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Discernment can't be commoditized
What AI commoditizes
For the last ten or fifteen years, coding and engineering looked like the future. Now anything STEM-based that has a right and a wrong answer, anything a computer can do, including code, is basically becoming irrelevant. Most of the skills an employer values today are what people call soft skills: deciding what matters and what doesn't, choosing where to put time and resources, communicating, and deciding what to edit when AI produces something.
What holds its value
Some facts and memorization are still needed to have the discernment to choose a direction. But recalling a specific date, or having the skill set to write certain types of code, has been commoditized. Relationships and wisdom have not, and probably will not be, because they are the ability to understand what to do and not only what can be done.
Where value goes
In a world of abundance, what matters is having the wisdom and discernment to put resources in the right place and make the right bets. As technology advances, certain skill sets get magnified, and creativity, relationship building, and communication are likely to skyrocket in value. A liberal arts education builds those muscles.
How did calculators change what schools valued?
Pocket calculators became affordable in the 1970s, and teachers worried they would erode arithmetic skills. In 1980, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics recommended that calculators be used at all grade levels, shifting classroom time toward problem solving. The SAT began permitting calculators in 1994.
Why do liberal arts programs teach discernment?
Medieval universities taught the seven liberal arts, split into the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The word liberal comes from the Latin liberalis, meaning fit for a free person. The trivium trained students to read closely, argue a case, and judge between competing claims. That curriculum shaped European higher education for centuries.
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