Whistleblower Brendan Lyon’s court win clears path to challenge big four liability shield

Former KPMG whistleblower Brendan Lyon has won a court ruling that could expose Australia’s most powerful audit and consulting firms to hundreds of millions in uncapped damages.

PwC was embroiled in a tax leaks scandal three years ago. Picture: Gaye Gerard

A landmark costs ruling handed down by the NSW Supreme Court has cleared the way for former KPMG partner Brendan Lyon to press ahead with a legal challenge to scrap the liability protections enjoyed by Australia’s audit and consulting firms.

The ruling comes after KPMG faced a second grilling in Canberra on Friday over its shocking audit scandal that only came to light when a whistleblower’s allegations were aired under parliamentary privilege. A parliamentary committee heard how KPMG’s partners lied in an internal investigation.

In the past six years, the big four have been hit by rolling scandals involving misusing government and corporate documents to win work, cheating on tests (including an ethics exam) and using artificial intelligence to produce client briefs. 

Mr Lyon says this is partly due to a legal structure that protects partners financially and allows them to operate in the shadows.

The former KPMG whistleblower turned academic won a rare protective costs order before Justice Tim Faulkner that caps Mr Lyon’s adverse costs exposure for the case at $25,000. Chartered Accountants ANZ, which opposed the application, had put its own estimated recoverable costs at between $400,000 and $460,000 – a gap that, absent the order, would have left Mr Lyon exposed to a bill capable of ending his case before it reached trial.

A trial should be heard this year, and if Mr Lyon wins, clients and shareholders could pursue KPMG, EY, PwC and Deloitte for the true, uncapped cost of bad advice delivered by consulting or tax arms currently sheltered by the scheme. The damages potentially run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Bad advice is not as rare as the public might expect. Mr Lyon argues that’s because the big four are not forced to bear the financial consequences of what they deliver. Their liabilities after insurance drop to $1m per firm in most instances, regardless of the scale of damages. That’s a small amount when spread among 700 or so partners.

“In these settings it is entirely rational for a big four partner to accept big fees to overstate asset values or provide risky tax advice now, because any liability is capped to an insignificant amount that won’t usually emerge until years later,” said Mr Lyon.

“Current and recent litigation involving major accounting firms demonstrates that the losses associated with big four advice can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Case in point is Lendlease. The company is fighting a $160m amended tax assessment resulting from an alleged “double-dipping” tax scheme by its retirement villages, built on tax advice from Greenwoods & Herbert Smith Freehills, later absorbed into PwC. 

Not only does Lendlease face a massive tax bill, its shares fell 14 per cent the day it revealed its true liability.

Without a liability cap, Lendlease would have a considerably stronger basis to pursue PwC directly for the assessment, interest and associated costs. Shareholders could consider a class action.

Commonwealth Bank ran into similar trouble after Deloitte advised the bank on $100m of research and development tax concession claims tied to its core banking modernisation project. The ATO challenged the claims, forcing CBA to withdraw its Administrative Appeals Tribunal proceedings and settle.

Separately, EY advised on and modelled transactions intended to generate substantial tax benefits for Gordon Merchant, founder of Billabong. The ATO determined the move to be “asset washing.” Merchant is now suing EY and a former EY tax partner for damages arising from the advice.

Lyon’s case alleges the Professional Standards Council failed to consider mandatory matters when reapproving the Chartered Accountants ANZ scheme, and that the scheme unlawfully extends liability caps to non-accountants providing “category 3” – non-accounting – services. That distinction matters enormously: Category 3 services account for roughly 80 per cent of big four revenue, according to Mr Lyon’s own case materials.

Litigation already under way shows how quickly this could play out. Shareholders in Downer EDI are running a class action in the Supreme Court of Victoria through Maurice Blackburn over alleged accounting irregularities and continuous disclosure failures, and have sued KPMG directly as the company’s auditor. KPMG has filed a defence and cross-claimed against Downer EDI.

Should Mr Lyon’s case succeed, plaintiff firms running that action – and others pursuing big four firms over audit or advisory failures – would gain powerful ammunition to argue liability caps should not apply, or should apply far more narrowly, to non-accountant personnel. Litigation funders are understood to be watching the case closely for precisely this reason.

Chartered Accountants ANZ says that its professional standards scheme “plays a vital role in protecting consumers by ensuring access to insurance-backed compensation when a professional services engagement results in a court-awarded damages claim for loss”. 

In a statement, it went on to say the scheme does not limit liability for damages arising from a breach of trust, fraud or dishonesty. 

“As the proceedings are ongoing it is inappropriate to comment any further,” it wrote.

With costs protection secured, the case likely heads to a hearing, where the Supreme Court will determine for the first time the outer limits of who can be covered by a approved professional standards scheme.

Ombudsman warns ATO over bias in tax process

Bias in tax administration has again come to light, with the Tax Ombudsman giving the ATO quite a rebuke.

In its just-published report of a review of the system, the Tax Ombudsman has warned that unchecked bias in tax administration can have serious consequences for taxpayers.

It has found the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) should do more to manage the risk.

The review was initiated after an investigation into historical allegations of ATO maladministration involving bias and prejudice.

It examined whether the ATO’s current processes, guidance and training prevented bias or prejudice from influencing its decisions, particularly where they can significantly affect a person’s livelihood.

A review of the ATO’s management of a complex and long-running case, along with a follow-up review, considered broader systemic risks of bias or prejudice in the ATO’s decision-making and inappropriate disclosures of taxpayer information.

It examined whether the failings identified in the historic case could occur now and whether the ATO’s current controls were effective in mitigating such risks.

Tax Ombudsman Ruth Owen said the review found that while the ATO had strengthened its controls to improve decision-making in response to weaknesses identified 10 to 15 years ago, there remains plenty of room for improvement.

“The ATO has improved how it makes decisions about taxpayers in recent years; however, this review shows there’s more to be done, particularly by explicitly recognising bias as a risk and strengthening controls so they are embedded in the ATO’s everyday processes,” she said.

“Guarding against bias is not a set-and-forget exercise. It requires ongoing vigilance, regular review, and a willingness to continually challenge assumptions as circumstances, data, and risks evolve.

“The community expects the ATO to act impartially, lawfully, objectively and without bias or prejudice, regardless of a taxpayer’s past behaviour or history.

“The ATO’s decisions must always be based on evidence, applied fairly and regularly checked against the risk of bias.”

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Ms Owen said she was also concerned about the ATO breaking its own rules or processes because it believes it is acting in the public interest.

She said she had heard concerns from taxpayers and tax professionals that once a taxpayer is labelled as “bad” it is difficult for them to remove that label, and this could ultimately undermine public confidence in the ATO’s impartiality.

The review found some of the ATO’s processes were not designed to counter bias, meaning staff were not explicitly prompted to consider the risk of bias in their decision-making and to retain an open mind in considering the facts.

Bias and prejudicial conduct can impact tax administration in many ways, she said. For example, officers may depart from procedures or the law to reach a predetermined outcome because they believe they are acting in a “noble cause”.

Alternatively, investigators can give too much weight to past compliance behaviours instead of looking at current evidence with fresh eyes.

“While bias exists in all organisations, the risk is heightened in teams regularly dealing with non-compliance or suspected wrongdoing,” Ms Owen said.

“Strong bias controls are not about second-guessing ATO officers; they are about protecting people from avoidable harm, supporting good decision-making and maintaining public confidence in the tax system.”

The review has made two recommendations to the ATO:

• Assure itself and the community that its controls against bias and prejudice in compliance and enforcement actions and decision-making are working effectively, and
• Develop and implement a plan to address identified gaps in bias controls, including strengthening explicit bias checks, training, assurance guidance, data and monitoring, and the language used in disclosures.

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Given the nature of the topic that was reviewed and the ombudsman’s specific focus on the ATO’s internal controls, it did not seek broad public input for the review. Instead, it undertook targeted consultation with selected tax professionals and associations.

The ATO has accepted both recommendations.

“The ATO welcomes this report and its contribution to maintaining community confidence in fair, objective and evidence-based tax administration,” Second Commissioner of Taxation, Jeremy Hirschhorn, said in the ATO’s response.

“We recognise that public trust in the tax and superannuation systems depends on confidence that ATO decisions are made impartially, consistently and in accordance with the law.

“We are pleased that the review recognises the significant controls already in place within the ATO to support objective decision-making and manage bias.

“We welcome the opportunity to build on those foundations and reinforce community confidence in the integrity of our decisions and actions. The ATO agrees with both recommendations in the report.”

The Tax Ombudsman will monitor the ATO’s progress in responding to her recommendations.

Original Article published by Chris Johnson on Region Canberra.

On Cinema: Political Films Part 1 – Maybe?

 Why does every couple of generations have to re-learn you can't give fascists an inch because there's no appeasing those fucking maniacs.

David GIbbs: How Intelligence Services Captured Academia & Journalism Glenn Diesen

The Orwellian Company Behind ICE’s New Electric Shock Gloves Mother Jones. “The shock gloves, he went on to explain, allow their wearer to inflict pain without leaving the sort of marks that could look bad to witnesses or leave an officer vulnerable to lawsuits.”

On Cinema: Political Films Part 1 – Maybe?

Questioning whether some iconic political films are really all that political.

Nudge or tax?

 THE OLDER I GET, THE MORE I UNDERSTAND WHY ROOSTERS SCREAM TO START THEIR DAY.

NSW Supreme Court criticises IHRA definition as ‘detached from reality’ Deep Cut

US judge drops bribery and fraud case against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani BBC. “Highly unusual.”

Nudge or tax? At last, some data How significant are behaviourally informed public policies?

It all seems very long ago, but there was a time when David Cameron was most famous for his enthusiasm for behavioural public policy, better known as “nudges”. In a TED talk released a few months before Cameron became the UK’s prime minister, he began by asking, “How do we make things better without spending more money?”

It remains a seductive question, and one of the answers he offered was to use more behavioural science: “The best way to get someone to cut their electricity bill is to show them their own spending, to show them what their neighbours are spending, and then show what an energy-conscious neighbour is spending.”

Nobody should object to a judicious nudge like this, particularly since such approaches are easily tested with randomised experiments. But I’ve long argued that Cameron was just wrong to say that it was “the best way”. A tax on carbon-intensive energy would be better still: it would help shift the energy system to cleaner sources, encourage consumers to conserve energy more assiduously if it was from dirtier fuels, and raise revenue into the bargain. I’ve also argued that while nudges can be quick, easy and effective, serious policy action usually requires a change to regulations or the tax system. We shouldn’t become so enamoured of the icing that we forget to bake the cake.

But were my protestations based more on instinct than on evidence? Is it really true that a carbon tax has a bigger impact on behaviour than a cleverly formatted energy bill? At last, we have some data to answer such questions.

A new working paper from the economists John List, Matthias Rodemeier, Sutanuka Roy and Gregory Sun reviews more than 600 studies of different nudge-style interventions and asks the question: how significant are behaviourally informed public policies?

Start with the reformatted electricity bill. After reviewing such interventions around the world, the researchers conclude that the kind of tweak Cameron was applauding might reduce electricity consumption by something between 4 and 7 per cent. That doesn’t sound like much.

But who is to say that 4 per cent is a small saving? Small compared with what? One natural comparator is my preferred policy: a tax increase. How much would the electricity price have to increase to persuade people to cut back consumption by 4 per cent?

“The answer is actually quite a lot,” says Rodemeier. “You would have to raise electricity prices by 11 per cent . . . Try to go to the public and say, ‘We’re going to raise electricity prices by 11 per cent.’”

Fair. Cameron’s latest successor as UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, made a cut in VAT on electricity bills one of the very first policies he announced. There is not much point in columnists arguing that taxes on energy use are better than mere nudges, if politicians disagree.

In other areas, the best behavioural approaches are even more effective and the equivalent price rise would be even higher. The details vary. In the case of cigarettes, the most effective nudges have proven to be information about the risks of smoking. For vaccination, the best tactic is simply a timely reminder. The researchers reckoned that cigarette prices would have to increase by 28 per cent to match the impact of the best nudges. Alcohol prices would have to rise even further, by 34 per cent. As for a flu vaccine, the researchers estimate that a 100 per cent subsidy — making the vaccine free — is still not as effective at improving uptake as a reminder to get vaccinated.

So nudges are not just politically convenient. They induce a change in behaviour that is more substantial than we might assume.

When estimating the value of such nudges, it is useful to distinguish two yardsticks. The first is the cost-benefit ratio: for every dollar we sow implementing some clever behavioural tweak, how much social benefit would we expect to reap? The second is the total value of a policy intervention.

As an analogy, I might try to insulate my home by fitting some draught excluders, or by installing double glazing. The draught excluders look good on a cost-benefit basis because I might save 50 times what I spent. Still, if I want a noticeably warmer home with lower bills, draught excluders won’t do the job — it will have to be those costly new windows.

The same story appears to be true for behavioural public policy. The cost-benefit ratios of such ideas are often large, with tiny expenditures yielding outsized rewards. But the biggest total benefits emerge not from nudges but from more traditional policies such as appropriate taxes, subsidies and regulations. List, Rodemeier, Roy and Sun estimate that the optimal energy tax “generates roughly seven times the total welfare of the optimal nudge, even though the nudge is more cost-effective”.

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So which approach is best? That depends on where the bottleneck is. A government with a limited budget to invest would do best looking for clever nudges here and there. If the binding constraint is political capital, space in the legislative agenda, or the attention of the prime minister, then a better bet is to pick a handful of traditional policy reforms and push them hard.

A well-functioning bureaucracy should be able to do both, of course. While political leadership is focused on major reforms, a bit of delegation goes a long way in implementing the small stuff. Whether the UK and the US currently have well-functioning bureaucracies is a separate question.

In any case, the two approaches complement each other. Take vaccination: a government keen to maximise the uptake of a vaccine would do well to reduce the price (zero is a particularly attractive price point, it turns out) but should also send out well-timed and well-phrased reminders. There is nothing mutually exclusive about these options.

Or energy policy: a government might favour a carbon tax to push every element of the energy system towards lower-carbon options, but some of those elements are likely to prove sticky. Bills that provide well-formatted information and a bit of peer pressure can help shake up consumer behaviour, and reforms elsewhere can help the whole system respond to the tax incentive.

If the choice is between the icing and the cake, politicians should choose the cake. Nudges are far from trivial in their benefits, but there is no substitute for using taxes to get price signals right. List et al write: “In four of five markets, price instruments deliver substantially larger total surplus than nudges.” 

All too often, politicians are turning their back on the most beneficial policies because they lack the political courage or the political skill to introduce them. 

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram

We Finally See Trump Administration’s Sweeping Census Power Grab Emerge

TPM’s Layla A. Jones and Josh Kovenskypublished a major story yesterday outlining a new, draft Commerce Department rule [Wired first reported the draft rule’s existence] that is circulating within the Trump administration. 

Our story includes documents that TPM is the first outlet to make public. The rule aims to do two things: exclude undocumented immigrants and other types of non-citizens from the census (in violation of the Constitution), and stop the census from collecting most demographic data on Americans. These changes would have several impacts, the enormity of which is hard to overstate:

• They would likely change allocations of power in Congress, shifting it toward red states. After the decennial census, the federal government apportions congressional seats to states. A census that doesn’t count many categories of non-citizens would see fewer congressional seats apportioned to blue states, and, as a result, more apportioned to red states.
• They would likely change the Electoral College, again shifting power toward red states. The Electoral College is based on each state’s congressional allotment. Fewer seats for blue states in Congress would mean blue-state voters have less power to elect the president.
• They would eliminate a crucial source of data. By not collecting data on race and other demographics, the administration would eliminate information that is critical both for the government, as it distributes congressionally allocated funds to various communities meant to receive those funds, and to researchers trying to better understand America.
• They would make it harder to challenge maps that are gerrymandered based on race. Data on race is a critical tool for plaintiffs looking to prove that state governments have illegally carved up their congressional districts to dilute the power of minority voters. “You have to prove discrimination, you have to prove the fact that you have been discriminated against,” Walter Schwarm, a California state demographer, told TPM. “But if you don’t have race and ethnic data on the ground, how can you prove that you’re being discriminated against?”…

 "Age and wisdom don’t necessarily go together. Some people just become stupid with more authority."

- Sir Terry Pratchett

Online Age Verification, the Trojan Horse for Digital Identity, Hits Resistance in France

Across the world countries are adopting policies that threaten to radically transform the Internet. 

How many federal datasets have been terminated since January 2025?

Former federal data officials answer the question. “Since the 2025 change in presidential administrations, disappearing federal datasets have drawn widespread attention, generating both concern and confusion about what has actually been terminated. Different media outlets, academics, and nonprofits are reporting data losses ranging up to the thousands. Professional organizations are documenting cuts to federal staff, contracts, and advisory committees and raising concerns about the politicization of federal data. 

Adding to the confusion, some datasets are being pulled down only to return later. Today, dataindex.us, the nation’s leading resource for monitoring changes to federal data, published the Federal Data Terminations Tracker—the most policy-relevant, verified source of federal datasets terminated since January 2025. Having evolved from the crowdsourced Dearly Departed Datasets published in October 2025, the tracker combines community reporting with expert identification and review to provide a regularly updated record of terminations. 

“Data are the central nervous system of modern government,” said Denice Ross, former U.S. Chief Data Scientist, co-founder of dataindex.us, and Director of the Data Policy Institute at the Federation of American Scientists. “The termination of federal data – whether related to food security, drug abuse, or hate crimes – has far reaching impacts. Many of these terminations occurred behind closed doors and without opportunity for public input, so we’re bringing visibility to what’s been lost through a rigorous tracking process.”

 The team identified dozens of federal datasets and hundreds of data elements that have been terminated – significantly fewer than other reports, but more tailored to informing effective public engagement and future data policies needed to run a modern society. These are data that have long underpinned policymaking, journalism, advocacy, and research that improve American lives and livelihoods. 

“Disruptions to federal data are hard to monitor, yet they affect our nation’s ability to address issues ranging from climate risks, to maternal and infant health, to immigration enforcement,” said Christopher Dick, former Chief of Population Evaluation at the U.S. Census Bureau, former statistician at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and co-founder of dataindex.us. “We’re committed to publicly documenting what has changed and why it matters.”

• View the tracker at dataindex.us/terminations-tracker, and read more about the methodology and why quantifying data terminations is so challenging here.

Ordinary WiFi can now identify you with near-perfect accuracy Science Daily

Ordinary WiFi can now identify you with near-perfect accuracy

“Everyday WiFi networks could potentially identify and track people without cameras or special equipment, using signals already being transmitted by nearby devices. Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT): 

“Ordinary WiFi networks could quietly become powerful surveillance tools, allowing people to be identified without cameras, special sensors, or even carrying a connected device. Researchers showed that unencrypted signals routinely exchanged between WiFi devices and routers can be used to create radio-based images of people and recognize them within seconds. 

In tests involving 197 participants, the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy, even from different angles and regardless of how they walked…The researchers say the findings reveal a potentially serious privacy risk because WiFi networks are already widespread in homes, offices, restaurants, and public spaces.

This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance,” warns Julian Todt from KASTEL. “If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later — for example by public authorities or companies.”…

To Save Higher Ed, Professors Need to Get a Little Weird

What Do Students Lose 

When They Stop Writing?

Educators are worried that many 

students can no longer write essays

 without A.I. And it’s costing more

 than just grammar skills…

To Save Higher Ed, Professors Need to Get a Little Weird

 I read “The Brothers Karamazov” for the first time last semester. For someone in my line of work — I’m a professor in a great books program — having failed to read one of the greatest novels ever written is embarrassing, close to professional malpractice. So when my co-teacher, Alan, proposed we assign this thousand-page saga to our third- and fourth-year students, I eagerly agreed.

“The Brothers Karamazov” consumed me in a way I hadn’t experienced in years, maybe decades. I could think of little else. Emails went unanswered. I repeatedly read well past my strict, middle-aged 10 p.m. bedtime. I was once so absorbed I forgot to pick up my daughter at ballet. I lost interest in my phone.

And I wasn’t alone. As my profession underwent a largeand public meltdown over the future of education in the A.I. age, I was having one of the best semesters of my career. When I’d enter our seminar room, I’d hear my students chattering excitedly about Dmitry Karamazov’s wild love life and self-destructive partying as if he lived in the dorm with them; there were debates — wrongheaded, in my view, but sincere — about which books might help the obdurate intellectual brother, Ivan, overcome his despair.

That my students — regular 20-somethings at a public college in one of Canada’s poorest provinces — fell in love with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s strange little town might look like a miracle from the outside, but as the narrator of “The Brothers Karamazov” puts it: “Miracles never bother a realist.” To be a realist about higher education is to acknowledge that the challenge of our moment is not primarily intellectual, but sentimental — spiritual, if you will. In the algorithmic age, effective teaching is affectiveteaching.

Today’s educational problems are often attributed to a deficit of focus or attention, but attention is an anemic way to understand what allows education to transform people. We’re really talking about passion, inconvenient and unfashionable as that is to acknowledge. Passion creates a unity of purpose and urgency that is the antidote to the feckless, superficial distraction of the algorithmic age. Lots of us pay very close attention to our phones, but what we lack is the sustaining passion that endures difficulty and shapes a life.

When I asked my students why they thought Dostoyevsky was such a hit, they routinely said two things. First, they were moved by the passions of the characters in the novel. As one student put it to me, the characters in “The Brothers Karamazov” approach life “head first, heels last”; they dash to extremity, grab what’s there, and bring it back to this otherwise insignificant village, where it explodes into fierce little human dramas that take on cosmic significance. The novel is an extravagant convergence of form and content in this sense: It shows us what real, life-shaping passion looks like, but also awakens something similar in its readers.

Second, the students explained that my own enthusiasm helped stoke theirs. When I asked how they were managing to keep up with the brisk pace of the reading assignments, one of them candidly said: “Well, it really helps that you’re so into it.” Since Alan knew much more about the novel than I did and mostly led discussions, I had the pleasure of becoming a student myself, proposing thrilling but wildly unscholarly theories about the ultimate fate of Father Zosima, or the motivations of the novel’s mysterious narrator.

As far back as Plato’s irascible character Meno, would-be teachers have been confronting the problem that students must want to learn before learning is possible. For many decades, higher education has relied on a workaround to this problem — tying access to good jobs to success in school. In some cases, a desire for money and prestige leads to real, if incidental, learning. But large language models have broken this arrangement by making it possible for students to skip straight to an effortless A without doing any meaningful learning. Technology has exposed the limits of our mercenary approach to education.

Over the course of last semester, I became convinced there is a way out of this moribund strategy: We teachers must remain students — and model what we want to see. We need to recover the passion that drove us to our books, to the lab. We need to embody love of learning for its own sake against the pervasive message that higher education should be vocational, and we need to clarify the basic questions that make our subjects worth studying.

Keeping a certain youthful enthusiasm or undergraduate idiosyncrasy is difficult when you’re contending with day care colds, spirit-rending administrative work, worries about the state of the world and the future, or simply the kind of routinized structures that bear the weight of bourgeois life. Being a good teacher requires being sort of odd, even a bit immature. Some of my favorite professors married scholarly expertise with considerable eccentricity — my dissertation adviser insisted her students take up social dance like polka, line-dancing and zydeco; another of my former professors would alight at 4 a.m. to teach himself Japanese, before undertaking woodworking projects like making a life-size chess set. The passions are nonconformist. To be moved is to be a little bit weird.

What I discovered anew in my encounter with “The Brothers Karamazov” last term was that if you want students to be passionately engaged, not worried about the future, grasping, careerist or disengaged, you must transmit the spark of passion in your deeds, your mien — let’s face it, in your own soul. If you expect your students to choose books, ideas and genuine learning over shortcuts and distraction, you must be a bit courageous, too. Return to the basics. Cut through the haze of abstraction, the webs of scholarly terminology, the pretense of professionalization, and attempt to recover the basic human experiences that can move us. Remain a student in earnest.

Near the end of “The Brothers Karamazov,” the novel’s hero, the youngest Karamazov, Alyosha, is trying to win over an intelligent boy named Kolya, who confuses skepticism with maturity. Alyosha’s passionate appeal doesn’t involve rhetorical fireworks or hysterics. Instead, he takes the young man very seriously. He treats him like an adult. We forget, at our peril, how life-changing it can be for a young person to have an unrelated adult treat them with seriousness and respect. Alyosha is present to Kolya, and painfully earnest. For the most part, he asks questions rather than gives speeches. And eventually Kolya can’t deny that there is something about “Karamazov,” abandoning his prematurely world-weary cynicism for a more expansive embrace of life.

As educators the world over look toward the coming school year, perhaps, with a hint of dread, we should focus on what we can control. The challenges of our algorithmic age are real, but it has always been true that good teachers need to be exemplary students to help others learn. For Dostoyevsky, worldly common sense can make us unwitting fools. As Alyosha memorably notes, all capable people “are awfully afraid of looking ridiculous, and it makes them unhappy.” Remaining a passionate student yourself may well feel ridiculous, nowadays, but it is ultimately nothing more than realism about what education requires.

Matt Dinan is the director of the Great Books program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. He writes the newsletter Prefaces.

More on education in the A.I. age

Opinion | Shael Polakow-Suransky

The High Cost of Silent Classrooms

June 8, 2026

Opinion | Rebecca Winthrop

What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity

May 27, 2026

Opinion | Jessica Grose and Jill Frank

America’s First A.I. High School Is Great. But Not Because of A.I.

May 30, 2026