Many people are worried about AI taking all the jobs, and rightly so.

A parent recently told me her kids in college are worried they’re spending good money on an education for a field that may not even exist by the time they graduate. “They’re worried AI’s going to take away the jobs they want to do.”

That is the existential crisis of the current education system, and it’s worth asking how we got here.

Built for Automata

The dominant model of schooling in the West descends from the Prussian system, which was designed in the early 1800s to produce obedient, literate, punctual citizens. Later it was adapted to supply the factory floor. Sit in rows. Respond to the bell. Memorize the information. Give it back on the test. Move to the next station.

That was a fine way to turn out workers for an industrial economy. It also happens to be a perfect way to train people for the jobs that are the lowest-hanging fruit for AI. If the goal of education is to produce someone who follows procedures and reproduces information accurately, we have spent two centuries training humans to compete with machines at the one thing machines do best.

Maybe that shouldn’t be the goal of education.

What If We Trained Thinkers?

What if there were a system of education that aimed at forming a mind rather than filling a job slot? It just so happens there is, and it was used extensively throughout High Christendom, right up until the Prussian-industrial model displaced it.

We call it Classical Education.

Classical Education is built on the classics: Aristotle, Plato, Homer, and on through the great works of the modern era like Dickens and Hugo. It is organized into three stages that follow the development of a child’s mind:

• Grammar: Learn the building blocks. Facts, vocabulary, the rules of language, the fundamentals of each subject. Young children are sponges, so fill them up.
• Logic: Learn to reason. Students at this stage love to argue anyway, so teach them to do it well. How do ideas connect? Where does an argument fail? What is a fallacy?
• Rhetoric: Learn to communicate and persuade. Take everything you know, reason about it, and express it with eloquence and conviction.

Notice what that sequence produces. It doesn’t produce a person who knows one trade. It produces a person who can learn anything, because he has been taught how to learn, how to think, and how to speak.

Why This Is AI-Proof

AI is an astonishing tool for retrieving information and generating plausible text. It is not good at the things the trivium trains:

1. Judgment. AI can give you ten answers. Someone has to know which one is true, which one is wise, and which one is a confident-sounding hallucination. That requires a mind trained in logic and well stocked with the great ideas.
2. Asking the right question. The quality of an AI’s output depends on the quality of the prompt, and the quality of the prompt depends on the quality of the thinker.
3. Moral reasoning. A machine can optimize. It cannot tell you what is worth optimizing. Someone who has wrestled with Homer, Plato, and Hugo has spent years with exactly that question.
4. Adaptability. If you can learn anything, it doesn’t matter which jobs disappear. You were never trained for a job. You were trained for reality.

Classical Education isn’t good at producing automata to fit as cogs in the industrial machine. But that’s the point.

How to Actually Do It

You don’t have to move to a monastery or reinvent your life.

• Read the old books. Start with Homer, Plato, and Aristotle, and enjoy a good Dickens along the way. Read them slowly, and read them yourself rather than a summary.
• Learn logic. Study formal logic and material fallacies. It’s the cheapest upgrade your brain will ever get, and it makes you a better user of AI because you can spot when it’s wrong.
• Practice rhetoric. Write and speak. Defend a position out loud to someone who disagrees with you.
• Use AI as a tool, not a crutch. Let it be your research assistant, not your brain. If you can’t evaluate its answer, you shouldn’t be relying on it.
• If you’re a parent, consider a classical school, a co-op, or a home program, and don’t wait for college to start.
• If you’re in college, supplement your major with a Great Books reading list. Your degree may teach you a field. The classics will teach you how to think in any field.

The Bottom Line

The jobs will change. They always do. Nobody can say for certain which careers AI will swallow and which it will leave alone, and anyone claiming to know is guessing.

But a mind trained to think, reason, and speak is not a job that can be automated. It’s the thing that decides what the automation is for.

Don’t train to be a cog. Train to be the one who knows what the machine is for.