一所肯塔基中学发的学生手册，把 Kentucky 印成了 Venecky。开学第一天，一个学生就发现了。

When American middle schools start the year, every student is given a planner.

It has a timetable, a calendar, and some reference pages for everyday use.

For example a map of America, fifty states, each with its name printed on it.

These pages are not decoration — a student will turn to them all year.

The planner is not free: families pay ten dollars a year.

On the first day of school this year, a student opened the planner and looked at that map.

And then he found that the state names were wrong.

Not one of them wrong — a whole swathe of them.

Louisiana had been printed as a string of letters nobody can pronounce.

Arizona was missing a letter.

South Carolina had been spelled as another word.

Illinois had turned into something unreadable.

Alabama, too.

On a map of fifty states, the errors covered a large area.

And the one that leaves you speechless is the state he lives in himself.

This school is in Kentucky.

On the map, Kentucky had been printed as Venecky.

A Kentucky school spelled Kentucky wrong, and then handed it to its students.

Parents later found that it was not only the map that was wrong.

The periodic table in the planner is skewed — the rows and columns do not line up.

The page on the phases of the moon has diagrams too small to read at all.

In other words, almost every "reference" page in this planner has something wrong with it.

And this planner costs ten dollars.

In other words, what parents paid for is a booklet in which no page can be trusted.

It is worth pausing here to think about how this planner reached a student’s hands.

First somebody made these pages.

Then, by process, somebody should have checked them.

Then they went to a printer, several hundred copies.

Then they were handed out to every student.

There is more than one adult standing on that route.

The people who made it, checked it, printed it and handed it out are all grown adults.

A mistake a teenager spotted on the first day of school, within minutes, and not one of those adults stopped it.

The person who first raised it was a parent.

She said her son found it on the first day of school.

What parents are now pressing is the same question: who made this planner, and was it machine-generated?

The school says it is in contact with parents about it.

But as of today, the school has not confirmed whether AI was used, nor said who produced it.

Think about it: a mistake a child can see at a glance — how did it travel all the way to the printing press?