Our understanding of success also needs reconsideration. A person may earn a large income and yet experience a life impoverished by broken relationships, anxiety, selfishness or an absence of purpose. Another person may have a modest profession but contribute enormously to family, community and society. Economic achievement and human fulfilment are not synonymous. Education should not teach young people to be indifferent to material success, but it should teach them that material success is only one component of a meaningful life. This brings us to perhaps the deepest question: what is the purpose of human life?

Different philosophical and spiritual traditions answer this question differently, and education should not impose one particular answer. But education should create the intellectual space for a young person to ask the question. What does it mean to live a good life? What do I owe to my family and society? What is the relationship between freedom and responsibility? What constitutes happiness? How should one respond to success and failure? What is the difference between desire and need? How should power be exercised? What makes an action just or unjust? These are not questions outside education. They are among the most important questions education can help a human being explore. Literature, philosophy, history, art and culture have a special role here.

Literature allows us to enter lives different from our own. History teaches us that societies are shaped by choices and consequences. Philosophy trains us to examine assumptions. Art develops sensitivity and imagination. Music and theatre cultivate emotional expression and collective experience. Civics teaches us that rights are accompanied by responsibilities. These disciplines should not be regarded as ornamental in an education system increasingly oriented towards science and technology. The technological citizen of tomorrow will need the humanities precisely because technology will increase his power to act while leaving unresolved the question of what actions are desirable. Hence, the need for an inter-disciplinary approach to education.

Reorienting education also requires a closer relationship between education and the world of work, but in a different way from simply making education job-oriented. Students should have opportunities to understand actual workplaces, professions, entrepreneurship, crafts and skilled occupations. Vocational education should receive the dignity it deserves. The artificial hierarchy between “academic” and “practical” learning needs to be reduced. A society requires skilled technicians, artisans, farmers,........

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