Why Education Is Important

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John Adams hoped future generations would have more freedom to study the arts and humanities.

The liberal arts and humanities were never a luxury—they form the habits of mind democracy needs.

Today, AI and related pressures push colleges toward workforce alignment at the expense of civic formation.

In 1780, while serving as a diplomat in Paris, John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail:

"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematics and Philosophy."

Adams then imagined his sons studying commerce and agriculture so that future generations could pursue painting, poetry, music, and the liberal arts.

The premise seems quaint today. Yet Adams captured something essential: Education can serve purposes beyond earning a living. As a society grows more prosperous, it can devote resources not merely to producing workers, but to forming citizens—people who inherit a civilization, develop their aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities, and participate meaningfully in public life.

That idea is under serious strain. In a prior post, I examined how current incentives are lowering academic standards and threatening to hollow out the market value of the college degree. Here I focus on a deeper problem: the eroding civic value of higher education.

The Dual Purposes of College Education

A college education serves two functions. Its signaling function verifies that a student has the competence, knowledge, and grit employers value. Its civic function transmits a society's cultural and intellectual inheritance, cultivating a student’s capacity to think independently and participate in democratic life. Thinkers from John Dewey and W.E.B. Du Bois to Robert Maynard Hutchins have long emphasized this civic........

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