The U.S. kicked off its war against Iran on February 28 with a ‘double tap’ strike on an elementary girls’ school, Shajareh Tayyebeh, in the city of Minab in southern Iran. At least 170 people, most of them girls aged between seven and 12 years, were killed when bombs rained down on the school.
That set the tone for the onslaught of US and Israel bombings against Iranian educational centers in the weeks ahead. Prior to the “ceasefire” more than 30 other Iranian universities and 763 schools nationwide were reportedly bombed, including Sharif University of Technology, often called the “MIT of Iran,” which was reduced to rubble.
And it’s not just schools, but also libraries (the head of Iran’s public libraries’ association said on April 4 that at least 55 libraries have been damaged), and cultural heritage sites (damage to at least 56 museums, historical monuments, and cultural sites).
This fits a pattern. During the US war against Iraq, educational infrastructure was bombed, as Trump eloquently puts it, back to the Stone Age, and US soldiers helped loot Iraqi museums. In Gaza, Israel has repeatedly targeted educational sites as part of its genocide of Palestinians.
Israel justifies the strikes on Iranian universities by claiming research conducted on campuses contributes to the country’s military. And so the rewriting of the Geneva conventions continues.
Yet even that excuse from Tel Aviv feels incomplete as the US-Israel history of targeting schools and cultural sites reveals broader goals, described by Satya Sagar:
A university is not a weapons depot. It is a place where ideas are formed, debated, contested. It is where a society thinks about itself and its future. To target it – whether directly or through reckless indifference – is to strike at the possibility of thought itself. And to do so while claiming to defend civilization is an inversion so complete it borders on satire.
If the presence of scientific expertise in a country is grounds for suspicion, then the only “safe” world is one in which such expertise is monopolized. If the potential for misuse justifies pre-emptive destruction, then every school becomes a potential target.
It is a logic that, taken seriously, leads to absurdity and, more dangerously, to atrocity.
Perhaps the most unsettling possibility is this: that the fear is not of weapons or “terror”. The US and Israeli elites are fighting a war on parity. A world in which knowledge is widely distributed is a world in which power is less concentrated. It is a world in which narratives can be challenged, technologies developed independently, and cultural influence diversified.
That’s worth remembering as we turn our gaze to how the great American Lords of finance and tech—the same ones lusting after the “trillion dollar opportunity” in Iran—continue to demolish education and attempt to wall off knowledge in the metropole.
Two recent reports from the largest metropolitan centers in the US show how educational opportunities continue to be withdrawn from the vast underclasses.
As homelessness rises among NYC kids, report finds most struggle to make it to school Gothamist
Rising Numbers, Fading Resources: Students Experiencing Homelessness in Los Angeles County UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools
Here’s a snapshot of New York City:
The data shows roughly 154,000 students in the city’s public schools during the 2024-2025 academic year were homeless, meaning they lived in shelters or “doubled up” with other families, marking a record high in a number that’s been climbing for a decade amid the city’s affordability crisis.
The report found 49% of students whose families lived in temporary housing with other family members or friends missed at least one out of every 10 of their school days last year. That rate was even higher for students living in shelters, at 63%.
…Homeless students also lag far behind their peers academically, the new report found, with less than 33% of scoring proficient in reading and 35% in math. That compares to roughly 60%, in each subject, among their classmates in steady housing.
The story is the same on the sunny shores of the Golden state, where in the 2023–24 school year, there were 61,249 students experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County, marking a nearly 30% increase from the previous school year.
Unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer Americans are looking at higher education as worth the astronomical cost when they can’t even afford shelter during the K-12 years.
With Exploding Debt, Higher Ed Less Attractive
The perceived importance of college is at all-time lows in polling.
Why is that?
It’s no longer a near-guaranteed pathway to that illusory “middle class.” A trillion dollars in student loan debt stands as a towering testament to that fact.
In strictly dollars and sense terms, higher education’s declining attractiveness makes sense. Moreso, it’s unfortunate that higher education has largely been turned into a financial training ground rather than a place of reflection, debate, and expanding worldviews.
While working class students increasingly see higher education as too risky of an “investment”, the well-to-do still have the luxury of spending the money and time on such philosophical pursuits—and what they discover might just be newer and more creative ways to screw over the rest of humanity.
Dumbed Down and Upsold
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was born into wealth. He attended the $38,000-per-year private John Burroughs High School in suburban St. Louis. He then went off to the $65,000-per-year Stanford University where he had the luxury of dropping out after two years due to his connections that helped him raise millions to start what they call a “geosocial networking” service.
Altman is now worth billions, and at Blackrock’s US Infrastructure Summit in March he said the following:
“We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter. One of the most important things in the future is that we make intelligence, to borrow an old phrase from the energy industry that didn’t quite work, ‘Too cheap to meter.’”
Now while Artificial Intelligence might be nowhere close to being intelligent, the vision is clear. Make the serfs dependent on it—either because they’ve become dumber by using it, and require it in other ways as a price on being a member of society, i.e., force people to interact with it in educational, medical, social service settings, etc. Here’s Paris Marx on what Altman’s vision heralds:
AI companies are stepping into societies already at war with critical thought to take advantage of and further propel those trends to their own gain.
Sam Altman proposing to literally meter intelligence is just the most egregious proposal of such an anti-human industry. But he is not the only one with a desire to create a world where buying a tech product is a requirement to be fully engaged in society. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to build a society where anyone not wearing his AI-enabled smart glasses is at a disadvantage. In some ways, tech billionaires have already pushed us in that direction. It’s become hard to get by in modern society without a smartphone.
Altman’s slip of the tongue at the Infrastructure Summit give us a bit more insight into how these tech billionaires see the world, and how little humanity features in their visions of the future. They will degrade every aspect of society if they feel it will get them one step closer to the realization of intelligent machines and their science fiction dreams. But every time they reveal more of that vision, they further demonstrate why everyone else must work together to stop them.
I’d replace “intelligent machines and their science fiction dreams” with money and power, but the direction they want to travel is clear. It is the same as what’s occurring in Iran. To circle back to Sagar:
A world in which knowledge is widely distributed is a world in which power is less concentrated.
Poetic Irony
Knowledge, or a lack of, might be the downfall of Altman’s plan to put a meter on it. That’s because AI and financial engineering still can’t make the data centers and their power sources.
These water and energy guzzlers are increasingly turning to gas for power, but there’s a problem. The gas industry is dominated by three manufacturers, Mitsubishi, Siemens, and GE Vernova, and they cannot keep up. Why? A skilled labor shortage.
Mitsubishi Power cannot find workers due to labor shortages in the energy construction sector. Back in 2024 Siemens said it was using AI to overcome labor shortages. That predictably bombed. More from SupplyChain247:
The push to build out AI infrastructure across the U.S. is running into a different kind of constraint. It’s not data or software. It’s people.
New research from Randstad USA shows demand for skilled trade workers is growing much faster than for traditional professional roles, as companies invest in data centers, automation, and modern production facilities.
Between 2022 and 2026, job postings for robotics technicians more than doubled, rising 113%. Demand for HVAC engineers climbed nearly 78%, while industrial automation roles increased 51%. Hiring for electricians, welders, and other general trades also grew about 30%, outpacing the broader job market.
That demand is tied directly to the physical side of supply chains. Warehouses, manufacturing sites, and distribution networks all depend on skilled labor to build, install, and maintain the systems companies are investing in. At the same time, those workers are getting harder to find.
Perhaps they should look in Iran, which has some of the best engineering programs in the world.
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Once again, a sentence summarizes the intent and explains the destructive methods at play:
“A world in which knowledge is widely distributed is a world in which power is less concentrated.”
Concentrating money (CBDC), knowledge, media, seed banks, agricultural land, IPR, etc. The same play everywhere.
As an aside: maybe it is just me, but I have the impression that the long-running reduction in the perceived importance of college paralleled the odd linguistic evolution of the term “student”. In every language (I know of), there is a very clear distinction: students are for higher education institutions (i.e. university), otherwise we talk about schoolboys/schoolgirls, or pupils (e.g. Student vs. Schüler in German) — and that is also how I learned English aeons ago.
When did the term “student” get so devalued in the USA that it applies to primary school pupils — or vice-versa, when did the term schoolboy/schoolgirl get so demeaning that it had to be replaced with “student”?
The author of the article in Gothamist who used student for schoolgirl/boy (even in the headline) might be alone in this practice… or not. I find it interesting and counter-intuitive that the more expensive college education becomes in the US, the more devalued socially. Pri-va-ti-za-tion = cra-pi-fi-ca-tion?
Dating myself, but when I was a child, they called schoolkids in my corner of the US pupils or grade schoolers. There were also kindergarteners and high schoolers. College students could also be undergrads or co-eds. Nobody uses that one anymore.
Growing up I only ever encountered the term co-ed in old comic strips jesting about the idle fantasies of men in the throes of mid-life crisis.
There may be yet another reason. Student is by its very nature genderless. Outlets in lots of places may have an intrinsic fear of using any term that might be attached to a gender. Schoolboy/schoolgirl would by their very nature be problematic. School kids would be too informal.
OTOH most of the teachers I know refer to the pupils in their classes and their schools as students. So it may have become standard usage over time.
As a recovering Canadian educrat (specifically Ontario — education in Canada is a provincial responsibility) it was my experience that pupil and student were interchangeable with the former almost exclusively found in legal and quasi-legal written documents. In discussion the preferred term by a very wide margin was student.
Free education and healthcare in capitalist countries are not the result of government generosity. Rather, they are the result of capitalists shifting the costs of maintaining a healthy, educated workforce onto the government. Because the United States lacks these provisions, its future workforce is likely to be uneducated and unhealthy.
Sometime after WW2 – America outsources its education system to Hollywood and Walt Disney , two generations later the electorate return Mickey Mouth and his mates to government , suprise .
I was very worried about the museums during the ‘shock and awe’ carpet bombing in Iraq, but on a somewhat positive note, it turned out that the staff anticipated the attacks and hid many of the museums’ treasures before they could be looted or destroyed. One hopes something similar happened in Iran recently.
Meanwhile, given the trajectory of this “AI” madness, I will continue to increase my collection of dusty old books published prior to circa 2022 before the clankers got turned on. Sounds like someone might need those one of these days.
I teach students online, and their parents pay very good money for the courses. Honestly, I never knew how much until recently, and I was shocked. Not shocked at the actual cost but that they were paying for their kids who had no desire to learn, only to get the certificate to satisfy their rich parents’ wishes. I know many of these lackluster students will be running companies and governments someday, and then we wonder why we see them make such bad decisions. Education is so critical to functioning societies, which we are surely lacking today.
“These water and energy guzzlers are increasingly turning to gas for power, but there’s a problem. The gas industry is dominated by three manufacturers, Mitsubishi, Siemens, and GE Vernova, and they cannot keep up. Why? A skilled labor shortage.”
As somebody who works in the power generation sector, I can confirm the skilled labor shortage. It’s already causing significant problems where I work, and it’s only going to get worse as the last of the boomer generation retires.
I much prefer the people making the call for these kinds of workers to create a diverse economy that serves the needs of a population with a variety aptitudes, interests, and skills for the long term. Not those just wanting a big increase in numbers to increase competition for wages for a temporary build out of the data center bubble.
the war on parity…..the blueprint redesigned not many generations ago….when escalating material wealth…by the few, legitimized languor in the hedonistic populist.
Recognizing that humanistic knowledge is antithetical to control