Chapter 15: Education for Human Beings, Not Economic Units

Reordering Priorities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

There is an argument that has been made for education's importance, across the last two centuries of industrial and post-industrial society, with such consistency and such persuasive force and such deep embeddedness in the institutional assumptions of every major educational system that it has become largely invisible as an argument — has ceased to present itself as one position among others that could be examined and found wanting and has instead achieved the specific status of unexamined common sense, of the obviously true claim that requires no defence because its truth is simply what the situation is.

The argument is economic. Education produces capable workers. Capable workers produce economic growth. Economic growth produces prosperity. Therefore education, whatever its considerable costs in institutional investment and human time and the specific developmental costs that Volume I documented across its full length, is worth those costs because of what it contributes to the economic engine whose outputs justify the investment. Children go to school so that they can participate productively in economic life. Schools are evaluated by the quality of their contribution to that participation. Educational systems are assessed by their contribution to national economic competitiveness. The economic frame is so completely present in how educational policy is discussed, justified, and designed that the possibility of a different frame — of education understood as serving purposes that are not primarily economic — requires a more deliberate act of intellectual recovery than it should.

This argument is not wrong — it contains genuine truth, and dismissing it as though the relationship between education and economic participation were merely an ideological imposition rather than a genuine dimension of the legitimate purposes of education would be both intellectually dishonest and practically counterproductive. But it is incomplete in ways that the specific conditions of the current era — conditions shaped by artificial intelligence and the technological transformation of the nature of work — are making both more visible and more urgently consequential than at any previous point in the history of educational thinking.

What the Economic Argument Got Right

The economic argument for education captured something genuinely important that any serious philosophy of education must accommodate rather than simply argue against: that the practical conditions of human life matter morally as well as practically, that economic capability is a genuine good whose absence constitutes a genuine deprivation, and that education which ignores the need to prepare people for productive participation in economic life is failing a real and legitimate human need rather than refusing a merely ideological demand. The GAKHUR philosophy does not dispute this, and it is important to state the non-dispute directly because the argument of this chapter will be misread if it is understood as proposing that economic preparation be removed from education's concerns — which is not what it proposes.

Human formation and economic capability are not opposites in the way that some educational philosophies have framed them — not rival commitments in which the pursuit of one necessarily diminishes the pursuit of the other. A person who has genuinely developed the inner qualities of Gakhur formation — genuine capability in the full sense of the term, sound judgment grounded in genuine experience, ethical awareness that shapes actual decisions rather than merely informing explicit ethical reasoning, genuine relational competence built through genuine relationship — will also be genuinely valuable in any economic context, not because their formation was designed to produce economic value as a targeted outcome, but because genuine human formation produces the specific qualities from which genuine value, in any context including economic ones, naturally and reliably flows. The disagreement with the economic argument is not about whether education should serve human beings' economic lives — it should. It is about whether the economic frame is the correct primary frame, and what happens to education when it is allowed to become so.

What Artificial Intelligence Changes

The economic argument for education has always rested on a specific and largely unexamined understanding of what economic value consists of and what human beings contribute to its production — the understanding that economic value is generated substantially through the performance of cognitive tasks: the processing of information, the application of defined procedures to specified problems, the production of outputs that require the specific combination of knowledge and skill that formal education has been organised to develop and that the examination system has been organised to certify.

This understanding was always incomplete as an account of what genuinely valuable human economic contribution consists of — it neglected the relational, ethical, and judgment-intensive dimensions of genuine professional capability in ways that genuine professional performance has always exceeded the description. But it was operationally plausible in an era when human beings were the only entities capable of performing the knowledge work that economic production required at scale, and in which the cognitive tasks that education was producing were tasks that the economy genuinely needed human beings to perform.

That era is ending with a speed and a comprehensiveness that the educational systems still primarily organised around it have not yet adequately reckoned with. AI systems are rapidly developing — in many domains have already developed — the capability to perform cognitive tasks with a speed, consistency, and scale that human beings cannot match, and at a cost that makes large-scale deployment economically inevitable rather than merely technically possible. The tasks that examination-oriented, coverage-driven, recall-rewarding educational systems have most reliably and most efficiently produced — the accurate recall of information, the application of defined procedures to specified problems, the performance of cognitive routines within familiar and well-specified parameters — are precisely the tasks that AI can now perform, or will within a timeframe that is educationally relevant, more efficiently than any human being working within any institutional system. Educational systems that continue to justify themselves primarily by preparing learners to perform these tasks are not merely educationally inadequate in the sense of failing their own stated purposes — they are preparing human beings for a version of the economy that is already disappearing, at the precise historical moment when the educational investment of a child's development years needs to be directed toward the capabilities that will remain genuinely and irreplaceably human.

The Gakhur Qualities as Economic Necessities

This is one of the most practically important arguments for the GAKHUR philosophy, and it deserves to be stated with full clarity and full directness rather than offered as an implication that the practically minded reader is invited to draw: in an economy shaped by artificial intelligence — in which routine cognitive tasks at every level of complexity are increasingly performed by systems whose performance improves continuously and whose cost decreases continuously — the specific human qualities that cannot be automated become not merely desirable additions to basic cognitive competence but the primary determinants of what genuine human economic contribution will consist of. These qualities are the Gakhur qualities.

Sound judgment in conditions of genuine complexity — the capacity to read situations that do not have specified correct answers, to weigh considerations that are genuinely in tension with each other, and to act with both appropriate decisiveness and appropriate humility in full awareness of the genuine uncertainty that the action is taken under. The ethical awareness to recognise when efficiency conflicts with human dignity, when the technically optimal solution is not the humanly right one, and to hold this recognition firmly enough that it shapes actual decisions rather than merely informing explicit reasoning that is subsequently overridden by institutional pressure. The relational competence to work with other human beings in genuinely collaborative ways that draw on what each person actually brings rather than producing the performance of collaboration while maintaining the substance of individual agenda. The creativity that arises from genuinely integrated understanding rather than from the recombination of available patterns in ways that AI systems can perform with considerable sophistication. And the wisdom — the patient, time-deepened, experience-grounded, genuinely integrated quality of judgment that the Gakhur concept names — that allows genuinely good decisions to be made under conditions of genuine uncertainty that no algorithmic system can resolve because the uncertainty is irreducibly human in its nature and its stakes.

None of these qualities can be automated, not because current AI systems are insufficiently sophisticated and future systems will eventually catch up, but because these qualities are not properties of information processing at any level of sophistication. They are properties of genuine human formation — qualities that develop through the specific conditions of genuine difficulty, genuine relationship, genuine time, and genuine honest engagement with genuine failure that this volume has been articulating throughout as the conditions of Gakhur formation. An educational system that genuinely produces these qualities is producing the most genuinely valuable human capability available in any economic context, and it is producing it specifically by prioritising genuine human formation over the preparation for cognitive tasks that AI has already, or is in the process of, making redundant.

The Correct Ordering of Priorities

The argument of this chapter does not propose that economic preparation be removed from education's legitimate concerns — it proposes that economic preparation be correctly ordered in relation to human formation, understood as genuinely secondary to human formation rather than primary, and understood as genuinely served by human formation rather than in competition with it as an alternative educational priority.

Human formation first — not as an idealistic aspiration that the practical constraints of real educational systems make impractical, but as the most practically serious educational commitment available in the conditions of the current era, the commitment that produces the qualities that endure across the unpredictable changes of a human life and a human career, that serve the person in every context they will inhabit rather than in the specific contexts for which they were specifically trained, and that no technological development can render obsolete because they are not properties of the processing of specific information but properties of the genuine development of a specific human being. Economic preparation second — grounded in human formation, drawing from it, expressing the capabilities that genuine formation has developed in specific professional contexts rather than existing as an independent educational objective whose pursuit can be separated from the formation that makes genuine professional excellence possible. The learner who has been genuinely formed will be more professionally capable in any specific domain than the learner who has been specifically trained for that domain without the formation that makes professional excellence genuinely achievable rather than merely performed.

The Broader Human Purpose

But the economic argument, however compelling in the specific conditions of the current era, is not the deepest argument for reordering educational priorities around human formation, and resting the case primarily on the economic argument would be a concession to the framing that the argument is ultimately working against — the framing that education's value is primarily determined by its economic contribution and that the question of educational priorities is ultimately a question about which educational approach produces the most economically valuable human beings.

The deepest argument is simply and irreducibly this: education is for human beings — not for economies, not for industries, not for national productivity metrics or international competitive rankings or any other institutional purpose that exists at a level of abstraction above the specific human being who is the actual subject of the educational encounter. For the human beings who are education's students — who are, before they are workers or citizens or contributors to any institutional purpose, people, whose lives have a value that is not exhausted by their economic function or their civic function or any other function that can be specified in advance of and independently of the genuine human being they are in the process of becoming.

This is the argument that the Santal concept of Gakhur makes most directly and most completely. The Gakhur person is not valued by their community because of their economic productivity — not because their formation has made them more useful to the productive processes that sustain economic life, though it may have done that as well. They are valued because their formation has been genuine — because their understanding has reached the specific depth where their judgment can be trusted and their way of being in the world reflects the specific quality of human development that the concept was developed to name and recognise. This valuation is the oldest and most serious understanding of what education is ultimately for, and it is grounded not in the requirements of any particular economic era but in the permanent requirements of genuine human life lived among other human beings in conditions that require genuine judgment, genuine care, and genuine wisdom to navigate well.

Education that understands itself as being in service of this — as forming genuine human beings rather than producing economic units, as developing the inner qualities from which both human flourishing and genuine economic contribution naturally flow, as taking seriously the irreducible worth of each human being in its care rather than treating that worth as a function of the educational system's contribution to institutional purposes — is not sacrificing practical relevance for idealistic aspiration. In the age of artificial intelligence, it is the most practically relevant educational response available. And it is, in every era and regardless of the specific economic conditions of that era, the most humanly serious one.