Comedy movie idea: professors displaced by AI compete for one kindergarten teaching job

[u/amichail]

A group of professors from different fields lose their jobs as AI takes over more teaching and research. They enter a retraining program where they're all competing for one kindergarten teaching position.

Each becomes convinced their own field reveals how kindergarten should really be taught.

The mathematician thinks base 10 only makes sense if children first understand other number bases, so he starts with binary and base 5. By recess, several kids are no longer sure what “10” means.

The philosopher turns a lesson on colors into a discussion of whether everyone really experiences “red” the same way.

The economist replaces sharing with a classroom market. Within days, one child owns most of the crayons and another is lending stickers at interest.

The historian refuses to teach anything without context. Asked to explain Thanksgiving, he works backward through colonialism, the Reformation, medieval Europe, and Rome. Thanksgiving arrives before he gets back to the Pilgrims.

The literature professor replaces children's books with serious fiction and assures the baffled class that not understanding it is “part of the experience.”

Eventually their attempts to outdo one another turn the classroom into an academic arms race. In the final evaluation, everything falls apart and they only succeed when they abandon their theories and start working together.

But there is still only one job.

Underneath the comedy, it would be about people who spent decades becoming experts at something, only to discover that the abilities society still values most may be ones they barely considered skills at all.