Tue Sep 29 2026 16:48:57 GMT+0300 (Moscow Standard Time) · Education
Training for a factory that left
My metaphor for rigid schooling is a runway built for a factory. Sit in rows, follow the bell, do the repetitive thing on cue, don't ask why. That was the job once, so we shaped children for it. Then the factory left — the monotonous, rule-following work is exactly what robots took first. The runway's still here, and the bell still rings for planes that stopped coming.
We know what school teaches, because we tested it. Show a child how to open a box and add a pointless tap on the lid, and the child copies the tap — even after calling it silly. The experiment demonstrates overimitation in its task; extending it to twelve years of schooling is my analogy, not its finding. School doesn't grow foragers. It over-imitates them into farmers.
People differ in attention and exploration, but the studies cited here do not establish a single gene for rejecting rituals. A 2008 study of 152 Ariaal men reported an association between a DRD4 variant and nutritional measures that differed between nomadic and settled groups. It did not study schoolchildren or show that ADHD prevents overimitation. Exploratory-foraging research addresses a narrower task, not a universal advantage or deficit. My design argument is that an environment should accommodate different ways of working.
AI is now taking the monotony — the exact farm-work the runway drills for. So we automate the thing we still teach. The factory left, and we're still training children for the shift.
Nobody planned this. The state counts two workers and one educated kid, and the numbers look fine. A conveyor can't stop and wait for a child to walk up to the tool that catches their eye — so it doesn't. Topology, not malice.
Seeing the pointless step isn't a superpower. It's a tax: the forager skips the empty ritual and gets marked down for it. We build for the ones who ask why — the core is open, so you can read how it works, not just that it works.
godcrm.ai/git/holetron-lab/godcrm
Correction · 29 September 2026: Separated the education metaphor from research findings. Removed unsupported claims linking ADHD, one genetic variant and refusal to overimitate.