Teaching Through an Occupation

An American High School English Teacher’s Reflections on the Fourth of July, 2026

A memory from this past school year, a brutal one, recurs often. It was at the tail end of what the Trump administration euphemistically referred to as “Operation Metro Surge”—a moment when more than 2,000 masked agents occupied Minneapolis, Saint Paul and surrounding areas in Minnesota. As in recent past American “surges” (read invasions) of enemy territories, this was poorly conceived, incited violence and resistance from the occupied people, and confirmed the moral bankruptcy of the imperial leadership.

I’d like to highlight at the beginning of this essay an aspect of the occupation (I won’t use the word “surge” again) that many Americans don’t seem to know about this episode—or perhaps do but simply gloss over. That is, when ICE agents occupied Minneapolis and Saint Paul, they specifically targeted schools and bus stops as areas to locate undocumented immigrants. Because of this targeting, a number of schools—mine included—pivoted to online or “hybrid” learning as during the pandemic, in order to protect the safety of students. At the height of the ICE occupation here, this meant that half of the 12^th graders that I taught were attending class online, on a Microsoft Teams call, instead of in the building with their classmates.

I write these recent memories out as prologue partly to jar the senses of any 250th anniversary-fourth of July celebrating American readers out there in Substack-land, but also to remind myself of what actually happened this year. We schoolteachers are famous (infamous?) for forgetting over the summer what has transpired during the past 9-10 months. While I would wish to forget the 2025-2026 school year, I know it is vital for me to commit this one to memory, to learn its lessons in my bones.

One key lesson: State violence, imposed by the government of this country on its citizens, served to reduce, foreshorten, and in some cases make impossible teaching and learning for young people most in need of education. Another: A good portion of this country’s population doesn’t give a damn.

But to the memory. In the midst of this collective and national madness (and no, we have not emerged from it) some of the students I taught attended school in person on a Friday in January, 2026. This was the 16^th—middle of the month: A little more than a week after Renee Good was murdered, a little more than a week before Alex Pretti would be. Because of the idiosyncratic nature of our school’s calendar, the day was not a “regular” academic one for our 12^th graders. (As if anything was “regular” at this point.) And so teachers of various classes had different one-off lessons and plans for the students who came in person, while the students who chose not to attend, as I recall, were excused the absence given the circumstances.

We 12^th grade English and Religion teachers at the school were collaborating on this particular session. We had been spending a good amount of time during the first part of the semester sharing, writing, and trying to spark discussion around issues surrounding AI, specifically AI in education. We’d had students divided up into book clubs related to the topic. The books, which in the main mirrored our skepticism of AI and its omnipresence, were not a hit with the students. For this particular one-off, 100-minute lesson, which we would “team-teach,” we had about 35 of our 80 students present, a few of whom had been reading Karen Hao’s Empire of AI for their book club.

I’d just finished reading Hao’s book myself and had listened to a fascinating, insightful, and funny interview Hao gave on Hasan Minhaj’s podcast. Because we were missing more than half of our students, we decided to make the content of this podcast our “text” for discussion: We broke the 50-minute conversation into two big chunks, had students take notes and write down questions they wanted to discuss as they listened and watched the interview (Minhaj’s podcast is excellent as video as well as audio.) Then we broke them into group groups of 5-7 students and they talked about what they’d heard.

I don’t know what it was—perhaps the intensity of the moment surrounding us, maybe the knowledge everybody had that this discussion was “off the books” (ungraded)—but for whatever reason as I circulated to various of the groups discussing Hao’s and Minhaj’s conversations, I found the discussion more vibrant and alive than anything I’d managed to facilitate during the school year up tot hat point. Students had lots of their own questions and opinions to share. No trickles of conversations—they flowed. And with lots of connections to the present moment.

One of my team teachers for this block, a fellow English teacher, had wandered over to a group that was discussing Hao’s critique of American AI companies making their chatbots “everything machines”—that is, not focused on any particular use or industry—at the same time focused on making their creators very rich, while causing active harm to poor and marginalized folks. The example of building data centers in these communities was given and discussed. Another student noted that he’d learned about the company Palantir and how its AI capabilities were at this moment being used to surveill, monitor, and attempt to deport friends and family members. Some students at the table nodded. Others shrugged their shoulders. A variation of “That’s just how it is, how it always is and will be” was offered by more than one student in response to the Palantir comment.

As I recall, my English team teacher, who has also been my coach for the past three years, interjected at this point with a question. It was something about whether part of the way AI was being deployed had to do with the nature of capitalism in this country. Along the lines of was it possible to do ethical AI production with our consumer capitalist society?

“I don’t think you can be a billionaire and a good person,” one of the students said in response. “In order to make that kind of money, you have to be exploiting people, taking advantage of people.” The nodding and agreement at this opinion was much more vigorous than at the Palantir comment. Then the conversation moved on, as conversations are wont to do. But I remained haunted by this simple, forceful statement of opinion by one of the students I taught.

This student, like so many of his classmates sitting around the discussion table, spent considerable time and energy during the ICE occupation delivering food, running errands, and even financially supporting friends and families who were being targeted by the government’s siege of his city. And from his point of view, he saw clearly what so many responsible for his education could and cannot: The billionaires are not on his side, and never would be.

I spent time in my last two posts critiquing Pope Leo’s decision to platform one of these billionaires, thirty-three year old Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, in the roll-out of his AI encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. There’s not much more I need to say than what I’ve already written in these two essays (in order of appearance, here, and here) I’ll simply add in this post because I don’t think I stated it clearly in the first two that Anthropic’s main product, “Claude,” was built on the stolen labor of millions of writers. Now Anthropic is crying foul because the Trump administration which they have already actively been collaborating with has considered them a “supply chain” and “security” risk. Boo hoo and cry me a river. At the same time, their product is being adopted by Gavin Newsom’s California administration. (Newsom is reportedly gearing up for a presidential run.) Anthropic wants to be the “good guy” of AI and at the same time woven into all of America’s imperial machinery, but in an “ethical way”? Spare me. Spare us all.

You can’t be a billionaire and a good person. On an ethical level, this should be common sense. For readers of the Gospels, the student’s insight rhymes pretty clearly with Jesus’ saying, attested in all of the synoptic gospels: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” And yet, when I write these words out again, I am certain that there are readers of this post who will accuse me of a kind of “class warfare.” But to modify a saying from Becca Good, Renee’s widow, you can’t really have a “war” if one side has guns and the other has whistles.

From my point of view, as a long-time teacher of young people who billionaires (often tech-billionaires) have imposed their products and services on as a kind of charity (but a “charity” that actually further impoverished their educations), the truthfulness of this student’s statement should be obvious. No, of course, you can’t be a billionaire and a good person. And this truth should be in every school administrator’s mind as they consider weaving tech billionaire priorities into their school budgets for the upcoming year.

The millennial generation’s tech-wunderkid-billionaire, Bill Gates, who has now been disgraced through his association with Jeffrey Epstein, famously pumped many billions of dollars into schools, specifically schools like the ones I’ve taught at for most of my career, ostensibly to help prepare our next generation for the “21^st Century.” One-to-one laptops and personalized education were a few of Gates’ and his foundations’ initiatives. Significantly, Gates and his money were also attached significantly to a good number of the “ed reformers” of the last thirty years. For all of Gates’ money and his “beneficiaries” getting computers plopped into their laps and other assorted ed-tech products plugged into their classrooms, the divide between what it means for a rich kid to get a quality education and what it means for a poor kid to get one has only widened. The Exeter kids out east get Harkness table discussions and the kids at poorly funded schools in the city get bots. As the good book says, nothing changes under the sun. But please, let’s not call this “progress in educational equality.” As my wife will often tell me, “sometimes ‘helping’ is not helping.”

And now, for my contribution to President Trump’s 250^th anniversary celebration of America.

At the same time that I’ve been working on this essay (or diatribe? I’m not sure), New York Times’ resident right-wing whisperer Ezra Klein has interviewed Chris Rufo, a political strategist who has been influential both for his educational policy advice, as well as his investigative “reporting” on immigration policy in this country. There is, in my mind, a pretty clear line between Rufo’s stated aim to obliterate public schools as they stand by undermining their credibility with the public (“laying siege to public institutions”) and the current censored and precarious state of so many of our public educational institutions. There is also a pretty clear line between Rufo’s published writing on fraud in Minneapolis—which he asserted, without evidence, was funding terrorist organizations in Somalia—and the violence and terror which descended on Minnesota in the form of the 2025-2026 Ice Occupation.

I credit Ezra Klein with confronting Rufo with the facts of his writing and social media activity regarding Minnesota in this interview. And Rufo’s lack of contrition or repentance for words that have caused and continue to cause real harm, up to and including death, is notable. (I use these old-fashioned words “contrition” and “repentance” consciously; Rufo, like me, is Catholic). I challenge other conservative-minded readers of this essay (especially conservative-minded readers of the Catholic or Christian persuasion) to go and do like Ezra Klein in this interview, with others in their lives like Rufo, who are able to shrug their shoulders at murder and terror.

I wrote a few paragraphs above about education in this country, “The Exeter kids get Harkness tables; the kids at poorly funded schools in the city get bots.” But actually, that one-liner forgets a more significant educational initiative in this country, one that Rufo is actively involved in, the “Classical Schools” movement. It is significant that at the same time that Rufo and his ilk have worked to hollow out funding and support for public education, from kindergarten to the twenty-second grade, they are championing this “Classical Schools” model, which, among other things, gets students to read ancient texts carefully and talk about them around the seminar table.

As I’ve written before, this topic hits home for me on a personal level. My high school alma mater, Saint Agnes, this May was just awarded a $40,000 grant from Hillsdale College (where Rufo made his “laying siege to public institutions” speech in 2022) for its excellence in exhibiting “classical school” virtues: “they read the Great Books, discover the order of the cosmos through mathematics, hone their attention in drawing, study Latin, learn logical thinking skills, perform onstage, engage primary sources in history, unite faith and reason in the science lab, and participate in Socratic seminar discussions.” And my college alma mater, University of Dallas, announced itself as the first university to award college credit for scores on the Classic Learning Test. UD’s president, Jonathan Sanford, who notably teaches philosophy as well as acts as the university’s chief administrator, has rightly noted in multiple places how AI cannot do what teachers and students do: reason, think, and discern. And, as I’ve written here elsewhere, I don’t think anyone thinks teachers in “Classical Schools” are in danger of being replaced by bots. But teachers in public schools or non-Classical private ones (especially in low-income schools) are vulnerable to being replaced in precisely that way.

Discussions about AI in this country should be discussions about labor, and Catholic conservatives should be bringing their Catholic-informed opinions about labor into those discussions. (Start with Pope Leo XIII and his Rerum Novarum, bring in John Paul II in Laborem Exercens and go all the way forward to the current pontiff’s Magnifica Humanitas.) For leaders like Dr. Sanford, who are aiming to shape the “public virtue” of its graduates, I challenge them to talk back to the Machiavellians in their midst like Rufo, who as I’ve mentioned before, is an advisor on the Classical Learning Test board. Maybe a little less talk about the “soul” that AI can’t replace, and the flesh-and-blood human beings that bosses and administrators are replacing? At present, the “Classical Schools” movement with its relentless quest for its own institutional growth, and at the expense of public schools and colleges, is only serving to deepen educational divides in this country. The rapid adoption of AI in public schools, which the Trump administration is pushing, will only exacerbate the divide. Yes, you can think about more than one thing at once. Yes, you can consider more than the welfare of your “own.”

As old John Donne, that bard I’ve talked about at more than one seminar table in my time at a classical school, has preached in his meditation 17: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”

There is much diminishment, much reduction, afoot for those whose educations have already been diminished and reduced. For those whose already-enriched educations seem to be getting even better and richer, I’d challenge you to hear the “bell tolling” and consider that it is also tolling for you. As the poet says, any person’s death diminishes you. And the further impoverishment of the poor and their educations impoverishes you, too. You are, in that perfect word of the poet, unavoidably, involved.

---

NOTES:

-If you want to read the full text of the “erasure” I created from the mashup of the words of Chris Rufo and Thomas Jefferson, check out the video and Youtube notes here, originally published in 2022.

-I highly recommend Vinson Cunningham’s New Yorker essay, “What Thomas Jefferson Could Never Understand About Jesus” as ideal fourth of July reading. And my own poem wouldn’t exist without Cunningham’s piece.