Education's AI Panic Finds Its Word: 'Crisis'

Institutional language moves slowly until it moves all at once. The word 'crisis' reached escape velocity this week across education coverage — in Times Higher Education on South Korea's assessment failures ^[3], in Fortune on cognitive decline ^[2], in the Times on proctoring ^[4] — and its sudden ubiquity is itself an analytical signal. When outlets that rarely share vocabulary land on the same term simultaneously, it usually means the term is doing political work: naming the emergency while deferring the harder question of what produced it.