Division Economy

Student — Aiden, Sec 3

Aiden wakes to a cracked phone buzzing with three notifications: his gig-learning app, a class splinter group trading AI-generated summaries, and a safety alert about a fight outside the mall. He scrolls past ads tailored to his anxiety — boost your grades in 48 hours — and starts the day with a pit in his stomach. The school’s network is patchy and half the devices in his class run old operating systems, so teachers tell them to learn to be resilient. He likes science, but the lesson plans lately feel like digital policing: phishing drills, misinformation quizzes, endless reminders to report suspicious content. Learning to distrust, more than to understand.

Parent — Nurul

She is up before Aiden to get the rice on and check whether the tuition centre’s refund came through. It did not. The chat group where six parents are chasing the same refund has turned on itself overnight, and two of them are now accusing each other of working for the centre.

Teacher — Mr Koh, Humanities

Mr Koh gets in early to print. The department budget covers colour for assessment materials only, so his source comparison goes out in grey, which matters more than it sounds when half the point is that one of the images has been generated.

Stakeholder — Yee, technology vendor

Yee rehearses the pitch in the car park. He has two versions. The first talks about curiosity and takes nine minutes. The second talks about incident reduction and takes four. He has not used the first version since March.

Parent — Nurul

On the bus, Nurul weighs two part-time shifts against the cost of a private verification service that screens Aiden’s assignments for AI use. She cannot tell which services are credible; every platform claims institutional backing. She forwards a link to the school’s cyber-wellness talk to her parenting chat, where someone immediately calls it propaganda. The thread erupts. Nurul mutters a prayer — please let school be calm today — and steels herself for another evening of moderating Aiden’s online storms.

Teacher — Mr Koh, Humanities

He greets students at the door while the corridor speakers play a sterile jingle about digital hygiene. Mr Koh used to love long debates. Now the learning platform flags potentially polarising phrases, so his discussions must stay within community-safe bounds. He understands why — parents complain when comments go viral — but the guardrails flatten nuance. Today’s plan is a compressed unit on media literacy: identify logical fallacies, assess source credibility. He knows the irony; half the sources are AI fabrications circulating faster than corrections. Aiden’s hand hovers in the air, then drops. Mr Koh marks another tally in his private notebook: missed chances.

Policy HQ — Shu Wen, policy officer

The morning starts with three media queries about a viral clip of a classroom argument, filmed by a student, stripped of context, and now at two million views. Two of the queries ask what action will be taken against the teacher. None asks what the argument was about.

Student — Aiden, Sec 3

Assembly is a twenty-minute segment on reporting harmful content, delivered by a video that has been played every term for three years. Aiden knows the script well enough to mouth it. Behind him someone is livestreaming the assembly to mock it, which is roughly the same activity in the opposite direction.

Stakeholder — Yee, technology vendor

At a coffee shop, Yee pitches EngageScore, a lightweight app that uses keyboard and camera signals to forecast student disengagement. Schools love the dashboard; teachers hate the extra admin. He ends the pitch with a practised line: “We can’t fix polarisation, but we can measure it.” The principal nods wearily. There is a budget for digital safety, not for curiosity. Yee believes in early-warning systems; he also knows the product nudges schools toward a surveillance posture. The cheque clears anyway.

Teacher — Mr Koh, Humanities

Free period, spent not planning. A parent has emailed to ask what political position he holds, having heard from her son that he described a source as unreliable. He drafts three replies. He sends the shortest, which says nothing, and files a copy in case it is needed later.

Parent — Nurul

On shift, she watches a colleague get let go by notification — the scheduling algorithm reallocated her hours to someone with a higher reliability score after two cancelled shifts, both for her mother’s hospital appointments. There is an appeals form. Nobody in the break room has heard of it working.

Policy HQ — Shu Wen, policy officer

She reads the trust survey’s free-text field, which is the only part she trusts. Teachers write about time. Parents write about not knowing what is true. Students write, over and over, in different words, that nobody at school ever asks them anything they do not already have a form to answer.

Student — Aiden

The class splits into two: those with working tablets, and those waiting in line to borrow from the library. On his borrowed device the pop-ups lag and the camera blinks. The assignment is to compare two articles about coastal reclamation. Aiden’s group uses an AI fact-checker, which returns conflicting verdicts. They argue. The loudest voice wins. When the bell rings he has learned one thing: certainty is a performance, not a search.

Stakeholder — Yee, technology vendor

A support call. A school is using the disengagement flags for attendance enforcement rather than pastoral follow-up, which is outside the intended use and inside the terms of service. Yee explains the intended use. The head of department thanks him and does not change anything.

Teacher — Mr Koh, Humanities

The lesson goes well for eleven minutes. A student asks whether the reclamation article is lying or just wrong, which is the exact question the unit exists for. Mr Koh gets two sentences into the answer before the platform flags his phrasing, and the class watches him watch the flag.

Policy HQ — Shu Wen, policy officer

In a glass meeting room, Shu Wen reviews a heat map of student trust indicators. The red patches cluster in rental flat zones. She knows the data is noisy — schools report different metrics — but the trend is real. Her inbox bulges with pilot requests: trauma-informed pedagogy, micro-credential repair, community learning hubs. Budgets are tight. She drafts a circular telling schools to prioritise basic literacies, online safety, and structured routines. It is not the vision she imagined when she joined the service, yet the ground wants guardrails. She adds one line, quietly: schools may allocate up to 20 per cent of hours to inquiry-based projects with community partners. She hopes principals notice.

Student — Aiden, Sec 3

Lunch. His group ranks teachers by how easy they are to derail, which is a status game and also, Aiden half-notices, a map of who has given up. Mr Koh is near the bottom of the list. Someone says it like an insult. Aiden does not agree out loud.

Parent — Nurul

Lunch at the hawker centre. Nurul reads an article claiming national exams will soon accept AI-assisted essays. Another link says AI will be banned altogether. Both pieces cite insiders. She feels yanked between cynicism and hope. She texts Aiden to ask how school is. He replies with a picture of a dumpster fire. She laughs, then deletes the chat in case it is leaked.

Stakeholder — Yee, technology vendor

He turns down a request to add sentiment scoring of student writing. Not on principle — the model is not good enough and a false positive would end someone’s year. He notes that he reached the right answer through liability rather than ethics, and that the answer is the same either way.

Teacher — Mr Koh

The discipline case lands on his desk: online harassment between two cliques. He turns counsellor, technical support, and detective. The school’s new policy requires him to collect screenshots and log every intervention into the incident tracker. He spends planning time writing incident codes instead of lesson hooks. At dismissal a girl lingers to ask about internships in social work. He wants to say, we need you. He settles for, “Let’s find you a mentor.”

Policy HQ — Shu Wen, policy officer

A cross-agency meeting about the viral clip. The proposals are a communications response, a device policy, and a reminder circular. Shu Wen asks what the argument in the clip was about. Nobody has watched past the first fifteen seconds. She watches it that evening; it was about whether history is written by winners.

Parent — Nurul

Between shifts she finally reads the verification service’s terms. It retains submitted work for model training for seven years. She closes the tab and does the calculation she has been avoiding: the service costs a shift and a half a month, and she cannot tell whether it does anything at all.

Student — Aiden, Sec 3

He stays back to use the library computers because the assignment needs a browser his phone cannot run. Twenty minutes in, the filter blocks the archive he needs as an unverified source. There is a form to request access. It takes three working days. The assignment is due in two.

Teacher — Mr Koh, Humanities

Department meeting. The agenda is compliance: incident logging rates, cyber-wellness completion, device audit. Somebody raises reading and is told there is no time this week. Mr Koh counts the meetings this term where somebody raised reading and was told there was no time. It is all of them.

Stakeholder — Yee

He attends a community forum on restoring trust. Activists, parents, and a few students debate how platforms profit from outrage. Yee proposes a public-private partnership to embed digital citizenship into platform design: slower share buttons, verified context layers. A teenager scoffs — “You just want to sell us a slower app.” Yee swallows the sting. He believes in doing some good, even for a fee. The forum ends with a fragile consensus to pilot a slow feed for after-school spaces. It is something.

Policy HQ — Shu Wen, policy officer

She calls a principal she trusts and asks what would actually help. The answer takes four seconds: two more bodies and permission to stop logging things nobody reads. Shu Wen writes both down knowing she can deliver neither this year, and that being told the truth still costs the principal something.

Student and parent — Aiden and Nurul

At home their kitchen table is a battlefield of cables and worksheets. They watch a community tutor on a laggy livestream explain algebra slowly, kindly. Aiden’s shoulders drop. He asks a question; the tutor answers with patience that the day did not allow. Nurul messages a thank-you and slips five dollars via e-wallet. She feels the smallest flicker of solidarity.

Stakeholder — Yee, technology vendor

After the forum he sits in the car and does the arithmetic on a slow feed. It would reduce session length by a third. There is no version of the business in which he can sell it to the platforms, and a version — small, grant-funded, unglamorous — in which he could build it for schools directly.

Policy HQ — Shu Wen, policy officer

She rereads her own circular from three months ago and finds it reads as though it were written by someone who had never been in a classroom. It was written by her, at 22:40, from a template. She keeps the file open in another tab for the rest of the evening.

Teacher — Mr Koh, Humanities

At home he opens the notebook and counts. Forty-one tallies this term. He tries to remember what the fortieth was and cannot. He writes, under today’s date, a girl asked about social work, and closes it before he can talk himself out of having written something hopeful.

Parent — Nurul

She cancels the verification service. Then she sits with the fear that this is the decision she will be blamed for if his results go badly, and that there is no one she can ask, because every source she has is selling something or shouting.

Stakeholder — Yee, technology vendor

He drafts the grant application for the slow feed at the kitchen table, and gets as far as the section asking for evidence of impact. There is none, because it does not exist yet. He writes “this proposal seeks to generate that evidence” and knows how that scores.

Policy HQ — Shu Wen

She drafts a speech for the director: “We cannot out-discipline our way to trust.” She proposes three moves — restore community-based learning time, create portable learner portfolios verified by local mentors, and fund civic media labs run with libraries and youth groups. She knows some will call it naive. But when systems fray, sometimes the most radical act is to re-humanise the timetable.

Student — Aiden

He opens the slow-feed pilot on his phone. The app asks him to breathe before posting. He snorts, then breathes anyway. For thirty seconds his outrage quiets. In the gap, curiosity slips in like a stray beam of light.