In 1995, Neil Postman published a book with a Janus-faced title. The End of Education meant two things at once: that schooling as we knew it was coming to an end, and that schooling had lost its ends — its purposes, its reasons, its gods. He argued that a school without a transcendent narrative is not a school at all. It is a holding pen with a curriculum. Thirty-one years later, the holding pen has Wi-Fi, and every student carries in their pocket a machine that can do their homework, write their essays, and answer every question on the test — while understanding none of it. Postman did not live to see the smartphone classroom or the chatbot term paper. He died in 2003. But he described, with surgical precision, the spiritual machinery that would make those things not just possible but inevitable. He told us which gods we were w ...