Introduction
“You’re studying philosophy? Ah, that’s nice…”
“Are there even real jobs for that?”
This is often how young people who are studying humanities get talked to by their relatives or friends. The humanities are seen as a waste of time, and are not seen as a viable means of making money in the future.
I think this view comes from a deeper misunderstanding of what education is actually for.
Nowadays, we tend to look at education mainly as preparation for a job. You choose a study, learn the skills that belong to it, and then hopefully move into the corresponding profession.
But historically, education was often understood much more broadly. It was also meant to form the person.
And I think that distinction is becoming more important again, especially now that technology and AI are changing the kinds of things humans are needed for.
In this essay I want to make the case that the humanities still have a lot to offer. To do this, I first want to look at what education is actually meant to do, how this was understood historically, what technology and AI are revealing about the modern job market, what the humanities cultivate in us, and what we can practically do with this knowledge.
What should education do?
Education nowadays is often seen as job preparation. You go to college or university and get a specific bachelor’s degree to then work in the field related to that study. At least, that is the ideal vision.
And yet the numbers don’t really support this ideal as neatly as we might expect.
Among employed college graduates surveyed in the United States, 44% said that their work was closely related to their highest degree, 31% said it was somewhat related, and 25% said it was not related. (National Science Foundation, National Survey of College Graduates 2023)
This does not mean that the education of the other 56% was useless. Someone can work in a somewhat related field, switch careers, or end up using their education in ways which are difficult to measure. But it does show that the simple structure of study something, then work directly in that field, is not the reality for a large part of the population.
So maybe we should look deeper into what education is actually meant to do. Let’s look at a bit of educational history for answers.
In ancient Greece, education aimed at the formation and personal growth of the person. This personal formation within education was called paideia. Education included philosophy, rhetoric, literature, mathematics and physical training, but also the cultivation of moral character and the virtues necessary for living well within society. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Civic Education”)
Medieval Christian education inherited much from this Greek ideal. Students were first educated in the seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic, followed by the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.
These subjects provided a broad intellectual foundation. Only afterwards would students proceed to more specialised fields such as theology, law or medicine. There was a clear development in which someone first became broadly educated before becoming specialised. (University of Oxford, “A Tale of Two Manuscripts”)
Of course, higher education in those days was mainly available to a small part of the population. But the structure itself still tells us something important.
There was a clearer distinction between education aimed at forming the person and training aimed at preparing someone for a specific profession.
If you wanted to learn a trade, you would often do an apprenticeship under someone who already practised it. Meanwhile, higher education gave much more attention to broad intellectual and personal formation.
In the modern world, these purposes have slowly and poorly started to merge together.
As economies became more complex and specialised, education also became increasingly connected to particular professions. Over time, preparing people for the job market became one of the dominant purposes of higher education, while personal formation moved further into the background.
This is not necessarily bad. We obviously need doctors, engineers, lawyers, programmers and all the other professions which require specialised knowledge. The problem comes when we begin to think that job preparation is the only serious purpose of education.
And this becomes especially interesting when we look at what is currently happening with technology.
What technology and AI are showing us
Technology and AI are playing a big role in revealing some of the things we need to sort out within the job market and the educational system. Machines have already replaced many physical tasks that used to require human labour. AI is now starting to do something similar with certain cognitive tasks.
The fact that we use tools to outsource parts of our work is not a new phenomenon. Humans have been doing that for thousands of years. But the number and complexity of tasks which technology can perform is clearly increasing.
We as humans have to ask ourselves where this development is going.
If companies can use machines to perform physical tasks faster and cheaper, and increasingly use AI to perform tasks involving writing, calculation, analysis, organisation and other forms of cognitive work, what will humans be needed for?
I am not saying that there will ever be a time in which there is zero need for human labour or cognitive ability. Neither am I going to pretend that I have the economic knowledge or insight to perfectly predict what the job market is going to look like in the coming decades. But certain things can be said.
AI will probably change jobs in many different ways. Some jobs may disappear, others may change, and entirely new ones may appear. Meanwhile, technology will also keep on developing, so more physical labour will be replaced.
But I think we can still make a good case for us humans.
The more technology becomes capable of performing individual tasks for us, the more important it becomes to ask what human beings contribute beyond simply performing tasks. And there are many parts of human life which technology does not actually live or experience:
· Human beings can be in relationship with God, repent, pray, receive the sacraments, and freely orient their lives towards Him.
· Human beings can give themselves in love, enter into communion with others, form families, forgive and sacrifice for another person.
· We live a human life from within. We suffer, hope, mourn, wonder, love and long for meaning.
· We are part of culture. We inherit stories, traditions, art, history and ways of life, and we pass them on to the next generation.
· We can consciously pursue truth, wisdom and virtue which all shape the kind of person we become.
Technology may enter into all sorts of parts of our lives, but it does not consciously experience a human life as we do. It doesn’t even have a conscience.
This does not mean that all future jobs will suddenly consist of philosophy, relationships and contemplation. But it does mean that the distinctly human side of work becomes increasingly important when more basic tasks can be automated. This will probably be a gradual process.
And this brings us directly back to education.
If our humanity itself becomes increasingly important, then perhaps education should not only teach us how to perform a particular set of tasks. It should also help us develop as human beings. And that is precisely where the humanities come in.
What the humanities give you
The humanities consist of literature and languages, history, philosophy, art, music and theology. They are precisely the fields which have traditionally been concerned with the human person, human culture, truth, meaning, beauty and our place within the world.
Philosophy teaches a person to use reason well. It forces you to ask what is true, why you believe what you believe, and whether your ideas actually make sense. At the same time, you learn to listen, write, speak and think more clearly, while also learning to step back and look at ideas from a higher level.
Theology deepens our faith by giving it a strong intellectual foundation. You study Sacred Scripture, learn its original languages, look at Church history, and come to understand how the different parts of the faith fit together. You start to see more clearly who God is, who man is, and what our life is ultimately for.
History gives a person a clear historical consciousness. You begin to realise that the world around you did not simply appear as it is today. Our culture is the result of thousands of years of ideas, traditions, conflicts, discoveries and decisions. History helps you understand where we came from, and therefore also where we are now.
Literature trains the imagination and allows us to enter into lives and experiences that are not our own. Through stories, we come into contact with love, suffering, courage, betrayal, ambition, death and many of the other great parts of human life. In the process, we learn to understand people better, think more deeply and communicate with greater clarity.
Art and music train us to notice and appreciate things that are difficult to put into words. They develop our sense of beauty, taste, harmony, expression and perception. While they also train certain cognitive and social skills, their deeper value is that they teach us to see, admire, create and express what is beautiful.
Languages give us access to different peoples, traditions and ways of understanding the world. But language also lies at the heart of what it means to be human. From the beginning, Adam is shown naming the animals and making sense of reality through words. Christ Himself is revealed as the λογος, the Word. Through language we communicate truth, preserve culture and understand the world around us.
When we look at all these fields we see that they each deal with some part of what it means to be human. They ask us to think about truth, God, history, beauty, language, culture, meaning, suffering, love and about life itself.
That is why their value cannot simply be measured by job-opportunities. Their first purpose is the development of the person.
But that does not mean they are disconnected from the job market either.
Nuance and employers
This brings us back to the distinction I made at the beginning of the essay.
The humanities are particularly useful for broadly forming a person. Job-specific studies and apprenticeships are particularly useful for learning the knowledge and skills necessary for a profession.
We need both. We need engineers who know engineering, doctors who know medicine and electricians who know how to work safely with electricity.
But we also need those people to be able to think clearly, communicate well, understand other people, make good judgements, recognise beauty, understand the culture they live in and think seriously about what they are actually doing with their lives.
The mistake we’ve made as a society is not becoming more specialised; the mistake is thinking that the specialisation is all education should do.
And interestingly enough, even employers seem to recognise part of this already. Many employers are already searching for a certain type of person rather than simply someone with one particular degree or technical skill set.
A 2025 survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 88.3% of employers looked for problem-solving skills, 81.0% for the ability to work in a team, 77.1% for written communication skills and 73.7% for initiative. Technical skills, at 73.2%, came only after these broader abilities.
The same survey found that only 23.2% of employers exclusively hired graduates with majors directly related to their industry, while 50.8% also hired graduates from outside their industry and 24.3% were willing to hire graduates from any major at all. (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2025)
So employers are not only looking at what particular skill you have learned. They are also looking at whether you can think, communicate, work with others, solve problems and adapt.
This does not prove that studying humanities automatically makes someone a great employee. Neither does it mean that specialised knowledge suddenly stops being important. But it does suggest that the labour market already values many of the broader abilities which a good education should help cultivate.
And as more individual tasks become automated, I think these abilities will only become more important.
What should you do?
I want to stress that I do not think everybody should now start a humanities degree at university. Although I am studying within these fields myself, I don’t think that is the best move for everybody.
There is a distinction to make between having a calling towards a certain field and developing yourself more generally as a person.
God has given everyone certain skills, interests and abilities which can be used in different ways to serve Him and other people. For one person that may lead towards theology or philosophy. For another it may lead towards engineering, medicine, business, carpentry or something completely different.
So find the kind of work or field which actually interests you, become good at it, and take it seriously, but don’t let your professional education become your entire education.
Read good books, be amazed by interesting philosophy, study your faith next to living it, read the great stories of our civilisation, learn about history, look at great art, play some music, learn another language, and write out your thoughts once in a while.
None of these things have to become your profession, but they can make you a more educated, thoughtful and well-rounded person, while also strengthening many of the abilities which remain valuable in your work.
More importantly, they help you remain connected to the parts of life which are valuable whether or not somebody pays you for them.
Summary & Conclusion
The humanities are often viewed as a waste of time because it is not always obvious what job directly follows from them. That reaction is understandable if we begin with the assumption that the purpose of education is simply to prepare someone for a profession.
But historically, education was often understood in a much broader way. It was also concerned with the formation of the person. The Greeks valued broad formation. After this, medieval education first gave students a broad foundation in the liberal arts before they moved into specialised fields.
There was a recognition that becoming good at a profession and becoming an educated person were not exactly the same thing, both could supplement each other.
Modern education has moved much further towards specialisation and job preparation. And again, that is not entirely a bad development. We need specialised knowledge.
But technology is now showing us why formation still matters. As machines and AI become capable of performing more physical and cognitive tasks, the question of what human beings uniquely contribute becomes crucial.
We do not merely perform tasks. We love, worship, suffer, create, remember, communicate, search for truth, build cultures and try to live good lives.
The humanities deal directly with these parts of human existence.
So I don’t think the right conclusion is that everyone should abandon their practical studies and become a philosopher. The better conclusion is that we should stop treating professional preparation as the entirety of education.
Learn your profession well, but also read literature, learn history, study your faith, think philosophically once in a while, encounter beauty, learn languages, make music, and write.
Because before you are an employee, you are a human person. And no technological development makes the cultivation of that person obsolete.