Capacities
I can imagine a future in which humanistic study and the liberal arts are widely acknowledged to be beneficial for real people, but nonetheless American institutions and American culture turn against them as a form of training for almost anyone, for any reason. I focus on the American context here because it is the immediate situation I see around me. Maybe I have just described the present.1
If it really is the case that the pace of technological change is accelerating and the shape of the future is harder predict, would you not want to choose an education that prepares you to face change in general, that takes the certainty of transformation as its starting point? A traditional justifications of the liberal arts has always involved adaptability. “Precisely because it is general,” says the economist Ian Deming in 2024, “when it is well-executed, [a liberal arts education] is teaching you not a set of specific competencies in some specific thing, but rather giving you a set of tools to teach you how to think about the next problem over the horizon.” To believe this, you would have to accept the claim that there is a version of general education that is the best at preparing you for the unknown.2
There is also a question of whether one believes that the overwhelming pace of specifically technological change that today is comparable to other periods of change from the past. Previous eras have seen change like the movement from an agrarian to urban patterns of living, the rise of mass media and mass culture, and the rise of a class of knowledge workers. But maybe the transformation we are living through now– one where computers and computation mediate almost everything–is different in kind, and requires a different educational approach.
It may be a sign of how far American education has gone down the road of specialization that the novelty of the technological present has not really led to a revival of a liberal or generalist ideal in education. If anything, the crisis of confidence caused by AI has led to serious questions about the value of higher education overall. It is as if the liberal arts and the humanities, however marginal they are to the modern American university, nonetheless still represent a traditional ideal of what the university is (people are not completely wrong about this).
These days, the conventional advice goes, people should find a trade. Education should become even more narrowly constrained to the acquisition of specific skills. The question of a broad and durable education is one best left to one’s own instincts and preferences, not college guidance. The answer to an accelerating pace of change is just more specialization, ever more job-oriented training from the youngest age.
But those who reject a generalist education model, who believe only in specific, largely technical training for specific “roles,” will still have to confront a future that is hard to discern along with everyone else. And there can be little doubt that some people will adapt better than others. Education must have something to contribute on this question.
The problems of how to prepare for the unknown (vocationally, spiritually, etc) can be connected with the liberal arts through capacities. A capacity is any ability to act with effectiveness that is held in reserve. Capacities are what create a buffer of confidence about one’s abiltiy to respond well to the future. And because a capacity represents potential, it is also not fixed. Like anything hard that involves mental readiness, a significant part of a person’s capacity rests on a sense of what is possible. When you are faced with an event you haven’t seen before, you fall back on your capacities.
If AI is a knowledge multiplier, then the liberal arts are a multiplier for human capacities. I can’t think of an education more likely to instill a sense of purpose and self-confidence, one designed to build up trust in one’s own judgment. That is what a successful liberal arts education can do. Yes, the subject matter of the liberal arts often deals with questions of human value, but I am talking about more than the content of the education. To develop any capacity, you have to feel like a human being–like you deserve to think of yourself as human–not merely an employee, instrument, an element in a process. We feel like human beings through relationships, through being valued in the eyes of others. Any successful education will involve just this dynamic between teacher and student. Not always, but at crucial times in one’s development, the student has to feel that the teacher sees her and believes the she is capable. We develop capacities when we learn to internalize what others see in us.3
It is no accident that liberal arts, which is commonly taught in a small and highly participation-driven seminars, tends to create more of these personal relationships than the career-driven educational tracks. The latter is often “scaled up” to mass learning modeles that simulate the depersonalization of the workplace. Even an education in the sciences risks pulling the student into the same bureaucratic and impersonal system that funds most scientific work (and its army of vocationally-trained technicians) today.
There is a reason that instructors in the humanities will tell you about students who do not major in their subject, but who seek them out for recommendations and advice–because the humanities teacher is often the only teacher who has developed any kind level of individual relationship with the student.
An education that aims at capacities is also open-ended: we do not know where a person will go with it, what they will be capable of. From the standpoint of human dignity and potential, this is great thing. But from a control perspective, the problem with enhancing capacities is that you invigorate the full person, including moral sensibilities. For many actors–and many schemes of control–this will be undesirable.
I am thinking here of any number of prominent and conventionally succesful public figures, largely in business, who enjoyed a humanistic education but have now turned against it: for example, Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, who advises individuals against pursuing any ‘humanities job’ (whatever that is) in favor of straightforward vocational training. There are also public voices–some of them from within the AI world itself–advising the opposite. ↩︎
Granted, we could only evaluate the success of general education by looking at how previous models of education prepared a population in the past for the historical changes that have arisen so far. It is always possible that the future will be more discontinuous with our present than any previous era (indeed, if you believe even some of the hype for AI, you probably believe this too). A sufficiently radical change might exceed the capacity of any educational approach to prepare us, especially if it causes upheavals so suddent and drastic (e.g., ecological collapse, superintelligent machines) that no organized response is possible. Also, as I write this, I suspect that many people don’t really accept the idea of general education anymore (if they ever did_). For these people the point of education is to gain some specialization which entitles you to a specifiic job. Or maybe you think that any credible education has to go deep on one particular thing. ↩︎
Pre-modern educational models, which were driven by a 1-1 tutoring relationship, understood this personal aspect of learning well. Although it was expensive and exclusive, there can be no doubt that constant attention by an instructor was effective. ↩︎