For 10 years, Coleman loved his job teaching math and technology in Fall River, Mass. He lived for the “teachable moments” when young minds lit up and grasped concepts during lively, spontaneous tangents from lesson plans. Then his district mandated that he use i-Ready, an online platform that delivers canned tests and “personalized learning” on internet-connected devices. Coleman wasn’t wild about it. His students began complaining bitterly. Many disengaged entirely or learned to game the system. 

Then a directive came down that usage of the system would increase. “The day that the principal told us that we needed to do i-Ready three times a week, that’s when I was done,” he tells me. “It was three hours a week for each class, when we only had five hours a week. So 60% of the teaching was going to be done by this computer that the kids absolutely hate. That’s not what I went to college for.”

Coleman’s story isn’t unusual. Across the United States, veteran teachers in public and private schools alike describe a quiet exodus from a profession radically transformed by i-Ready and other educational-technology, or “ed-tech,” platforms.  

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By William Deresiewicz

Of course, American education has had a rough few decades; student achievement continues to fall ever further behind other developed nations. Partisan tribalists may blame their favorite villains — lazy union teachers and woke-ness for the Right, structural racism and poverty for the Left. But both political parties have been equally guilty of legislating more and more standardized testing over the past 25 years, creating an ideal environment for Big Tech to hawk “data-based” panaceas like i-Ready. 

Marketed as a high-tech solution to lagging scores on government-mandated tests, i-Ready is used across 30-plus US states and a staggering 70% of the top-100 school districts, covering nearly half of elementary- and middle-school children. This, even though i-Ready has never been proved to successfully teach, immerses already-screen-addled kids in yet more screens, and in all likelihood is making America’s children quantifiably dumber.

But storm clouds are gathering. Teachers are whispering their outrage. Parents are organizing to demand that their children be allowed to opt out. And last year, i-Ready publisher Curriculum Associates was hit with a federal class-action lawsuit that insists the platform is less about e-learning than it is a data-extraction racket exploiting minors without parental consent.

Curriculum Associates did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this essay 

In the $94 billion North American ed-tech market of 2026, Curriculum Associates stands as a dominant pillar. Founded in 1969, the firm operated for decades as a sleepy, also-ran textbook publisher before pivoting to the nascent e-learning market in the late aughts. Today, the company is a private-equity-backed juggernaut with more than 2,700 employees and $750 million in annual revenue — derived overwhelmingly from America’s taxpayer-funded public schools.

Curriculum Associates’ flagship product is i-Ready. First launched in 2011, it has evolved into two tightly intertwined screen-based products. i-Ready Inform is the diagnostic half: standardized “adaptive” tests given three times per subject annually. The other half is i-Ready Learning, which translates each student’s i-Ready Inform scores into algorithmically generated lessons called “My Path.” This takes the form of gamified multiple-choice math and English questions delivered by infantile cartoon characters with names like “Yoop Yooply” and “Snargg.” 

The sales pitch is that kids benefit from a kind of one-on-one “personalized instruction” that today’s teachers are simply stretched too thin to deliver. In practice, it usually means that in any one classroom, 25 headphones-wearing students are silently absorbing 25 unrelated e-lessons on a grid of glowing screens, rather than interacting in shared learning moments. 

In traditional, analog education, human teachers can apply infinite adaptations to assist struggling students, answering questions and reading facial expressions and classroom energy. But when kids answer i-Ready questions incorrectly, the system merely swaps in new numbers or texts and instantly regurgitates them through the same characters and scripts. For millions of children, this quickly becomes excruciatingly repetitive.

A private math coach in Alaska describes kids’ frustration to me in stark terms. “I’ve been tutoring for 25-plus years. In my experience, universally, without a doubt, every single kid hates i-Ready. Even my most diligent, self-taught kids loathe it.” 

When children are mandated to spend hours each week using a tool they actively detest, it trains them to equate schoolwork with coercion and monotony. The danger is not merely that kids dislike i-Ready; it’s that the software risks poisoning their attitudes toward learning as such.

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Across the internet, students howl visceral invective against i-Ready: thousands of one-star ratings dominate on Apple’s App Store, excoriating i-Ready as “mentally exhausting,” “THE WORST,” and “a nightmare.” On websites like Sitejabber, which aggregates consumer reviews, thousands more one-star ratings accompany statements like: “It makes students want to kill themselves.” A recent YouTube video titled “i-Ready GARBAGE” racked up 350,000 views in one week; its creator calls i-Ready a “medieval torture method.” 

Given this extraordinary geyser of acid bile from i-Ready’s own captive user base, it’s unsurprising that on both its official YouTube channels, Curriculum Associates disables all commenting. 

As for educators, many view i-Ready as a vocational and philosophical threat: a substitution of analytics and algorithms for human insight, one that erodes teachers’ role as decision-makers and is a Trojan Horse for the total machine takeover of education. Teachers resoundingly give i-Ready a failing grade at Common Sense Media and take to private Facebook groups and Reddit in droves to vent that it is “useless” and “toxic.” 

The most common educator complaint is that i-Ready replaces finite, invaluable teaching time with gratuitous additional testing. “Ms. A,” a director of math curricula at a California public charter school, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely, explains that “we lose between three and six weeks of actual instruction time every year taking the i-Ready assessments, and our teachers don’t find it useful at all.”

That problem is compounded in districts that also mandate i-Ready Learning. Although Curriculum Associates nominally recommends limiting usage to 45 minutes per subject per week, institutional pressure to demonstrate Stretch Growth® — CA’s convoluted internal metric that conveniently interprets failure and success as grounds for more i-Ready use — often bloats into hours of student screen time every day.

Teachers resent that i-Ready strips them of the authority to design lessons based on years of experience, effectively demoting them to a demeaning hybrid role: part test proctor, part IT support, part teaching assistant to their digital stand-in. Worse, educators are expected to treat i-Ready’s algorithmic assessments as definitive, even when the results contradict their firsthand knowledge of students’ abilities. 

Coleman, the Massachusetts teacher, recalls the program reporting that his class couldn’t solve basic geometry problems he knew they had already mastered. The software “was telling me my kids were completely ignorant,” he said. “But I knew for a fact they could take apart a right-angle triangle and figure out the other angles.” In his experience, many students gamed or rushed through the diagnostics, generating incorrect scores that then locked them into weeks of needlessly remedial lessons.

However heartfelt or valid their objections to i-Ready, many teachers dare not protest once a school or district implements the system. As Coleman explains, educators “will not stick their necks out, they don’t want to get fired … teachers are terrified.” This anxiety is exacerbated because the program itself also becomes a vector of almost Orwellian surveillance. Last year, “Mr. J,” a West Virginia teacher, received a reprimand after local officials noticed his students weren’t clocking the minimum i-Ready minutes per week. “A district administrator came to my class and sat me down and told me that I had to do what I’m told,” he explained. “Teachers at my school are worried…. There’s absolute fear.” 

You might assume that i-Ready must meet rigorous standards to lead district leaders to insist on its use, over and against the complaints of teachers and students. But you’d assume wrong.  The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the 2015 federal K-12 education law that replaced No Child Left Behind, requires schools to use evidence-based programs. Yet those standards are far looser than the public imagines. Genuine proof of the effectiveness of a program requires multiyear, independently run, randomized trials — which are slow and expensive. 

To date, no such gold-standard studies support i-Ready’s effectiveness. A 2016 Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy Brief warned “there is no evidence that [i-Ready] provides information that teachers can use to help students learn,” and chided Curriculum Associates for claiming “their assessments have the ability to increase learning,” when “none of the studies we found were peer-reviewed or independent.” 

Instead, Curriculum Associates routinely turns to its own employees and paid contractors to produce non-randomized quasi-experimental studies that meet only the very lowest threshold of ESSA evidence — enabling the firm to legally market i-Ready as “evidence-based” without substantiating the claim in a manner rigorous enough to pass muster with independent scientists. 

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Public LinkedIn profiles reveal that Curriculum Associates staffs a research-and-analytics  department with more than 50 full-time data and psychometrics scientists, whose names appear as authors on a steady stream of positive white-paper self-evaluations — all housed in the company’s own painstakingly search-optimized Research Library. 

Critics point to this as fitting the textbook definition of science-washing: credentialed employees using scientific language and internal data to overwhelm would-be doubters with well-packaged supportive documentation — a convincing facsimile of true scientific rigor. 

Lisa LeVasseur of Internet Safety Labs, which evaluates ed-tech software, says the strategy carries ominous echoes of Big Tobacco’s heyday: “Curriculum Associates funding their own research sounds like part of what I call the ‘Product Safety Resistance Playbook,’ which the tobacco industry pioneered back in 1953. It’s a whole set of social-engineering strategies to attack unfavorable research and fund bullshit research that showed positive things about cigarettes. And now we’re seeing that playbook again.”

Curriculum Associates, to be sure, also commissions evaluations from prestigious academic brands like the Johns Hopkins Center for Research & Reform in Education, or CRRE, which has produced at least seven CA-sponsored studies supporting i-Ready’s efficacy. Each study stresses that the underlying data is provided by school districts by way of touting its independence. Yet this sidesteps the reality that even district-supplied data are born of the firm’s closed i-Ready algorithm, which researchers can’t audit. That i-Ready generates the in-house black-box data upon which its supporting studies depend means that CA effectively operates a closed-loop evidence system, highlighting these affirmations in its Research Library as proof that i-Ready works.

Asked to clarify Johns Hopkins’ policy on whether its clients are permitted to review or edit their fee-for-service studies, CRRE Executive Director Steven Ross replied via email that “we don’t have a written policy,” adding that “they may offer caveats or suggestions for editing.”

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University research departments, moreover, routinely post their output to online government databases, including the Education Resources Information Center. ERIC is a mere digital archive which does not evaluate the legitimacy of any studies stored therein. But when i-Ready’s self-funded studies appear atop Google search results on the US Department of Education’s ED.GOV web domain, replete with federal ID numbers, it signals a government-vetted imprimatur that the research doesn’t actually have. The end result is credibility laundering: Curriculum Associates’ marketing studies wear federal government badges they didn’t earn — a distinction few district administrators or school board members are capable of making before deciding whether to implement i-Ready.

Perhaps more troubling is that on rare occasions when truly independent research into i-Ready has been conducted, Curriculum Associates has materially distorted mixed or negative findings.  For example, CA’s research library summarizes a 2018 WestEd/Gates Foundation evaluation as evidence that i-Ready students “demonstrated a significant improvement in their scores” on the Smarter Balanced Assessment and “tended to score 24 points higher.” 

But to the vanishingly few who slog through the 52-page report, the opposite picture emerges. WestEd cautioned that “causal conclusions about the impact of i-Ready cannot be made.” Students described lessons as “repetitive” and said they were “not learning new material,” while teachers reported that the diagnostic results “did not match their own perceptions of students’ readiness.” In other words: Curriculum Associates took a study festooned with red flags and repackaged it as a blue ribbon.  

So how is a product so unloved and so untested now compulsory for a generation of American K-8 students? Like other companies whose target market is government bureaucracy, Curriculum Associates employs lobbyists across the county. A filed lobbying disclosure by the firm declares an intention to “promote education technology within federal compliance standards,” and job postings for senior government-relations positions seek candidates “to drive policy wins with state leaders that grow student learning and expand CA’s business.” 

One tactic to drive policy wins is Curriculum Associates’ “Diamond Level” sponsorship of conferences for the Council of the Great City Schools, or CGCS, an organization that engages in federal- and state-level lobbying on behalf of America’s 81 largest school districts. CGCS brochures indicate its Diamond Level sponsors enjoy VIP access to top district leaders and are “entitled to share gifts and/or materials with attendees.”  

In 2019, an unprecedented joint initiative by CGCS and Los Angeles Unified School District selected Curriculum Associates as one of just three (out of 100) ed-tech publishers to develop “high-quality instruction materials.” A news release encouraged districts nationwide to piggyback on a no-haggle contract, assuring them “15 major city school systems have already expressed interest,” and CGCS’ Urban Educator newsletter praised the effort to “harness the joint purchasing power of the nation’s major city school systems.” The criteria for selecting Curriculum Associates over 97 other publishers were never released, despite the choice creating a de-facto whitelist of national vendors. 

While there is no public accounting of exactly how many urban districts ultimately contracted with Curriculum Associates because of the CGCS consortium, news releases indicate that its classroom penetration surged 75% in the four years following, jumping to 14 million by 2023.

i-Ready didn’t achieve its stranglehold on US classrooms because school boards are foolish or malicious, however. It’s because i-Ready is exquisitely designed to prey on education leaders’ accountability anxiety. Today, poor scores on federally mandated assessments can trigger state intervention plans, tank school ratings, animate angry parents, and place proverbial heads on chopping blocks.

So when i-Ready promises “actionable data” and a “path to proficiency” packaged in color-coded dashboards exuding scientific precision, it’s catnip for superintendents desperate to inoculate themselves from sanctions, lousy headlines, and charges of ineptitude. i-Ready enables district brass to say “we’re on this” by subjecting students as young as kindergarten to the stress and tedium of six additional standardized tests per year. 

Once implemented, the black-box system is perniciously self-perpetuating. Low i-Ready scores serve as proof that students will benefit from more i-Ready lessons. Over time, districts embrace the circular logic and begin optimizing not for actual learning, but for improved metrics within the i-Ready ecosystem.

There’s also alarming evidence that i-Ready plans to colonize more of the school experience. In late 2023, Curriculum Associates acquired Ireland’s Soapbox Labs, which specializes in AI recognition of children’s voices. A spring 2025 news release indicates that i-Ready is actively integrating SoapBox’s voice engine, which “will allow children to read aloud while the technology listens, analyzes, and provides timely feedback.” 

Curriculum Associates CEO Kelly Sia praised the plan, declaring that it would soon be “giving teachers back precious instructional time” — when, in fact, it is designed to supplant teacher interaction with students. By automating the act of listening to a child read and responding in real time, the software supplants one of the most intimate instructional roles a teacher performs and turns the teacher into a mere supervisor.

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In July 2025, Curriculum Associates also acquired Stile Education, an Australian ed-tech company that produces middle-school online science curricula. “Expanding into science is the next obvious strategic priority for us,” Sia explained in a news release. This means i-Ready’s core portfolio could soon balloon beyond its math and English to absorb science classes, boosting kids’ screen time even more. 

Another concern is privacy. i-Ready, just like social-media apps, is built for internet-connected mass data extraction — tracking and recording users’ every click, scroll, keystroke, and pause. According to its own Data Handling & Privacy Statement, i-Ready combines such “usage metrics” with personally identifiable information, including the names, birthdays, and racial backgrounds of its 14 million student users. And because it is a cloud-based system, i-Ready’s data extraction continues unabated whether children are in a classroom or in the privacy of their own bedrooms doing i-Ready homework on school-issued devices. 

The rub here is that minors can’t legally consent to surrendering their privacy for industrial-scale harvesting. In fact, American children are supposed to be protected by strict privacy laws. Federal laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and the Family Education Rights and Privacy Acts are meant to shield children from predatory digital exploitation. But both contain loopholes big enough for Curriculum Associates to exploit. 

In December 2025, a group of parent activists filed suit in a federal court in Massachusetts, accusing i-Ready of amounting to a compulsory child-surveillance system. The complaint alleges that CA sells “highly intimate academic and psychographic profiles of children” to advertising, marketing, and consumer-data-profiling companies. It further asserts that the company evades child-privacy laws by forcing families to surrender basic privacy rights in exchange for a public education. The suit seeks more than $5 million in damages under wiretap, privacy, and consumer-protection laws. 

In 2026, a mere 15 years after launching, i-Ready isn’t some upstart tech disruptor — it’s the status quo. With roughly 14 million students jacked into the platform, and usage guidelines requiring roughly 54 hours per child annually, that’s a conservatively estimated 750 million hours (or 86,000 years) of childhood consumed by i-Ready screen time annually — a breathtaking displacement of young American lives into one company’s experimental ecosystem. 

Which raises the fundamental question: has i-Ready delivered results? The big picture suggests not. Because i-Ready’s core selling point has always been improved performance on government-mandated assessments, those same standardized tests offer a common-sense measure of the product’s effectiveness. Unfortunately, results indicate that i-Ready’s screen-based learning paradigm has been a bust. 

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, was established by Congress in 1969 as the benchmark of American academic performance. While NAEP showed broad student-achievement gains in the early 2000s, during the 2010s, when smartphones and ed-tech took over, achievement flattened. On NAEP’s 2025 Nation’s Report Card, America’s reading scores continue to fall, math gains are minimal, and achievement gaps between low-income students and their affluent peers are widening. NAEP may not explicitly point to i-Ready as causing the decline, but it undercuts any claim that the platform’s massive market share is reversing it. 

As for hope that i-Ready districts buck that trend, even Curriculum Associates’ own State of Student Learning 2025 report — based on diagnostic data from all 14 million current i-Ready students — acknowledges that “academic recovery has stalled nationwide,” with “little change or small declines” across nearly all grades, subjects, and income levels in the previous year. The report reveals that i-Ready users’ proficiency has regressed so deeply that in Grade 8 Math, 60% of students fail to reach grade level — a failure rate that has increased since 2019. Worse, nearly 30% of fifth graders are two or more years behind, proving that the i-Ready algorithm is not a recovery engine, but a stagnation trap. 

And so the rise of i-Ready has mirrored a collapse of US academic achievement. This demands we finally ask: if i-Ready simply doesn’t work, at what point does America’s education establishment cut its losses and declare it digital snake oil — a boondoggle of historic proportions?

If and when we do, Benjamin Coleman won’t miss it. He still yearns for a return to the personal, empathetic classroom dynamics he watched Curriculum Associates steadily erode. “There is no teachable moment with i-Ready, man,” he says. “It’s all kids sitting in silence staring at the freaking screen. It takes the humanity out of education. It’s very sad.”

What I soon discovered was that none of them had much idea how to make an argument in any context. Nor were they particularly skilled at analysing the arguments of others. They didn’t know how to read; they didn’t know how to write; and they didn’t know how to think.

What do I mean? The syllabus consisted, for the most part, of short exemplary texts: a column by David Brooks, a blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and so forth. But whenever I assigned them anything a little more complex or sophisticated, it flew over their heads. These were students who were used to the idea that reading meant skipping and skimming.

Their writing was not much better. Most were competent at a basic level, but none had had any real guidance or instruction. One week, we did an exercise designed to help them make their prose more vivid and energetic. I had them read a short piece of writing pedagogy, then handed out a sheet on which I’d reproduced a single sentence from each of their most recent pieces that needed that kind of attention.

We set to work on the first, dissecting, pruning, and rewriting. After about ten minutes, we had it in decent shape; it wasn’t graceful yet, but at least it was concise. And then I said, “Okay, it’s taken thirteen of the finest minds in Claremont ten minutes to rewrite that sentence. This is what you need to do with every sentence you write.” They looked at me with horror and amazement. It wasn’t just the scale of the task that was rising before them. It was also the fact that no one had bothered to tell them that before.

It was then I finally understood something that my students had told me the first day of class. I had asked them to introduce themselves and talk about their strengths and weaknesses as writers. Many had said some version of “I’m good at writing naturally” or “I’m good at writing conversationally,” “but I’m not good at revising” or “I’m not good at editing”. What they had been telling me, I realised that day in the middle of the semester, was that they thought of writing as something that just happens, that they had never been asked to pay attention to their sentences as conscious constructions.

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As for their thinking, they had the same relationship to their arguments as they had to their prose. They just made them; they didn’t and really couldn’t think about them in a metacognitive way. They couldn’t recognise contradictions, anticipate objections, entertain alternative interpretations, make essential distinctions, or delineate the limits of their propositions. Remember, this wasn’t freshman composition. This was an advanced writing seminar at some of the most prestigious colleges in the country.

These problems weren’t confined to Claremont. Later that same year, in a piece about the differences between the way his students read Shakespeare and the way that students used to, Stephen Greenblatt wrote this:

“Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley. What has happened? It is not that my students now lack verbal facility… In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual and resembles the texting and blogging that they do so constantly. The problem is that their engagement with language, their own or Shakespeare’s, often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.”

A little later Greenblatt writes, “When I ask them to write a 10-page paper analyzing a particular web of metaphors, exploring a complex theme or amassing evidence to support an argument, the results are often wooden.”

Note how similar his observations are to mine. Note especially that sentence in the middle: “In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual.” As my students were at Claremont, Greenblatt’s at Harvard are able to write “naturally,” to write “conversationally”, but are at a loss when it comes to writing formally, or to reading complex texts in ways that are more than “shallow or tepid”, or to making arguments that are better than “wooden” (which sounds like a euphemism for “bad”). That they “write with ease” despite having a “shallow or tepid” engagement with their own language is part of the problem.

Greenblatt offers the familiar explanations for these generational differences: the rise of the internet, the emergence of social media, and so forth. But he neglects to address the fact that Harvard undergraduates are supposed to be among the exceptions. The students in his Shakespeare class undoubtedly boast a median verbal SAT score in the upper 700s (out of 800). The large majority probably received a perfect score of 5 on the AP (Advanced Placement) English exam. If any group of college students should be capable of deciphering complex texts, writing incisive expository prose, and constructing compelling analytic arguments, it is they. But apparently they’re not.

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To understand how this predicament came to pass, one needs to understand how students manage to get into places like Harvard or the Claremont colleges in the first place. It is not by learning how to read, write, or think. It is by jumping through the endless series of hoops that elite college admissions offices have developed over the decades to winnow down their skyscraper stacks of application folders.

To win a place at such a school, students most receive top grades in a broad range of AP courses, show evidence of participation in a dozen or more extracurricular activities—sports, arts, student government, et al.—demonstrate “leadership”, engage in “service”, and gather experiences, often through purpose-built programs, to write about on their personal essays, statements designed to convince the admissions officer of the existence of an actual human being beneath the credentials. To do all this, they will work without cease for years on end, sleeping little and foregoing the freedoms of adolescence.

This is not a system that’s designed to foster intellectual engagement. Students learn to skip and skim, not just their assigned readings, but everything. Everything is done at maximum speed and with the least possible effort. Curiosity and passion must be actively suppressed. Students become experts, not so much in subjects as in working the system. There is simply no time to do anything else.

This is not to say that things are better below the level of the elite. For many years, public education in the United States has been dominated by high-stakes assessment regimes. Schools, accordingly, “teach to the test”, foregoing the development of holistic understanding in favour of the grinding repetition of isolated skills (a practice known as “drill and kill”). And since the tests cover math and reading only, many subjects have been stripped from the curriculum, along with any opportunity for students to follow the wayward path of their own interests. The system might almost have been devised for the express purpose of destroying the love of learning.

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If that’s the kind of education students have received by the time they get to college, do things get better once they arrive? Not usually. Old habits die hard. Elite students, already competing for the next prize, continue to conduct their lives at the same frenetic pace. At the large mass of institutions below the level of the elite, the problem is less apt to be misdirected zeal than sheer indifference. Courses are a bother; campus culture runs to sports and beer.

Nor will students get much help from their professors. As I’ve travelled to colleges and universities around the country over the last 14 years, I’ve been stunned by the sheer laziness of so much undergraduate instruction. Professors on the tenure track have no incentive to care about their teaching, and a great deal of incentive not to. The adjuncts and other contingent instructors who make up the vast majority of the American faculty — underpaid, overworked, and sometimes teaching well outside their field — simply don’t have time to do a proper job.

The whole creaking machine is lubricated by the magic grease of grade inflation. As of the early Sixties, 15% of grades at American colleges and universities fell within the A range. By 2013, the proportion had reached 45%. To paraphrase the joke from the old Soviet Union, students pretend to work, and professors pretend to grade them.

It is within the context of these forms of collegiate stupidity that we can understand the one that is now the most salient: wokeism. Wokeism can be thought of as the opportunistic infection of a host with an already weakened intellectual immune system. Students haven’t learned to think, so they lack the means to spot its inconsistencies, its hypocrisies, its absurdities. They haven’t learned to read, so they uncritically absorb its empty language. They know little of history, so they accept whatever tendentious version wokeism hands them.

Wokeism also satisfies important psychic needs, of the kind that education ought to address but does not. It provides students with an interpretive framework with which to understand the world. For earlier generations of young adults, that function would have been performed by Marxism or Freudianism or feminism or liberal progressivism or American patriotism. All have long since been discredited except for feminism, which had itself been in abeyance and has now been absorbed by, and subordinated to, the new intersectional identitarianism.

Indeed, after decades of postmodernism, with its assault on the very idea of grand interpretive narratives, wokeism represents a return of the repressed — the repressed in this case being the ineluctable human hunger for meaning. For wokeism, like those earlier belief systems, offers a framework that is not only cognitive and historical, but also moral and existential. It tells you not only where you come in, but also who you are and how you are to orient yourself toward others and the world. In other words, it offers purpose and direction.

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I am not suggesting colleges should play that role. They should play a better one: instead of telling students what to think and how to live, equipping them to work those questions through for themselves. But that’s a mission institutions long ago abandoned. It’s too hard; it requires professors to see themselves as mentors, with all the commitment of time and energy and feeling that entails; and it implies a level of self-confidence, a willingness to confront students with the idea that their education ought to be about something more than becoming as wealthy as possible, that colleges and universities no longer have.

In the absence left by that delinquency has flourished the careerism that has come to dominate the American collegiate experience. For many years now, students have told me how empty, how meaningless, their education feels. Which means that wokeism fills a void that’s ethical as well as intellectual. Under its ascendancy, campuses are once again alive with moral zeal.

In telling students what to think, wokeism also provides them with something to say. The value of this should not be underestimated, particularly in the age of social media. Having opinions — easily, instantly, on everything — is essential to the contemporary presentation of the self. The process of forming them is aided immensely if you already know where you’re supposed to stand on every subject, including ones you haven’t heard of yet.

Of course, college students have always been champion spouters. But there are some crucial differences today. The most important fact about the alternative intellectual frameworks I enumerated earlier — Marxism, Freudianism, and so forth — is that they existed not in series but simultaneously. They were ideologies, but they were competing ideologies. Indeed, they each represented a menagerie of mutually competing sub-ideologies: Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Marxist humanism; the schools of Jung and Reich as well as Freud; the rival strains of second-wave feminism.

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Which meant that students couldn’t just believe: they had to debate, had to read the sources, had to know what they were talking about. Debate and contention were pretty much what it meant to be a college student, at least at the schools and in the circles that took themselves seriously. So while wokeism represents a reemergence, after many years of intellectual prostration (on campus as in public life), of ideas and ideology, it does so on very different terms. With wokeism, there is no debate. There are no competing ideologies or rival schools. There isn’t even much of any reading, from what I can tell. There is only assent.

Another thing is different now, as well. Professors are different. No longer do they see their role as challenging students’ unexamined convictions — of scraping the stupid off their brains, as the documentarian Rob Montz has put it. The old salutary adversarialism has been replaced by an insidious alignment of views. Students and professors now are social justice warriors together, marching in lockstep, wreathed in clouds of self-congratulation, for the one true cause.

But this is really no surprise. Wokeism, as a bundle of intellectual tendencies, began in the academy. Decades on — academics being great conformists — dissent has largely been bred out. Meanwhile, leftist professors (that is, most of them), ensconced in bureaucratic institutions and the upper middle-class, are desperate to hold onto their self-image as subversives, speaking truth to power (in their monographs), doing battle with the system (that pays their salaries).

Besides, as parents themselves, in most cases — parents in the modern mold — they are allergic to authority, uncomfortable with negativity, and eager to be seen as friends. The degree of student ass-kissing that I’ve observed among professors now is something to behold. The situation, in many respects, is reminiscent of the Sixties: an era of social upheaval, a feeling by the grown-ups that they’re being left behind, a compensatory worship of the young (“these kids are going to save the world”), all tending to stifle the impulse to question or challenge. If you can’t teach ‘em, join ‘em.

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By Park MacDougald

Finally, the schools are different, too. Having searched for decades for a rationale for their existence that is more respectable than training workers for the labour force, they’ve embraced the cause of wokeism as the new institutional mission. We have entered the era of the social-justice college. Schools now bill themselves as places to learn, not to understand the roots of contemporary society or contribute to the stock of human knowledge, but to “change the world.”

And everybody understands that the world means only in one direction. I was speaking with an old friend who works at Columbia. She asked me why we shouldn’t teach our students how to “instrumentalise” the things they learn from us. I said, fine, as long as you’re okay if a student instrumentalises what they learn from you to try to overturn Roe v. Wade. She looked at me in horror; the possibility had clearly never crossed her mind.

I spent some time a couple of years ago at the University of San Diego, a private institution. The campus was adorned with banners bearing slogans such as “Be — The — Change” and “Shape — a better — World”. One young man I met there, one of the few students who seemed intellectually alive, likened them to prayer flags. The faculty member who brought me to campus remarked that schools were in danger of turning themselves into madrassas. The New School university in New York, founded as the New School for Social Research in 1919 at the height of the Red Scare, as a bastion of free intellectual inquiry, now employs a Senior Vice President for Social Justice. From social research to social justice: that pretty much sums up the trajectory.

Is there any real learning still happening at American colleges and universities? Of course there is: in the interstices, the institutional cracks, where it can evade the surveillance of the diversity deanlets and the persecutions of the PC police. It survives behind the doors of the classrooms and in the quiet of the offices of the dwindling minority of true teachers who remember what it looks like and are committed, come what may, to keeping it alive. It persists inside the dorm rooms and the brains of the few recalcitrant students — the real campus subversives — who insist on being individuals, on thinking things through for themselves. May it live to see the end of this new dark age.

A longer version of this essay appeared in the Dutch-English journal Nexus. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged by the author.

Omicron has been detected — and may have first arisen — in Gauteng province, South Africa. There have only been a few hundred cases detected, so it’s hard to say much about it with any real certainty. But it appears to be more transmissible and there are concerns that immunity, whether from vaccination or prior infection, will be less effective against it. There have been, as I write, three cases detected in the UK, and there are real (and justified) fears that we are heading once again into a lockdown Christmas. 

But nonetheless, we have been very lucky.

We mustn’t forget that the virus is constantly mutating. Every time it copies itself, there is a chance that it will make some minor error. Most of those mutations either have no effect or make it less effective at spreading. But every so often one will improve it: perhaps make it harder for the immune system to see, or make the virus quicker at copying itself.

The other new variants, notably Alpha and Delta, had several mutations, but Omicron has dozens: around 50. And 10 of them are on the bits of the “spike” protein on the virus’s surface which bind with our cells — the “receptor binding domains”. Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and former member of SAGE, tells me that these are exactly the kind of mutations which virologists have been expecting and dreading: “It’s biologically plausible that they will drive higher transmission. They’ve been identified before as ones we should be really careful about.”

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So far, it doesn’t sound very lucky. But in one mutation, Omicron has been kind to us. Like Alpha before it, it has a particular mutation, 69-70del, two missing RNA letters in its genome — part of the “S gene” which codes for the spike protein. By happy chance, those missing letters are at one of three places that many PCR tests look at.

What it means is that if a PCR test comes back positive on two out of its three areas — if it has an “S-gene dropout” — then you can be pretty sure you’ve got one of the variants. It means that Alpha last year and now Omicron can be tracked pretty effectively, just with PCR testing: even without sequencing the genomes, you can see where these S-gene dropout results are happening and it’ll give you a good idea of how the variant is spreading.

“It’s a complete gift that the S-gene dropout hits this variant,” says Ewan Birney, the deputy director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. If it didn’t, we would have much less of an idea where Omicron is. (We’ve actually been lucky twice. If Delta hadn’t replaced Alpha, then the S-gene dropout wouldn’t have told us anything, because both the circulating variants would have had it.)

So far, so good. But is the new variant more transmissible and/or more able to bypass our immunity, whether from vaccines or infection? And is it more or less dangerous to people who catch it?

These are hard questions to answer, because at the moment, we only have data from South Africa, and South Africa’s population is tricky to compare with ours. It’s younger, for a start — the median South African is 26-years old, while the median Brit is 40. It’s also much less vaccinated: somewhere around 75% of Britons have been double-jabbed, while barely a quarter have in South Africa (which is, to my surprise, more to do with uptake than supply). It has also had far fewer confirmed cases per capita.

That said, we can make some guesses. When a new variant emerges, it’s difficult to tell whether it has spread because it is better at spreading, or because it happens to have arisen in a convenient place. Imagine a virus which happened to mutate into a new variant in someone who was about to go to a major conference. It might infect hundreds of people and show up all over the country, but it wouldn’t be because it was any more transmissible — it was just that it got lucky.

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With Omicron, this seems unlikely to be the case. Thanks to the S-gene dropout, we can see that it’s spreading faster than you’d expect. Farrar says that “there has been a clear upswing of transmission in Gauteng, which seems to be driven by the variant”. “It probably can outcompete Delta,” says Babak Javid, an immunology lab director at the University of California San Francisco, “although by how much is still up in the air.” 

Is that because it’s better at spreading in general, or because it can evade immunity? So far, we don’t have the data to say for sure. Soon, we’ll start to get results from laboratory studies, and later from epidemiological observations, but Rupert Beale, leader of the Cell Biology of Infection lab at the Crick Institute, thinks it’s “a few weeks before we get useful information, and the other side of Christmas before we know anything definitive”.

But on the plus side, antibodies aren’t the only part of our immune system. We also have T-cells, which are less easily fooled by mutations. To oversimplify, antibodies stop you getting infected in the first place, but T-cells stop you from getting very ill. So Javid and Birney think it is plausible that Omicron will spread quite easily among vaccinated and/or previously infected people, but will be less likely to kill them or make them severely ill.

There has also been speculation that Omicron is inherently less deadly to people with no pre-existing immunity. That’s not impossible, but everyone I spoke to said that any definitive conclusions are premature. “The speculation is extremely uninformed,” says Beale. “We just don’t know until it gets into a more vulnerable population, which sadly it seems it’s likely to. We can hope it’s less pathogenic, but it’s foolish to make that assumption.”

So it might be better at spreading, and able to escape our immunity to at least some degree; and while it’s theoretically possible it might be less deadly, that’s certainly not a proposition we want to put any weight on. The question is: what should we do, and are we facing a second bleak Covid winter?

The pandemic should have taught us that acting early is usually better than acting late, and that preparing for worst-case scenarios is important. It’s like chess, says Beale: “You play your moves in the most flexible order.” If we assume it’ll all be OK, we might be right, but if we’re wrong, we’ll end up with Omicron spreading all over the place. Whereas if we assume it’ll be pretty bad, we can always open up again later on.

I’ve seen a lot of people, some of them very sensible, suggesting that there’s no point closing borders to South Africa because variants will get through anyway, and that it’s just punishing countries for doing good surveillance. But I think they are wrong. 

Yes, the variant will get through, if it hasn’t already. Farrar points out that it was first identified on 11 November, and its sequence suggests that it had already been circulating for some time before then. “I think it may already be on every continent,” he says. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no point in trying to reduce its spread. “Border closures might buy you a little time.” Birney agrees: “Shutting the borders until we understand it, minimising the seeding events, is a good rational move.”

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It’s true that there’s a risk of punishing countries for responsible surveillance, but I don’t see what the alternative is — pretending that they don’t have lots of Omicron circulating? Perhaps the thing to do is also put restrictions on countries with poor surveillance.

Because “buying a little time” might be important. If nothing else, it gives us time to understand it: if Omicron is highly virulent and vaccine-resistant, then our best response will be rather different to what it would be if it isn’t. It also gives us a chance to get more boosters in arms and to stockpile antiviral drugs. 

All the same arguments apply to other non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as introducing vaccine passports or asking people to work from home if possible. But there are other things Britain can do, too. 

One thing is to hugely increase our vaccine manufacturing capacity — something which would be good for us and for the world. Rolling out children’s vaccines and booster jabs faster wouldn’t hurt. One scientist I spoke to suggested making antiviral meds available by post when people get a positive result: “They need to be given quickly to have a good effect, so you can’t rely on GP appointments. You need to link them to Track & Trace”. Cheaper, quicker PCR testing at airports would help.”

But while those measures are important, they’re not addressing the root of the issue. For Farrar, the emergence of Omicron is just another reminder that we need to vaccinate the world, not just the rich world. “There’s been political drift for months now, in terms of access to vaccines,” he said. “The rich world thought it was over, so they’ve been kicking it into the long grass.” Variants like Omicron will continue to arise until the world has a decent level of immunity.

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We’ve been lucky, with Omicron. But it may well still end up becoming the dominant strain, just as Delta did before it. If it doesn’t, then another one will come along. And it will be “incredibly disruptive”, says Farrar: “Everyone’s putting restrictions in.” Certainly, to avoid another lockdown Christmas, we need to act now.

But if we want to be sure we don’t have another one next year, we need to get this pandemic behind us — and that means billions more doses of vaccine, distributed around the world. We won’t always be so lucky.