What is the purpose of education? How are we educating students for the future? What is the importance of the humanities in this age of AI and the rapidly changing workplace?

Michael S. Roth is President of Wesleyan University. His books include Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters and Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses. He's been a Professor of History and the Humanities since 1983, was the Founding Director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute, and was the Associate Director of the Getty Research Institute. His scholarly interests center on how people make sense of the past, and he has authored eight books around this topic, including his latest, The Student: A Short History.

“There's definitely a shift that occurs in the West from education is really giving you the ability to take your place in society, to education as being able to create your space in society. And so for most of human history in the West, education was to show you where you would fit in, and you may have had a couple of options or not, but you were going to fit in, and you were educated in such a way as to enable that fitting. In the modern period that changes. It's less about fitting in than it is about opening a space for flourishing or for creativity or freedom. And I spend a fair amount of time in the book on college students and those privileged folks who get to extend their formal education in ways that are supposed to open themselves up to creativity, transformation, and eventually participation in the system. That creates their schools in the first place.”

https://www.wesleyan.edu/academics/faculty/mroth/profile.html

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300250039/the-student/

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