Lloyd Blankfein, until recently the CEO of Goldman Sachs, counseled, “Study the humanities. Know how people think, know how the cycles work, know the lessons of history.” Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, insists that the most important skills gap in America is not coding; the gap is in “soft skills” like writing, persuasion, and leadership.

An Oxford University study on the vulnerability of different jobs to automation, the largest on the topic, concluded that students who want to prosper in the future must travel against the prevailing ideological winds—that is, they will have to “acquire creative and social skills.”25

he theory of relativity, calculus, even the physics of a bridge—these are deemed valuable not for helping us reach the good, the true, and the beautiful, but only insofar as they give us GPS satellites, efficient insurance pricing, and interstate highways—and even then, only if the latter public goods are mediated by private profits.

in many public school districts we have already traded our collective birthright, the promise of human flourishing, for a mess of utilitarian pottage called “job skills.”