As a former Latin teacher, I’m used to people telling me my subject is obsolete. What use is a so-called dead language in the age of AI? But as the UK throws its weight behind cutting-edge tech, we need to double-down on humanities education. Without it, we risk losing the critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills that will ensure real innovation.
Boosting humanities education should not be an either-or scenario. In fact, when balanced with STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – it can be the key to unlocking a new generation of skilled workers who can meet the demands of the modern world. AI's rapid development has highlighted the vital importance of data science, machine learning, and coding. But building useful systems also requires effective communication and creative problem solving. Simply put, a robust humanities education will ensure that our workforce never loses sight of humanity while working to change it for the better.
This month the Curriculum and Assessment Review interim report doubled down on the growing call for greater humanities education in schools. While looking to future technological developments and challenges Dr Becky Francis, the review’s chair, highlighted that “young people’s understanding of human culture through the humanities, languages and arts” will be a vital component to responding to the waves of change facing our society.
Teachers and employers are already telling us that essential skills are not being taught sufficiently. In the Skills Builder Partnership’s 2024 Essential Skills Tracker only 24% of professionals surveyed said students were being given the opportunity to enhance skills such as problem-solving and literacy.
One step that can be taken to meaningfully change this state of affairs is to reform the English Baccalaureate, or EBacc. Since its introduction in 2010, this Gove-era reform has pushed humanities to the side in favour of a specific set of GCSE subjects - English, Maths, Science, a foreign language and - to represent the entire breadth of the arts and humanities - one of either History or Geography. This has created a narrow view of what arts and humanities subjects have value, and perversely discouraged students from studying what they really love, whether that’s classical civilisation, art, music, drama, or economics. The Curriculum and Assessment Review interim report also found that the EBacc “may unnecessarily constrain the choice of students”.
As a classicist, I can vouch for the rigorous demands placed on humanities students. Being challenged repeatedly on the foundations of one's beliefs prompts more agile thinking. Understanding history, philosophy, geography, and literature unleashes empathy. I drew upon
these skills last year when I weighed up how to vote on the Assisted Dying Bill. It was a time not of politics but collective questioning of who we are and how we may want to approach the end of our lives. It was, to its core, a humanities question and a question about humanity.
While the Assisted Dying Bill was a national moment, others in the future will be less public. Take the rapid rise of agentic AI, AI models that can work autonomously to achieve goals without regular human supervision – this marks a significant departure from generative models which underpin OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While agentic AI represents an exciting chapter in the evolution of AI technology, it also introduces new challenges in AI ethics and governance. If we don’t have a workforce who can effectively work on these issues we risk developing technology without morality, having innovation without empathy, and progress without wisdom.
Deeper humanities education will not only aid the future careers of students but it will also help them navigate the information overload era that we are in. Students need to understand fact from the manipulative fiction being used to drive division and fear online. Young students are growing and learning in a wholly new online environment, while they need to understand the science and mathematics behind these programmes, they also need support to be able to navigate it ethically and independently - robust humanities education does just that.
Viewers of the hit Netflix series ‘Adolescence’ have seen a graphic example of what can happen when young people are not equipped with the human skills needed to safely navigate a dangerously online world. And of course it is through a TV drama that we can explore such a difficult topic, just as the ancient Greeks contemplated mortality, their relationship with the gods, and even the nature of democracy itself through the tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus.
The last time our country’s national curriculum was assessed was in 2014. At that time the iPhone was only seven years old, OpenAI was one year away from being founded, TikTok had not been launched. Since then the world has changed in extraordinary ways and students futures’ look remarkably different. So while the argument that students need to buckle down to STEM subjects remains a valid one, so too is the call for a more holistic approach that incorporates humanities education to equip students with the age-old skills to tackle the problems of the future.
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