Bring Back the Liberal Education (for the Post-Industrial Age)

Our schools were built to make dependable factory workers: bells, compliance, one right answer. That model made sense in 1900—but the factory is gone and the incentives that shaped “industrial education” are still with us. In this episode, I argue for bringing back a liberal education—not as nostalgia, but as the most practical toolkit for the Augmentation Age.

We trace how mass urbanization and child labor concerns led to school as factory—rewarding smart conformists while sidelining creativity, judgment, and inquiry. Then we rebuild the core: logic and critical thinking (to separate signal from noise), rhetoric and communication (to persuade with clarity), the scientific method and basic statistics (to test claims), plus philosophy/ethics, history/civics, literature/art, languages, media literacy, and durable numeracy. The aim isn’t more facts—AI holds those—it’s better questions, better decisions, and better action.

I share why curricula can’t keep up with tool stacks, how AI shifts value from memorization to judgment, and where entrepreneurs can step in—micro-schools, cohort courses, and company “finishing schools” that teach by doing. We’ll also talk about the difference between “your truth” and “the truth,” why long-term thinking matters more than ever, and how to start a DIY liberal education at home or at work with simple practices that produce public, real-world artifacts.

Bottom line: the Industrial Age is over. To thrive now, we need thinkers who can reason, communicate, and lead—and that’s exactly what a liberal education builds.

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