A Day in Class With Plato, the Melania Trump–Mandated Robot Teacher
Plato had just downloaded another update and was refusing to teach us math until we upgraded to a Be Best Platinum subscription, so we were left to our own devices. This was how our class spent most of its time. With the Be Best Basic plan, which was all that our school district could afford, we didn’t get very much instruction, mostly ads. Plato had been trying to sell us razors for the past three weeks, possibly because it had heard someone ask about Occam’s razor, but more likely because it had access to our data and understood that as tenth graders, we were entering the razor market. (This was when Plato was awake, which was more and more seldom due to the rolling blackouts.)
Every classroom had a Plato in it—that had been Melania Trump’s vision. Plato was a humanoid-robot instructor powered by AI, the only kind of instructor our school had had for as long as any of us could remember. Except for Gregory, the Oldest Student. Gregory had been here for more than a decade; he had never been able to learn quite enough to graduate, but he was getting pretty good at football.
Each morning, we gathered around whatever screen was functional and connected to the internet to watch Melania’s triumphant speech from March 25, 2026, when she had first laid out this future. How beautiful she looked, marching on a red carpet side by side with a robot! It was interesting to see this early-model humanoid, which had performed household tasks (fetching towels and groceries, serving champagne) before such tasks had been forcibly reassigned to women, a much more just system that freed us boys up to achieve greatness better.
Today, the functional screen was Timothy’s phone, and we gathered around it to watch the video. There, on the cracked display, we saw her: Melania Trump, Our Lady Benefactress, whose dream we were now embodying. We recited along with her, “Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato. Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous: literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics, and history. Humanity’s entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home. Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student. Plato is always patient and always available. Predictably, our children will develop deeper critical-thinking and independent-reasoning abilities. The AI-powered Plato will boost analytical skills and problem-solving and adapt in real time to a student’s pace, prior knowledge, and even emotional state. The by-product: a more well-rounded lifestyle for our children, freeing up time for being with friends, playing sports, and developing interests beyond school. A more complete person.”
Timothy snickered; Plato flickered to life and zapped him with its rear-mounted stun cannon. Despite being shut down for teaching, Plato was always listening. Timothy started to cry, and Plato zapped him again. “Be best,” we urged him. “Come on, Tim. Be best.” He kept crying, and Plato kept zapping him. It was difficult to be best under these circumstances. In moments like these, I sometimes wondered whether I really was becoming a more complete person with more time for hobbies. But I tried not to wonder it too loudly in case Plato could hear.
The budget cuts had hit our classroom hard. Math was off the table. Also, our trial version of American History had expired, so we were able to access only events from the New Golden Age (2016 to the present, with an illegitimate four-year interregnum from 2021 to 2025). We knew that everything before that was the Dark Age anyhow, and besides, nobody expected to need any of this information in the future. We would never have jobs that required it. It was already a mark against us that we were in this classroom at all during what our state governor described as our “peak earning years, when the fingers are nimblest and the body best sized for crawling into narrow-gauge tubes.” But he still let us enroll.
Once, on a rainy Tuesday, when Plato was downloading another system update, we asked Gregory what it had been like to have a human instructor.
“Good,” Gregory said. “Better.”
“Better at delivering utility?” we asked. “Did she adapt in real time to our pace, prior knowledge, and even emotional state?”
“Yeah,” Gregory said. “Obviously, and way better.”
“But it was so expensive,” Lars said uncertainly. “And wasteful, and sometimes she might have said Untruths.”
Gregory squinted off into the distance as if trying to read something written very far away.
“Not wasteful. She bought all the supplies herself. She knew my name. She knew everyone’s name. She spelled strawberry the same way every time. And she loved to teach.”
We didn’t believe him. Lars called him a liar; he had downloaded MyPillow News Network’s Authorized History of the Greater United States and Canada-Greenland audiobook, and now he hit “Play” (none of us could read; we needed Be Best Platinum for that). The voice on Lars’s tablet insisted that teaching was one of the most obvious tasks to delegate to humanoids. Human instructors had been famously unable to adapt to the needs of students, and they had demanded compensation in the form of apples. (None of us had ever seen an apple; Gregory claimed that he had once seen one before the Low-Protein Purges had eliminated all foods not blessed to contain enough of the One True Source of Health. He claimed that it was like a medicine ball, but much smaller and lighter, and you could eat it.)
Human teachers, Lars’s audiobook said, had lived in luxury, constantly demanding more and more items on so-called Amazon Wish Lists, wasting all of their income on such absurd luxuries as “human food” and “shelter” and “student-loan debt.” Also, sometimes they had disagreed with the things the State had wanted them to teach. Sometimes they had wanted their students to read books. Plato briefly stirred to life to announce that there had never been such a thing as a Department of Education, then shut back down. This made Gregory say that he remembered being told that there had been one, before the Golden Age.
I went out and shoveled more coal into the Mandatory-Greatness Fuel Burner to see whether the extra power would help wake Plato up again, but it didn’t. The classroom was very hot and had a foul odor, a thick, pungent coal smell that we had been told to associate with freedom. Timothy, after consulting briefly with the rest of the class, put a rare Donald Coin (the big, golden one that showed the president glowering from behind a desk) into the provided slot on Plato, and the humanoid perked up briefly, swiveling its head from side to side and playing another ad for razors. Then it went back to sleep. Lars asked it to grade our worksheets from three weeks prior, but it didn’t seem to hear him.
There was not much else we could do. They had replaced our district’s superintendent with a Plato three years ago, and it was on the Be Best Basic plan too. We played games on our phones in the meantime, and waited. Sometimes we took tests, but how we did on them never seemed to matter—whenever we got more funding, Team Be Best just increased the price of the subscriptions. Be Best Platinum classrooms were better, and Gregory had heard that sometimes they had a real human-teacher substitute when the Platos went offline for repairs, but Lars said that he was lying. Humanoid-AI instruction was the way of the future. Melania had said so, and she was always right.