(The Epoch Times)—Four out of every ten teenagers are likely to use artificial intelligence (AI) to complete their homework instead of handling their own research and accumulating English and grammar skills, even though the majority know it’s probably wrong. According to a study released by the nonprofit Junior Achievement this summer, 60 percent of the 13-17-year-old teens surveyed viewed their use of AI as cheating. In response, teachers, some tech savvy, some not, are either throwing their hands up without a counter-strategy or are requiring their students to turn in essays that are handwritten with a device some of their students have never used in secondary school or college—pencils.
“The technology will continue to outpace our ability to monitor it. I require my kids to write all their first drafts by hand. Handwriting is the only way. It leads to deeper learning because it creates more neural activity while you’re doing it,” educational consultant, Washington Examiner columnist, and Catholic high school teacher Pete Laffin told The Epoch Times. “What’s the point if we don’t need our kids to learn what’s in a book and how history happens and so what’s the point of having a teacher? I always say we’ll see, but if it’s anything like the effect that using spell check has had on spelling and ChatGPT being exponentially greater, we’re going to be in a dark place very quickly.”
Students have found that typing in a short description of the topic they’re assigned to write about gives them text output in seconds. From developing fictional stories to completing essay assignments, AI tools like ChatGPT can develop quick responses to online queries, drastically cutting down on homework time. These developments have seeped into the classroom much to the chagrin of some school districts now attempting to crack down on the practice.
Some schools have attempted to ban the use of AI tools like ChatGPT in the classroom altogether like the New York City Public Schools did earlier this year, because they’re worried their students were using it to cheat. Several school systems nationwide have made similar decisions, including Milwaukee Public Schools.
“Blue books and pencils, I’m almost there,” Steven Morgan, an English teacher at Orland High School in California, said to The Epoch Times. “My Juniors just finished reading ‘The Crucible’ and had to write a report on it. Out of 55 juniors, about 20 percent used ChatGPT. I could tell right away. I passed out their graded papers and gave failing grades to the ones that did. They said, ‘you caught me.’”
It’s also become a big issue on college campuses, with Stanford University’s student-run newspaper finding that 17 percent admitted to using ChatGPT on assignments and exams in 2022. However, some college professors see positives in students using the new technology in the classroom.
“I think students are a lot more innovative with it and not just to cheat. They’re using AI to get past writer’s block and polishing their emails. I do think they have their own kind of moral sense of what’s appropriate,” said Annette Vee, an associate professor of English and director of the Composition Program at the University of Pittsburgh. “Right now, we’re in a bubble of AI. There’s some over-embracing of it that’s going to turn some people off, but there’s going to be a course correction. At this point, a wholesale ban of it is untenable,” she told The Epoch Times.
Peter King of AI Product Reviews reported this month an eye-popping 408 percent increase in Google searches by students looking online for AI technology help. By reviewing Google trends, he found that Hawaii and Rhode Island were the top states for these searches nationwide, with Georgia a close second. While lauding students’ creativity, King also wondered about the complex challenges teachers are now dealing with. “AI essay writers offer the allure of an easy and quick way for students to complete their assignments, posing a growing challenge for professors and educators nationwide who are grappling with maintaining academic integrity and effective learning experiences.”
One thing that’s certain is that the emergence of AI at all levels of academia is causing educators to come up with collaborative solutions. Tom St. Antoine, professor of Communications at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida, told The Epoch Times that his fellow faculty members are now meeting monthly to discuss how AI has impacted their classrooms.
“We’re discussing capabilities and sharing sample papers and how to use it [AI] positively, rather than talking about how bad and scary it is. But we feel that even using AI for brainstorming ideas or finding new sources during the research stage is a disservice to students as the information an AI chatbot can find is not always relevant, original, accurate, or even real. Technology, even in its most advanced forms, is not human.”
In the Junior Achievement study, when asked why students would use AI to do their schoolwork for them, the top responses were that AI is just another tool (62 percent), they didn’t like school or schoolwork (24 percent), they wouldn’t need to know the information because of AI (22 percent) or because everybody else is doing it (22 percent). Mr. Laffin believes, from his classroom experience, that AI can contribute to robbing students of a real and necessary educational experience.
“The problem is they don’t learn things. I’m less concerned with the cheating aspect than the kids cheating themselves in actually learning how things work. I was teaching a fifth grader and the kid looked at me and said, ‘Why would I even need to know where commas go?’ I just looked at him. My tongue was tied.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.