Memento Mori
Imagine this nightmare: You have sixty seconds to make your loved ones know you love them and help them be at peace with your impending death. I’m not playing, try it now.
How’d you do? Do you wish it was better? Me too.
This past month, this happened where I live. On July 4th the Hill Country of Texas experienced a truly horrific series of floods. Billions in damage, hundreds dead and still missing. Relief efforts were confounded and reset again and again by more floods as the rain we’ve been praying for all came at once.
RJ Harber and his family experienced this horror. He woke in the wee hours of the morning and found three little words texted to him at 3:30am, the last communication he’d ever get from his daughter Brooke: “I love you”
So simple. He’d heard them before, I’m sure. Yet, as he watched the cabin in which his two daughters had been sleeping get swept away in the floodwaters, helpless to save them, I’m sure it meant the world. And in the emptiness that follows daily now, I’m sure he clings to that reassurance that he was loved. The girls’ bodies have been found. Other extended family members are still missing.
When the world fell apart, that simple sentence of only three words, no punctuation, meant everything. And it’s in moments like these we are all reminded: Communication isn’t optional. It’s survival.
We’re social creatures. We need more conversations and meaningful messages, not uninteractive, brainslop posting. Communication is our beating heart and our greatest tool whether we’re closer to the tomb or womb.
The Great Irony of Modern Schooling
Babies are born with only two fears: falling and being abandoned. They’re born knowing their two most likely causes of death, and both are solved by a trusted person holding them close. To stay alive, they communicate. They scream. They don’t have words yet. There can be no politeness where there is no learned resilience, no sense of confidence and rugged survival for even thirty seconds of time alone with fear.
It changes — hopefully! — as we grow up, but communication never stops being our tool to defuse fear and ensure survival. Businessmen stay up at night practicing their sixty-second elevator pitches, knowing that being ready at a surprise conference water fountain moment might define their future.
Schools have devoted much time to language training, but the outcomes are awful for students and society as a whole, as I discussed in my last article. Schools were designed to train middle managers for factories, to fill out forms as cogs in great machines, a Nicolaetan triumph that has defined the inhumanity of the modern era in every country on Earth.
Currently, school fails at producing adults who are willing and able to communicate, much less clearly, politely, or winsomely. Students love texting each other and commenting on social media — real communication they are discouraged from — but as far as objective-oriented, professional or humanely polite communications, they often have to be trained by their first employer. Or their second.
The irony of this abject failure is funny — until you consider the human cost. The inability to make yourself heard and be understood is one of the greatest single drivers of unhappiness and grief. This hits deeper than just the feelings, though: Babbel reports that one in five adults is functionally illiterate and estimates the societal cost of this group’s unused potential at over 2.2 Trillion USD every year.
So much hinges on persuasion and leaving good impressions, making friends and influencing people. The land of opportunity only sings if you’re able to make the opportunity stick, and that involves communication above all.
Self-made business titan Grant Cardone — raised by a single mom, former drug addict, a man who has true life experience on both sides of the knife of success — was willing to break the mold with his most important assets, his daughters: “We took them out of the school system because one, we wanted to be with them. The second reason is we didn’t want them to be taught by people who weren’t successful … I want my kids around people that know how to communicate. That’s the most important skill they can have.”
How did his daughters fare? Well, earlier this year from the stage at the largest entrepreneurial convention in the world, thirteen-year-old Scarlett Cardone spoke … on the importance of communication skills.
The Unexpected Teacher: AI
To access the fun new LLMs like ChatGPT, you must communicate with deliberate words in specific prompts. The students, like entrepreneurs, are learning to command their AI assistants using the written word.
Are there stumbles? Yes. Are some of these students still lazy? Yes. Are they breaking some rules? Of course. But they’re learning to communicate better from these unexpected tutors than they are in English class. Each essay they have to write is a tiny project, sharpening their ability to execute on their ideas and produce real-world results — and with the threat of getting caught? The competition and risk mean there’s even real stakes.
Students doing homework with ChatGPT get as much communicative exercise in this process as your average entrepreneur does, and it’s a skill that will take them farther than their peers in the real world after they graduate. Reining in the hyperliteral guesswork of an LLM translates well to writing training SOPs for staff and a host of other tasks, practice these students crave and will apply in their careers as well.
What AI Gets Right That Schools Don’t
Three of my favorite five teachers going through school were English teachers. Yet for all these wonderful hearts that pour themselves out to students, the results-oriented, real-world application of an unfeeling AI is proving superior. I not only expect this trend to continue, I invite anybody interested in building interactive AI tutors and curriculum-substitutes to reach out to me on Substack. My thoughts have stayed private for a decade, so now I’m sharing them and would love to hear yours.
I don’t think an LLM is better than a master’s degree for teaching students in terms of ability, but the systems in play fractionalize the teachers’ skill, while the accessibility — and customizability — of AI assistants enables students to learn more, absorbing it at their own speed in several key ways.
First, consider the shortened feedback loop. With an AI, the feedback on a prompt or command is almost instantaneous, while getting your essay written and reviewed with a real red pen takes days. That closer loop means real learning within a single focused session. No nervous waiting on “read” building your insecurities due to pouring out your thoughts and not getting a response for days.
Second, consider how important style is. Most school assignments are simply not applicable to the business world, much less a student’s personal life. LLMs adjust for usage and context, adapting to the user’s goals and asking clarifying questions so they are accidentally teaching students to consider their essays in an extra dimension rather than just the grading rubric by simply asking, “Who are you writing this to?”
Schools rarely train this and fewer do it well, even though every English teacher would surely be able to teach style excellently one-on-one. Their capacity is negated by their ability to deliver within the present system.
Thirdly, consider how the nature of the practice at its core is different. Literary analysis and research assignments account for so little, those assignments can easily be dismissed as marginalia. Emails, job applications, coversheets, apologies, and even text message advising is vital to the students’ immediate and future needs and desires. That voluntary purpose in communication is absent from the modern curriculum, a key ingredient which must be reintroduced.
In trying to be efficient the professors yank out communication’s throbbing heart, unable to do much individuation in the very subject that is most unique to the individual, while the lack of direct feedback produces insecurities. By contrast, the software is accidentally teaching individuals how to sound human again and communicate effectively, boosting confidence.
A Cheery Vision for Education
All this criticism is easy to write and read, but harping on problems does nothing. If communication were central, and project-based survival skills the methodology instead of forced memorization of referenceable factoids and conformity demands, what might a school look like?
As an initial idea, I ask you to picture three proven methods mixed together: Modern class unity, one-room schoolhouse synergy, and Unschooling’s preservation of curiosity.
Assign core “home room” classes for at least half of every day where the students are mixed in age and assigned to projects — which could range from longer, real business startup attempts to quick scientific experiments. Older students lead, even being enabled to continue working on projects on their phones after school via the LLM tools. Younger students gain experience in more focused roles in these small, tight-knit groups. Technology for accessing an AI assistant can be made available via a library system or dedicated classroom computer like we had back in the 90s for math blaster.
They are guided by a teacher whose job is primarily to help groups keep moving, not assign homework. Instead of the AI replacing the teacher, the machine does the heavy lifting of homework iteration plus roadmapping groups and answering individual questions while the teacher gets to focus on individuals and group dynamics instead of bureaucracy. These long exploration blocks allow for deep, social learning while the other half of the day can be exposure rotations like music or specialty classes like, say, a GED-focused prep class.
Make the students responsible for progress reports instead of teachers. Use essays, speeches, or PowerPoint presentations and the simple presence of supportive teachers to pressure the students to accountability. Competitions within the school and even within the district can also serve as powerful incentives and even provide resources for strapped students and schools alike through sponsorships with local businesses.
Not everyone needs calculus or a business plan, but everyone needs to know how to set goals, communicate them, stick with them, and persuade allies to accomplish them. Everyone needs to know what it takes to make an impact … and get as much practice as they can.
Coming Full Circle
My community, all these small towns along the river here in Texas, is in crisis. The world has problems to solve, not just money to be made, and I’m watching the massive need for coordination and initiative and patience and project-orientation requiring one taxing, frustrating, chaotic, emotional day at a time.
The same skills that prioritize a final “I love you” to your dad when you’re trapped and you start washing into the river are the ones I see needed all over this world. The ability to tutor each child individually that AI is making possible simply wasn’t available before now. The technological scale has tipped in our favor.
But our current system, like the town river, is making war on our advancement with a gravity as firm as the status quo’s self-preservation instinct.
Imagine a world where kids graduate with the skills to defuse conflict, mediate differing opinions, find common ground, ignite and pursue dreams — even soften grief and act bravely and decisively in times of crisis — because we gave them real tools and real experience in school.
Imagine kids coming home excited about learning because they’re pursuing their curiosity, firing up their project AIs to show off what they’re making instead of firing up an Xbox to escape the real world when they get together.
If AI can help us learn how to say the things that matter, maybe the future’s not so heartless after all.
Join the Conversation
I’m building tools and stories to help young people and educators harness AI for deeper communication and learning. Continue this conversation at paulaspen.substack.com, or learn how to support the Texas Hill Country by following my wife at reseed.substack.com
