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Yuval Noah Harari, the celebrated historian, made a bold claim: “Today, nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years."1
I think Harari is wrong.
Of course, much depends on what we think is the aim of education. J. F. Roxburgh (1888-1954), a British schoolmaster, was close to the mark with his pithy claim that we should nurture young people so that they are “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck”.2 Such intellectual agility is precisely what societies and economies need most from their citizens when confronted with problems syllabi can’t fully anticipate: pandemics, financial shocks, or transformations caused by compounding climate, tech, and geopolitical disruptions.
To be fair to Harari, he is now on board with Roxburgh’s way of thinking and recently recognised that “to flourish in the 21st century, you need a very flexible mind”.3
In other words, the most timely educational systems are those that pursue timeless wisdom. From Plato to George Eliot, the “best which has been thought and said”4 must unapologetically be at the heart of young people’s learning if they, and our societies, are to thrive.
This paradox is borne out by the latest World Economic Forum’s The Future of Jobs Report5 which identified the following top five core skills needed for the labour market:
What is most striking is how closely the WEF's timely employability skills align with Aristotle's timeless framework for eudaimonia, or human flourishing, articulated over 2,000 years ago. Phronesis — practical wisdom and good judgement — maps directly onto analytical thinking. Resilience and agility reflect the virtues of courage and temperance: Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, the right response between excess and deficiency.6 The same logic runs through every skill on the WEF list.
While WEF identifies the capacities young people will need to thrive in the workplace, Aristotle points us towards the character needed to use those capacities well. Crucially, the integrative virtue of phronesis, or practical wisdom, is developed over time through education, reflection and habituation. The great Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget is often credited with the observation: “Intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do.” That, surely, is what having a flexible mind is really about.
The WEF top core skills list places “technological literacy” just behind the top five. Yet just a few years ago the WEF ranked “technology design and programming” eighth.7 After just a few years of young people being advised that programming and coding were crucial for future career success, such “cutting-edge” skills now look less like the future itself than one tool within it.
As Jared Cooney Horvath, one of the most insightful educators of the digital era, explains: “When you teach people how to use a tool, they are able to use that tool. When you teach people how to think and learn, they are able to use all tools."8
Recent research analysing US occupational data and 70 million job transitions has shown that advanced, specialised skills tend to rest on broader, more general foundations.9 This is because skills are nested: the sophisticated capacities that matter most later in life do not float free from knowledge; they grow out of it.
So beware of the simplistic “teach future skills” rhetoric. Resilience, creativity, programming, leadership and judgement cannot be taught as detachable modules. They grow out of deep foundations – language, knowledge, reasoning, communication, self-command and cultural literacy – built cumulatively over time.
There are no shortcuts to resilience. As Roxburgh well understood, an “invaluable in a shipwreck” graduate is not someone who has completed a resilience module. It is someone whose intellectual, moral, civic and performance virtues have been nested over time into a character capable of acting with phronesis. We thus develop the traits for success in this age of resilience precisely by leaning into timeless wisdom to achieve eudaimonia, which is needed more than ever.
The educational message is clear. In an era of AI and labour-market disruption, the best preparation for the future is not a narrow focus on “future skills”, but a knowledge-rich education that builds the foundational human capacities on which later flexibility depends.
This means policy makers would do well to resist the temptation to organise curricula around whichever technical skill currently appears most marketable. Instead, we need to protect a broad, knowledge-rich core — literature, history, mathematics, science, languages, the arts and civic education — because these disciplines build the conceptual, cultural and linguistic foundations on which later creativity, judgement and adaptability depend. It would also mean treating so-called “future skills” not as stand-alone subjects but as outcomes of demanding study: critical thinking developed through evaluating historical evidence; creativity through composing music, writing and solving unfamiliar problems; resilience through sustained effort, revision and productive failure; and leadership through debating, sport, drama, and community service. Assessment would therefore reward not only recall, but the intelligent application of secure knowledge to new and uncertain situations.
At the same time, policy would need to preserve the human conditions in which character and creativity are formed. Despite growing pressure from technologists, that means investing in excellent teachers rather than imagining that AI can replace them. Motivation is not simply delivered with content: it is cultivated through encouragement, explanation, challenge and human attention. Research shows that pupils who experienced greater teacher support displayed stronger motivation to learn, as well as higher attainment and lower mathematics anxiety.10 Policy should therefore protect discussion, practical work, performance, apprenticeship and mentoring, while ensuring that schools remain communities rather than content-delivery platforms.
AI literacy matters, but it should be taught critically and developmentally: younger pupils would first acquire the knowledge and habits needed to judge AI-generated output, while older pupils would learn when to use such tools, when not to use them, and how to verify their claims. The guiding principle should be simple: technology ought to extend human judgement, not substitute for its formation.
We do not prepare young people for an uncertain future by chasing every new certainty. We prepare them by forming the kind of people who can think, judge, adapt and act wisely when certainty runs out.
1 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b1PJkdh9Was
2 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/6965133/David-Cameron-A-test-of-character.html
3 https://x.com/harari_yuval/status/2064001026684785135
4 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy.
5 https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf
6 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.
7 https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_2020.pdf
8 Jared Cooney Horvath, “AI in Education,” LinkedIn post, 2025.
9 Hosseinioun, M., Neffke, F., Zhang, L. et al. ‘Skill dependencies uncover nested human capital.’ Nature Human Behaviour 9, 673–687 (2025).
10 OECD, Teacher Support for Student Learning: Insights from PISA, OECD Education Policy Perspectives, no. 124 (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2025), DOI: 10.1787/97b3a899-en.
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