“We Don’t Educate. We Manufacture Compliant Consumers.”

Originally published February 12, 2014

James “Tricky Shotgun” Woods spent eight years teaching high school in both public and private institutions, then followed that with over two decades in higher education. He entered teaching to light minds on fire. Instead, he found himself trapped in an institution built to extinguish sparks. Today, he speaks openly—often brutally—about what’s gone wrong, who’s to blame, and why education as we know it is a long-running con that’s pushing society toward a cliff.

We sat down with Woods to discuss the state of education. The result isn’t a conversation—it’s a controlled detonation.

SFL: You taught high school for eight years, then college for more than twenty. What pushed you out of K–12?

James Woods: It was a combination of incompetence, cowardice, and willful ignorance—served daily by every layer of the system. Parents, teachers, administrators, lawmakers. They all played a part in taking something that should be a crucible for thought and turning it into a customer service center for fragile egos.

I was tired of being expected to pass students who refused to read. Tired of pretending standardized tests measure anything other than obedience. Tired of watching my colleagues spend more time worrying about hallway bulletin boards than whether their students could form a coherent thought.

I got out. I thought maybe at the college level, I could actually do some damage—in a good way.

SFL: So you went to higher education expecting change?

Woods: Expecting? No. Hoping? Yeah. And I was wrong.

College is just a more expensive version of the same problem. You’ve got students who’ve been conditioned for years to mistake compliance for competence. They want A’s for attendance, praise for passivity. They don’t want to think—they want to be told what to say so they can repeat it with confidence.

By the time they land in my classroom, the damage is done. They’re not students. They’re performers. Their only real skill is formatting answers to match expectations.

SFL: You’re saying the system is too far gone?

Woods: I’m saying the system is working exactly as intended. It’s not broken—it’s just serving the wrong goals. It doesn’t produce citizens, or creators, or critics. It produces workers. Consumers. Compliant, manageable, low-friction human capital.

And we pretend this is a public good?

Please.

SFL: Where does the blame sit, in your opinion?

Woods: Everywhere. With everyone.

Parents, who want their kids to be treated like geniuses but act like victims every time little Jimmy gets called out for not turning in work. Teachers, who know damn well what’s going on but would rather protect their pension than their principles. Administrators, who speak in PowerPoint decks and wouldn’t recognize critical thinking if it bit them in the mission statement. Policymakers, who measure “success” by graduation rates and test scores, then wonder why no one can think independently. Professors, who built ivory towers only to rent them out to student loan companies and corporate donors.

We’re all in on the grift. We just lie to ourselves about it in slightly more academic language.

SFL: When you say it’s a “factory,” what do you mean exactly?

Woods: It’s a mass production model. One size fits all. Rows of desks, bells ringing, standardized tests, performance rubrics, empty praise, inflated grades. We don’t teach students. We process them.

You think a student is going to emerge from that with originality? With grit? With the ability to tolerate ambiguity or stand up for a complex idea?

No. They come out nice. Smiling. “Well-rounded.” Clueless.

SFL: And this shows up in the college classroom?

Woods: Every. Damn. Day.

They walk in with the vocabulary of learning—“critical thinking,” “problem solving,” “communication”—but zero capacity to do any of it without a prompt, a deadline, and a backup plan.

Ask a college student to defend an unpopular position, and you’ll get either panic or plagiarism. Ask them to sit in uncertainty for more than 30 seconds, and you might as well be waterboarding them.

They’ve been taught their whole lives that discomfort is abuse and disagreement is disrespect. And then we expect them to innovate?

SFL: What happens if we don’t change course?

Woods: We eat ourselves.

We’ve built a society that’s spiraling toward ecological collapse, political entropy, and economic instability. And into that chaos, we’re injecting generation after generation of mentally underweight, emotionally padded, structurally fragile citizens.

We can’t survive like this. Not when every challenge requires depth, discipline, and confrontation. Not when the real world is indifferent to your GPA and your group project skills.

We are not preparing people to live in the future. We are preparing them to submit to it.

SFL: So what would it take to turn things around?

Woods: Burn it down. Start over. No reform. No tweaks. No new standards or buzzwords or professional development day horseshit.

We need to destroy the idea that school is about safety, comfort, and self-esteem. We need to teach students how to argue, how to reason, how to stand alone, how to lose without breaking, how to win without pandering.

We need to stop grading for obedience and start demanding actual intellectual output.

We need to admit that the 1950s education model doesn’t belong in the 21st century.

And we need to do it now—before it’s too late.

SFL: You sound angry.

Woods: I am. But underneath that, I’m furious. Not just at the system, but at the people who see it failing and do nothing. Who keep playing along because it’s easier than fighting it. Who know this house is on fire and keep rearranging the furniture.

This isn’t about school. It’s about survival.

We’re sleepwalking into extinction—and we’re grading it on a curve.