along the way we swatted away things like MOOCs and digital badges, Khan Academy didn't replace stats classes, we incorporated Learning Management Systems and plagiarism detectors, but more often than not teachers (myself included) just sat on the sidelines to wait and see if the new thing was going to stick around.

The fluff is the point (sorry, Dr. Dilley, this is an essay for a blog, I'm keeping the fluff). The mechanisms of teaching and learning have never existed in a vacuum, and they never will. Learning, as illustrated in history and in this essay, is contextual. Theories like culturally responsive pedagogy urge us to think about the world that frames our expectations of what to teach, how to evaluate, and what "mastery" means. And to counter the refrain of truly well-meaning teachers throughout history: this is not the end of learning as we know it, but the end of your teaching as you have built it. And it's frustratingly challenging to figure out how to redesign learning assessments that can't be answered with a single prompt on Copilot. For online teaching, the challenge is even more difficult (watch for a future post for a fuller discussion), but since when did teachers just throw up their hands and say "this is the end of my teaching as I know it!" instead of, you know, finding a way to get it done? Just as we always have.

References

Brenan, M. (2026, April 9). Gen Z's AI adoption steady, but skepticism climbs. Gallup. https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skepticism-climbs.aspx

Jagt, T. (2026, June 3). My students can't read [Opinion]. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-students-cant-read

* Yeah, I picked a doomer phrase from the Gen Z folks who are just great at rebranding emotional states. Really, they were raised in a world where everything is an ad; as a generation they are excellent at clever nomenclature, as they climb their way into relevance in a world that tells them how to be but doesn't really ask how they are. And if you look at the casual and the rigorous research, they are a generation with an early identity crisis that both uses AI (Gallup found a steady 51% of Gen Z use generative AI at least weekly in 2026) and also hates it.

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