The jackal in the Panchatantra survived by wit, not by brute strength. In a world where machines will increasingly supply the answers, the human being who can frame the right question, who can notice the bandit at the bend, will be more valuable.
There is a Jataka tale I return to often. A merchant crossing a forest meets a talking tortoise who asks to be carried to the next village. The merchant begrudgingly agrees. Along the way, the tortoise speaks, to warn him of a bandit waiting at the bend in the road. The merchant avoids the encounter. The tortoise is never described as clever or strong. It simply notices what others miss. A couple of millennia later, this remains the rarest skill.
I have been thinking about that tortoise a lot these days, as conversations turn to how artificial intelligence and automation will affect jobs in the future. The anxiety is understandable. When a chatbot can draft a legal contract, pass a medical entrance exam, and write tolerable poetry before breakfast, parents are entitled to ask what exactly their children should study. The unfortunate, predictable answer from much of the education industry has been: more code, more code, more code.
I want to suggest the opposite. In a world where machines will increasingly supply the answers, the human being who can frame the right question, who can notice the bandit at the bend, will be more valuable. That is what a liberal education, properly understood, has always trained people to do.
The phrase “liberal education” is often misunderstood in India, partly because it sounds unfamiliar, like a cultural import. It is not. Long before Harvard or Oxford existed, Takshashila and Nalanda taught grammar, astronomy, medicine, logic, music, and statecraft. Students of Chanakya would have been mortified to be called a specialist. They were expected to read the stars, argue a case, compose a verse, and advise a king, sometimes on the same afternoon. It was a tradition that sought to expand the student's worldview.
Somewhere in the twentieth century, we imported an assembly-line model of higher education that treated the human being as a component to be polished for a specific slot — most notably, Engineer or Doctor. The older tradition was lost.
The technology revolution is now making the case for that older tradition of thinking. Large language models have become remarkably good at what we used to reward students for: recalling facts, summarising texts, writing competent first drafts, performing routine analysis. They are not yet good, and may never be good in the same way, at deciding which problem is worth solving, which argument is dishonest, which design is beautiful, which course of action is ethical when two values collide. These are human questions. They require a person who has read widely, argued often, made mistakes in public, and consciously thought about what it means to live a good life.
This is the case for a liberal arts and sciences education, and I should declare an interest: I work with colleagues who are building exactly such a school. The argument to parents is simple, and it borrows nothing from fashion. We are not trying to make students ready for their first job. We are trying to make them ready for their fourth job, the one that does not yet exist. We do this by refusing to let them specialise too early. A student reading Psychology also reads Philosophy. A student of Environmental Science argues about Politics. A student of Literature learns to code, not because we want another coder, but because we want a writer who understands what code can and cannot do.
Critics dismiss this as a luxury. “All very well,” they say, “but will it get my child a job?” It is a fair question given the times. The evidence suggests that graduates from a liberal arts background tend to start a little slower but climb a great deal higher: They are promoted to leadership roles disproportionately because they can do something most specialists cannot: translate between worlds. Between the engineer and the customer. Between the data and the decision. Between what is legal and what is right. In India, where the cost of poor translation is paid in riots, stalled projects, and bad policy, we have a particular need for such people.
There is another Jataka story, less often quoted, about a monkey-king who makes a bridge of his own body so that his tribe may cross a river to safety. He does not survive. The lesson I take from it is not about self-sacrifice, which is a luxury most of us will never be asked to afford. It is about the imagination required to see that your body could be a bridge in the first place. Nobody taught the monkey-king that at a training programme. He had, one suspects, simply spent a lifetime paying attention to the world.
Paying attention is becoming a lost art. Our phones train us against it. Our syllabi, overstuffed and exam-driven, offer no time for it. A liberal education, at its best, is a stand against this shallowness. It forces a student to sit with a difficult text, to listen to a classmate they disagree with, to write and rewrite until the sentence says exactly what they mean. These sound like old-fashioned skills. They are. They are also, I would wager, the last ones the machines will take from us.
None of this is an argument against technology, which I have spent much of my career teaching and using. But it is a case against the superstition that technology alone is education. A country that produces only coders will find, a decade from now, that it has produced a workforce whose skills are reproducible (by machine), and hence replaceable. A country that produces thinkers who happen to code, people who can read a poem and a spreadsheet with equal seriousness, will find it has produced the people the world actually needs.
The choice, for Indian parents and institutions, is between a narrow education that ages badly and a broad one, whose benefits compound over a lifetime. Our own storytellers knew this long before any of us. For the tortoise who noticed the bandit, the monkey-king who became a bridge, they were, in their own way, making the same argument. In a world of quick solutions, the slow, patient and curious being holds the key to a meaningful change.
Views are personal
The author is the Vice Chancellor of RV University, Bengaluru.
First published in City Express (Bengaluru), Education Powerhouses, 30 April 2026.