Last week, I wrote about why the world is rethinking America.
Not as a protest, and not as a rejection, but as a recalculation — driven by a growing sense that the systems once assumed to be predictable are becoming harder to trust.
Once people accept that background systems are fraying — whether in the U.S. or elsewhere — the next question isn’t political.
It’s practical.
For most of modern history, much of the work that made society feel navigable happened quietly, in the background.
Institutions — by which I do not mean schools or universities, but the legal, civic, economic, and administrative systems that governed how power moved, how decisions were made, and how risk was absorbed without demanding constant attention — did unglamorous work.
They buffered uncertainty.
They constrained authority.
They slowed decisions long enough for judgment to matter.
Due process. Appeals. Norms. Professional distance. Institutional memory.
These were not moral luxuries. They were structural protections. They allowed people to invest time, talent, and ambition with a reasonable expectation that effort would be met with process, not whim.
Education could therefore focus on advancement — knowledge, skills, credentials. Learning prepared people to move within a world whose rules, while imperfect, were broadly predictable. You did not need to teach people how to navigate institutional failure because institutional failure was assumed to be the exception, not the baseline.
That assumption is no longer safe.
Across the world, the systems that once absorbed risk quietly are fraying visibly. Different countries, different politics, same experience. Rules that once translated effort into outcome now feel uneven or opaque. Processes that once restrained power increasingly feel discretionary. Guarantees that once anchored long-term decisions feel provisional, conditional, or revocable.
This is not collapse. It is something quieter — and more dangerous.
It is the erosion of predictability.
When background systems stop holding, people need to be taught how to operate without them.
And increasingly, that burden is landing on education.
Not because education was designed for this role.
But because it is the last institution that still reaches people early enough to prepare them for what the systems around them no longer reliably provide.
When Systems Fray, Behavior Changes First
This shift is often misunderstood.
When institutions weaken, people do not immediately revolt. They adapt. They hedge. They quietly re-evaluate where to place their trust, effort, and ambition.
This pattern is visible globally — in democracies and non-democracies alike. What differs is not the response, but how visible the signals become. In some places the recalibration is muted. In others, especially those that once exported confidence, it is broadcast widely.
This is not a generational trait. It is a human one.
Young people simply reveal it earlier because they are less anchored to sunk costs and inherited narratives. They are early indicators, not anomalies.
When belief in the conversion mechanism weakens — when effort no longer reliably maps to outcome — ambition does not disappear. It relocates.
AI Makes This Burden Heavier, Not Lighter
At the same time, artificial intelligence is accelerating decision-making everywhere.
Hiring. Lending. Policing. Admissions. Content moderation. Governance.
Decisions that once moved through human judgment, institutional friction, and appeal now move faster, flatter, and further than the systems designed to oversee them.
There is a temptation to treat AI as a solution to institutional strain. Faster decisions. Better data. Fewer humans in the loop.
That temptation is dangerous.
AI removes friction at precisely the moment friction is most needed. It optimizes without judgment. It scales patterns without values. It accelerates decisions without absorbing responsibility.
When systems are healthy, AI can enhance efficiency.
When systems are fragile, AI amplifies incoherence.
Education is now being asked to prepare people not just to use powerful tools, but to live inside accelerated systems that are no longer reliably constrained by process.
That is not a technical challenge.
It is a civic one.
What Education Is Now Being Asked to Protect
Globally, education is being forced to protect capacities that systems once carried implicitly.
Judgment over information.
Agency without guarantees.
Process awareness in environments where rules blur.
Moral clarity without panic or nostalgia.
These are not “soft skills.” They are survival capacities in unstable systems.
And this is where the strain becomes visible.
Education was built to prepare people for opportunity within functioning systems — not to teach people how to operate when those systems fray. And yet that is precisely what it is now being asked to do.
Not temporarily.
Systemically.
What Education Cannot Carry Forever
Education cannot indefinitely compensate for institutional failure.
It cannot replace governance.
It cannot absorb the moral weight of broken systems.
It cannot be the last firewall against incoherence while everything else accelerates.
Pretending otherwise is not optimism.
It is abdication.
When we ask education to quietly shoulder this burden without redesigning itself, we turn schools into shock absorbers rather than sites of learning. We praise adaptability while ignoring the conditions that make constant adaptation necessary.
Some see it as resilience. It’s not. It is quiet exhaustion.
The Vacuum Education Is Leaving Behind
There is a deeper problem beneath all of this.
Education is not failing because it lacks the ability to change.
It is failing because, in many places, it is unwilling to.
Redesign would require institutions to question their own relevance, loosen their grip on credential monopolies, and abandon the comforting fiction that incremental reform is enough. So instead, education hesitates.
And when institutions hesitate, vacuums form.
Those vacuums do not remain empty.
They are filled by influencers, platforms, and personalities who offer certainty without rigor, confidence without accountability, and belonging without responsibility. They do not teach judgment. They teach allegiance. They do not make systems legible. They simplify them into villains and slogans.
This is not accidental.
It is the predictable outcome of institutions that retreat from meaning-making while the world becomes harder to interpret.
Neutrality, in moments like this, is not restraint.
It is surrender.
What This Moment Demands
Education can step up. In many places, it already is.
But it must do so honestly.
Not by pretending it can replace the systems that have frayed.
Not by bolting new tools onto old factory models.
And not by remaining neutral while others define reality for the next generation.
Education’s role now is not repair.
It is preparation.
Preparation for judgment without guarantees.
For agency without permission.
For ethical action in systems that no longer reliably restrain power.
Education can build bridges to help people cross unstable ground.
But bridges are not destinations. They are temporary structures built because something underneath is broken.
If education forgets that — if it mistakes adaptation for progress — it will become just another brittle institution producing people fluent in survival, but unprepared to rebuild.
That is the line we are approaching.
And whether education chooses to redesign, or to retreat, will determine who teaches the next generation how to make sense of the world — and to whose benefit.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
