The advent of artificial intelligence has inaugurated a wave of economic and social transformations whose full implications we may not know for decades. In the realm of higher education, we are currently scrambling to cope with the rapid changes in our classrooms and curricula development. Many in academia see the rise of AI as the death knell of liberal arts education—after all, what is the purpose of an English degree in a world where the computer can write your papers? However, this question misses the whole point of liberal arts disciplines. The liberal arts do not teach students specific professional skills but instead how to read, write, and think. While long a subject of derision in popular culture, liberally educated individuals who can think for themselves will soon be among the most marketable professionals.
The British philosopher Michael Oakeshott once argued that there are two types of education: technical and liberal. A technical education emphasizes what we call hard skills—highly specific techniques that can be applied to clear vocations. Such teaching has long been the focus of most STEM programs and, of course, technical and vocational schools. A liberal education, on the other hand, teaches not so much how to achieve a specific result as how to think broadly and deeply—offering students an approach to critical thinking that can be applied both to their personal lives and to any number of jobs. Using Oakeshott’s educational framework can help us to see the continuing value of the liberal arts in a world increasingly flushed with AI technology.
When considering the liberal arts, we often think of amorphous subjects with little obvious value—English, philosophy, history, political science, religion, and so on—but the rise of AI shows just how important these subjects are. According to recent studies of economic trends, the jobs most likely to be replaced by artificial intelligence are careers that focus on a series of set technical skills—data analysis, computer programming, social media management, and so on. It turns out that many of the jobs in these once-sought-after fields rely on the repetitive technical tasks that AI easily replicates. To put it simply, many of the STEM jobs that we have pushed as the future of America are likely to be significantly diminished in the coming years.
This is not to say that STEM education is a waste, but that our pedagogical approach to STEM must evolve. Historically, STEM education has stood in stark opposition to liberal arts disciplines. Students who major in computer science are not often expected to have a robust education in English literature or theology. Yet the liberal arts provide the exact outlook that makes individuals versatile enough to easily learn new skills and move on to new jobs. This is because the content of a liberal arts education, though less obviously useful for particular jobs, over time trains students to do the one thing a computer can never do—pull together a wide range of disparate information and produce original ideas.
At the most practical level, this means that liberal arts degrees will be more important than ever. It also means that academic programs that have typically not emphasized the liberal arts should start to push their students into these courses. Does this mean that a data management degree should require upper-level courses in the history of American religion? Not necessarily. Instead, we should encourage our students, if they choose to major in a technical field, to double major or minor well outside their chosen field.
More importantly though, our schools and universities need to teach our job-obsessed students to be less single-minded. For a brief period—the last eighty years or so—it was an easy thing to go to college for a specific career. You would take courses that prepared you to accomplish particular tasks, and then you would go out into the world and do them. Almost every university in the country has leaned into this model and catered to students who need to learn certain skills for the workforce. Universities were not entirely wrong in this approach. Most of us have spent our entire lives in the age of technical education, but that age is passing—the time of artificial intelligence has arrived and only the timeless education of the liberal arts can face it.
The demise of the simplistic “just major in STEM” approach of too many in higher education may even prove a blessing to the perpetuation of Western civilization. After all, if a university education focused almost exclusively on technical subjects no longer even confers the benefits of guaranteed steady employment, why not choose to focus on the classics?