It is  twenty years since I first wrote a column for this newspaper.  The greater ease of obtaining and checking relevant facts and data has transformed the life of the columnist. Pulling books from library shelves and turning their pages was never an efficient search technique, even if sometimes an entertaining and instructive one. But exercises that once required hours in a library, and were often unproductive, can now usually be accomplished with a few mouse clicks. It is hard to imagine life without  digital search and the internet.

This change is a pointer to wider changes in the nature of knowledge and the methods of education appropriate to it.  Today it is less important to know, and more important to know what is known.  The options trader need not be familiar with  Black-Scholes equations, though he must know that they exist, and that others attach weight to them:  the lawyer does not need to recall the judge’s reasoning in Bloggs v. Bloggs, but must still have the higher level knowledge that guides her search for relevant cases.

At the frontiers of knowledge, the finance academic who seeks to find a more advanced option pricing model, or the judge who must determine the case to which Bloggs v. Bloggs applies, must still acquire personal  mastery of  all  relevant information.  But writing newspaper columns, running businesses, managing assets, and advising clients in legal disputes, are activities whose primary demand is synthesis.  In these, the ability to make connections between disparate sources of information is more critical than detailed familiarity with any specific source.  And that is the task which modern technology has made so much easier.

That is why the widespread belief that education should be focussed more on the acquisition of job specific knowledge is especially misconceived in the twenty-first century.  Those who argue that more resources should be devoted to teaching STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) have a point, but not the point they generally make.   It is beyond scandalous that so many people in positions of influence, especially in Britain and the United States, are not only functionally innumerate, but do not feel embarrassed by that innumeracy.  But this is because education is excessively specialist, not because it is insufficiently vocational.   In England it is possible, and common, to abandon the study of any scientific subject at the age of fifteen, and the knowledge that they can opt out of any quantitative discipline allows young people to avoid applying themselves to these subjects at an earlier age.

Fareed Zakaria’s defence of liberal education – which introduces undergraduates to a wide range of subjects and approaches to knowledge – is very much to the point.  And so is his refutation of philistine Republican governors (just Google Rick Scott, Rick Perry, or Patrick McCrory), who draw cheap laughs at the expense of philosophy and anthropology. A little capacity for reflection might reveal that morality is not simply a matter of common sense, or reading a sacred text, and that an understanding of other cultures, or simply an acknowledgement that there are other cultures, might have led to better outcomes in Iraq.

 It is a mistake to focus basic education on job specific skills which a changing world will render redundant in a few years.  The objective should be to equip students to enjoy rewarding employment and fulfilling lives in a future environment whose demands we can neither anticipate nor predict.   Twenty years from now, we will probably not be using the Black Scholes model, or referring to the case of Bloggs v. Bloggs.  But the capacities to think critically, judge numbers, compose prose, and observe carefully – the capacities that education can and should develop – will be as useful then as they are today.