To the Class of 2026: You Are the Most Capable Class in History

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, gave the 2026 commencement speech at Stanford University on June 14.

**Sundar Pichai**

His message: choose optimism, work on hard things, and do what excites you. Oh, and by the way, “you are the most capable class in history. At least until next year’s class — that’s how progress works.”

He did not say, I have an MS from Stanford University School of Engineering in materials science and engineering and an MBA from the same school that allowed Donald J. Trump to graduate, Wharton School. I was schooled to believe in progress, i.e. that the last 146 years of ever increasingly progressive education (at least until 2017) has schooled the professional-managerial class on how to run the world socioeconomic-political system. Look upon our works, ye Mighty, and despair.

In India (where Pichai was born), you can go to most any university and get a MS or PhD in astrology (Vedic of course, not the false Hellenistic astrology of the West). Everywhere on the planet where the modern educational (schooling) system serves modern techno-industrial monetary society, now global, you can go to most any university and get a PhD in neoliberal economics and maybe come to work to advise CEOs (e.g. Google’s) on how the world economic system works. All the CEOs are so miseducated as to fail to recognized conventional economics as a pretend science.

Prior to the dominance of the progressive liberal schooling system to educate workers to serve the economy and the professional-managerial class to do the same, students could expect to be educated (to endeavor to think well). Today’s professors are on the receiving end of 4 to 5 generations of declining expectations (in the late 19th century, students were still expected to EXCEL/SURPASS their professors — ”Poor is the teacher whose student does not surpass him.” — Leonardo da Vinci). Today’s “teach to the test” generation just wants to know what’s going to be on the test. Expecting them to think well (or at all) is not remotely progressive enough, even if some of their professors as autodidacts had learned how.

Today about 60% of the grades handed out in classes in Harvard University’s undergraduate program are A’s. Now that’s progressive grade inflation. It is now common for top high school graduates to go to top universities and admit to professors that they have never actually read an entire book — just Googled about some books and read excerpts, and so expecting them to, like, read a whole book is like so not for TikToked brains that are far better at taking in hundreds of meme per hour more than the disabled old people.

Sundar Pichai is obviously a highly educated modern human who doesn’t know shit from apple butter. That the class of 2026 is even more dysfunctional than the class of 2025 is clearly impossible for linguistic thinkers to think due to the nature of progress. All properly educated humans know this (until they don’t).

Read Sundar’s address if you can (it took me a couple of days between bouts of near terminal facepalming).

If you’d rather know than believe, read Howard T. Odum’s commencement address to the class of 1978.