The topic of an “education crisis” has become background noise — debated by teachers, tech entrepreneurs, and government officials alike — but reforms still look cosmetic: a bit more IT in school, a soft skills module at university, a critical thinking course on Tuesdays. Meanwhile, the systemic driver of change runs deeper — and it now operates independently of ministries’ intentions. The very definition of valuable knowledge has changed.
Education as Skill
Originally, learning was part of life. It wasn’t separate from practice: someone hunts, someone gathers — children watch and imitate. No abstraction. Knowledge = skill, mistake = risk.
This kind of education didn’t require theory or institutions — its function was strictly practical: survival in a world that repeated itself.
Education as Knowledge
With the rise of the state, markets, and science, learning ceased to be a craft and became institutionalized. Subjects, standards, and exams appeared. The goal: to teach universal structures — logic, arithmetic, history, physics.
In an industrial economy, this worked. The system needed doctors, engineers, accountants, teachers. It was built on the idea that knowledge is capital — something you can invest in, formalize, and measure.
When Knowledge Became Too Cheap
That model is now breaking down. Access to knowledge is instant. Algorithms “know how to do” in nearly every field — from coding to cooking. This isn’t a hypothesis; it’s an observable fact.
In this environment, a new scarcity emerges: not knowledge, but judgment. What used to be a soft skill is now the core — because the human is no longer a carrier of knowledge, but a filter: to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant, the accurate from the flawed, the safe from the risky.
Common Sense as the New Center
In practice, this means a shift toward heuristic, contextual thinking. Not just critical thinking in the academic sense, but the ability to understand a task that’s not yet in the database. Not “what does gravity do,” but “should gravity matter in this case.”
In countries attempting reform — Finland, Estonia, Singapore — the educational process is already built not around subjects, but around questions. The focus isn’t on “definitive answers” but on learning how to decide which questions are worth answering in the first place.
What’s Next
This doesn’t mean knowledge is no longer important. But it’s no longer a unique resource. What becomes unique is judgment — the ability to build a simple model of a situation, test a hypothesis quickly, discard what’s irrelevant in time. If the old school taught: “do it this way — because that’s how it’s done,” the new reality demands something else: “try to understand what’s actually happening here, and only then decide whether to act.”
This kind of education is harder, more expensive, and offers no guarantees. But there’s no alternative left. Everything else is a repetition of what machines can already do.
One area that will grow, though, is education tied to physical labor and hands-on professions — from contractors to massage therapists. At least until we have cheap machines with human motor skills, warm skin, and the ability to adapt to unpredictable situations. ■
Previously on the topic:
On the Core Deficiency
On Modernity
On Postmodernity