Why a Liberal Arts Education Still Matters For Kids In the Age of A.I.
The fried rice was greasy on the chipped blue cereal bowl Liam was using, and he’d twisted the drawstring of his soccer hoodie into a tight knot by the time my sister said it. “History? You want to major in history?” She tapped the breaking news alert on her phone, the one that pops up on all our feeds lately: AI could replace a quarter of all job roles within a decade. “Why waste four years learning something a bot can summarize in 10 seconds? Just pick comp sci. You’ll be set.”
I sat back and stirred my lemonade, because I hear this every single week as a high school English teacher. Parents come in with the same worry, framed slightly different: isn’t all this reading and writing and talking about old ideas useless when AI can do it faster? I get it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t check my own 10-year-old’s course schedule and wonder if I’m pushing too much poetry and not enough coding. But last fall, I had an experience that changed how I talk about this with parents, and it started with Liam sitting in on my senior class.
He’d been curious what a college-level discussion looked like, so I had him sit in the back during our unit on the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. We started class by pulling up a ChatGPT summary of the strike, just to see what it gave us. It was correct: dates, names, key events, the impact on the civil rights movement. It was all perfect, and half the class nodded along like that was all there was to know. Then I asked: why do most of your high school textbooks only mention this strike once, in a single sentence after MLK’s assassination?
Silence for a minute, then one girl said “because it was led by Black union workers, not famous preachers?” Another said “because they were demanding better working conditions for poor people, and that’s not the story people like to tell about civil rights.” Liam raised his hand from the back – he’d never been in my class before – and said “if you just read the AI summary, you wouldn’t even think to ask that question, right? It just gives you the answer they think you want.”
That’s the part no one talks about when they’re panicking about AI and liberal arts. Liberal arts isn’t about memorizing dates or writing five-paragraph essays that AI can crank out in 30 seconds. It’s about learning to ask the questions that don’t have pre-written answers. It’s about reading between the lines of what you’re told, and connecting what happened 100 years ago to what’s happening to your friend group, your town, your job right now. That’s not something AI can do, because AI only pulls from what’s already been written. It can’t see the gaps that no one has pointed out yet.
After class, we walked to the gas station down the street for slushies, and Liam told me he’d always thought his love of history was just a weird hobby. He liked going to the small local museum in our town and reading the old plaques about the mill workers who went on strike in the 1930s, stuff that no textbook covers. I told him about my cousin Claire, who graduated with a philosophy degree 12 years ago and now works as a senior product ethicist at one of the biggest AI companies in the country. She told me last Christmas that her team actively seeks out liberal arts majors for entry level roles, more than they do straight comp sci grads some years. The engineers can build the algorithm, but someone has to ask: who is this algorithm going to hurt? What stories is it missing? Why are we building this in the first place? Those are all liberal arts questions.
I’ve started giving parents three small, concrete things to think about when they come to me worried that their kid’s love of English or art history or sociology is going to leave them unemployable. First, swap the question “what job will this get you?” for “what problem do you like thinking about?” AI can solve the problems we already know to name, but the best jobs over the next 20 years are going to go to people who can find new problems no one else has seen. If your kid likes thinking about why people tell the stories they do, or how groups of people make hard choices, that’s not a useless hobby – that’s a skill set.
Second, if your kid is excited about a non-STEM subject, don’t immediately pivot to talking about money. Instead, ask them to tell you one thing they learned in that class this week that surprised them. I’ve seen so many kids shut down about their interests because the first thing they hear from their parents is “how will you pay rent?” It doesn’t mean you can’t talk about practicality, but it starts with honoring that their curiosity matters. Curiosity is the skill that AI can’t copy.
Third, it doesn’t have to be either/or. My nephew is planning to pair a history major with a minor in data analytics, so he can learn to analyze large sets of historical records for the museum exhibits he wants to build. That’s the sweet spot – technical skills paired with the ability to ask why that data matters, and who it’s for.
Liam still hasn’t sent off his college applications, and my sister still worries sometimes that he’s making the wrong choice. She asks him every other week if he wants to take that summer coding camp, and he says maybe, but he’s still set on history. I don’t tell her everything will be fine, because I don’t know that. No one knows what the job market will look like in 10 years. But I tell her what I saw in my classroom that day: AI can give you all the facts. It can write the essay, summarize the strike, spit out the dates. It can’t care about the people the facts are about. It can’t want to tell the story that no one else has told. That’s the part that’s still ours.
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