I’ve always viewed tying curricula exclusively to the needs of the labour market as a form of educational malpractice. 

To be sure, there are fields where academic learning organically transitions into career-ready skills. But for the most part, we’ve lost sight of the fact that education isn’t primarily meant to produce good workers, but good humans. 

The STEM approach to education has been a myopic failure, a blinkered fixation whose improvident legacy will have been as henchman to generational declines in literacy. At a time of increased vulnerability to misinformation and predatory algorithms, we’re struggling to read the world around us. 

To its credit, STEM has at least proven an egalitarian mirage, deluding everyone from the nearly half of adults in most developed countries lacking the necessary cognitive capital to navigate everyday life to the ballooning community of tech workers now jobless despite meaty resumes fattened with incalculable lines of code. 

Did you know that in classical antiquity, science and philosophy were one unified discipline? Such was the breadth of education, universally understood as foundational to understanding not only the physical world but human nature, that the workings of the universe and the principles of existence were taught side by side.

It took us almost 3,000 years to denature education and flatten it into a mechanistic shorthand for career training. But we succeeded. Extra credits all around!

School environments shouldn’t have to serve as anterooms for the workplace. Especially today, with a thickening AI cloud virtually blotting out any possibility of ascertaining the types of jobs or businesses that will emerge in the future. If we are to move forward, we need to go back to a more balanced course of study that embraces the human past, meaning the humanities, literature, history. It’s the only way education fulfills its core vocation of broadening minds first, then prospects. 

Education for its own sake, purely for the epistemic exhilaration, makes us better-rounded citizens of the world. It nurtures civic sophistication, an engaged quality of thinking that frames the way to be a person. 

And that spells an A+ for society as a whole.