Long ago, in a town whose name the storyteller has forgotten, four friends set out to seek their fortune. Three of them had spent years mastering the sacred sciences of their time. The fourth had studied very little, but he understood people, weather, animals and the ordinary world around him. The Panchatantra calls him the one with common sense, a man of buddhi.

On the road, they found the bones of a dead lion scattered in the forest. The first scholar said, “I can join the bones.” He did. The second said, “I can give it skin, flesh and blood.” He did. The third said, “I can breathe life into it.” The fourth friend raised his hand and pleaded, “Stop. This is a lion. If you wake it, it will eat us.”

The three scholars laughed. “You are uneducated,” they said. “Watch the power of our knowledge.” The fourth friend sighed, climbed a tall tree, and waited. The third scholar completed his mantra. The lion opened its eyes, stood up, and killed all three of its creators.

I have told this story in classrooms from the metros to the small towns of India for 14 years. Every year, the room goes quiet at the same moment. Because every student suddenly realises that the three scholars are not characters from an old book. They are the products of our modern degree factories. They are technically perfect, commercially confident, and dangerously unwise.

What fourteen years of teaching has shown me

I will not name the institutions where I have taught, trained, examined, mentored or evaluated. They are scattered across this country: big city campuses with glass atriums, tier-two town colleges with leaking ceilings, glossy private universities with international tie-ups, and humble programmes run in rented floors above shops. The institutions differ in fees, faculty and furniture. But the pattern I have seen repeats with painful consistency.

A student walks into a postgraduate management class. She can build a pivot table in ninety seconds. She can recite the 4Ps, the five forces and the seven Ss. She cannot explain why a border dispute thousands of kilometres away changes the price of the fertiliser her family buys. She cannot write three coherent paragraphs without help from a tool. When I ask her what she thinks about a difficult policy question, she asks me what the “right answer” is for the exam.

A young engineer in an M.Tech class can tune a model but cannot tell me who might be harmed by it. A data science student can clean a dataset but has never asked who decided what was collected and who was left out. An HR specialisation student can list motivation theories but has never read a novel that shows what a human being at work feels. A marketing student can run a campaign but cannot distinguish persuasion from manipulation, because nobody ever taught her ethics, history or psychology as living subjects.

These are not stupid young people. I want to be very clear about that. They are hardworking, anxious and often the first graduates in their families. But we have trained them to become narrow. When I say people are becoming dumber, I do not mean they have lost intelligence. I mean they are losing the breadth of mind, the habit of questioning and the capacity to connect ideas. That is cognition, and it is being starved.

The employability gap is not a rumour

The India Skills Report, published annually by an employability assessment firm along with industry partners, has hovered around the 50 to 55% range for the employability of Indian graduates in recent editions. The 2025 edition put the figure at roughly 55 percent. Read that again. Nearly half of those who finish our degrees are considered not ready for a job.

An older but widely discussed national employability study by a talent assessment company found that around 80% of Indian engineers were not employable for software roles, and that only a tiny fraction possessed skills in emerging areas like AI and machine learning. The exact figure can be debated. The direction cannot.

The India Employment Report 2024, prepared by the International Labour Organization and the Institute for Human Development, delivered a harder blow. Youth made up about 83% of India’s unemployed. The share of educated youth among the unemployed rose from about 35% in 2000 to nearly 66% in 2022. In plain words, a degree no longer protects a young Indian from joblessness. It has become the common qualification of the jobless.

Now place this beside the demand side. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect roughly 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. The top core skill employers want is analytical thinking, which about seven in ten companies rated as essential. Right behind it come resilience, flexibility, agility, leadership and social influence, creativity, and curiosity with lifelong learning. Look at that list carefully. Not a single item is a software package. These are habits of mind. They are exactly what history, philosophy, literature, sociology, political science, psychology and economics are designed to build, slowly, through reading, argument and writing.

So, the connection is simple. The market is asking for minds. We are supplying tools. And then we blame the students, the employers and each other when the two do not match.

The “cognition problem” in the age of AI

There is a deeper alarm that few admissions brochures will mention.

When I began teaching, the fear was that machines would do routine work. Today machines also write, summarise, design, code and analyse. A student who has been trained only to execute a defined technical task is training for exactly the work that software now does faster and cheaper. The more narrowly you are trained, the more easily you are replaced.

What cannot be easily automated? Judgment under ambiguity. Moral reasoning. Understanding of culture, language and context. The ability to ask the right question when the data is incomplete. The ability to persuade a sceptical room. The capacity to see how a policy in one ministry shakes a market in another. These are not “soft skills,” as the corporate world condescendingly calls them. They are the hardest skills of all, and they grow only through sustained engagement with the humanities.

There is also early scientific evidence that we should not ignore. In 2025, researchers at the MIT Media Lab released a preliminary study, with a small group of about 50 participants, in which people writing essays with the help of a large language model showed weaker brain connectivity and poorer recall of their own work than those who wrote unaided. It is early research, not yet a final verdict, and I would not build a doctrine on it. But it matches what I see in my classrooms. When a student outsources thinking before she has learned to think, the muscle never forms.

Long before AI, researchers in Norway analysing military conscript data found that the long rise in average IQ scores, the famous Flynn effect, had begun to reverse for cohorts born after the mid-1970s, with evidence pointing to environmental causes rather than genetics. Nobody can claim a simple link to any one factor. But it tells us that human cognition is not guaranteed to rise on its own. It depends on how we educate, read, converse and struggle with ideas. A society that stops exercising its mind should not be surprised when the mind weakens.

Now imagine this happening in a country of 1.4 billion people, where the Annual Survey of Higher Education counted a gross enrolment ratio of about 28% and over 4,00,00,000 students in higher education. If a large share of those minds is trained narrowly and then handed an AI that finishes their sentences, we are not building a demographic dividend. We are building a demographic dependency.

The curse of the specialisation scramble

Walk through any admission season and you will hear the same chant. Marketing, finance, analytics, business management, robotics, data science, HR. Parents say it with the confidence of people reciting a family prayer. Coaching centres sell it. Colleges print it on hoardings with photographs of smiling students holding offer letters.

Nobody is saying these fields are worthless. They are essential. My objection is to the way they are taught in isolation, as if a marketer does not need to understand anthropology, as if a finance professional does not need history, as if a robotics engineer does not need philosophy, as if an HR manager does not need literature and psychology.

Consider the evidence from our own recent past. Financial crises have repeatedly been preceded by brilliant quantitative models operated by people who had never studied how panics, greed and institutions behave across centuries. Social media algorithms optimised for engagement, built by superb engineers, have also deepened polarisation and anxiety, partly because their builders were never trained to ask what a society needs. Businesses launch products that fail because they misread the culture they sell into. Entire teams burn out because managers learned motivation as a framework and not as a human reality.

The blind men and the elephant are another story we all grew up with. One touches the trunk and says it is a snake. One touches the leg and says it is a pillar. One touches the ear and says it is a fan. Each is correct about his own part and wrong about the animal. A specialist trained without a liberal education is exactly such a man. He is confident, detailed and wrong about the whole.

When education became a product

I must now say something uncomfortable, and I say it as an insider who has seen this up close in many kinds of institutions.

Much of the damage comes from the unchecked commercialisation of education. When a degree is treated as a product and a student as a customer, the institution begins to think like a retailer. Programmes are launched where the demand is loud, not where the need is deep. Fashionable specialisations are added because they fill seats. Humanities departments are shrunk, merged or quietly shut because they do not produce visible placement numbers in the first week. Faculty members are hired on thin contracts, burdened with massive teaching loads and little time for research or mentoring. Libraries become decorative. Admission targets overrule academic standards.

Governance has not kept pace. Regulators are stretched, accreditation is often a paperwork exercise, and disclosures about placements, salaries and faculty quality are frequently inflated or vague. A shiny brochure can claim “100% placement” without anyone defining what counts as a placement, at what salary, in what role, and how many months it lasted. Students and parents, who have often taken loans or sold land and gold to pay fees, cannot verify what they are told.

The National Education Policy 2020 deserves credit for pushing in the right direction. It speaks of multidisciplinary education, flexible choices, a four-year undergraduate structure with liberal arts foundations, and a target of 50 percent gross enrolment by 2035. But a policy is a promise, not a practice. On the ground, I have seen “multidisciplinary” reduced to a single elective squeezed into a crowded timetable, taught by whoever was available, assessed by multiple choice questions. The label changes. The learning does not.

Without strong, transparent, independent checks on quality, pricing, claims and academic freedom, the market will always reward the cheapest way to produce a certificate. And the cheapest way to produce a certificate is to teach narrowly, test narrowly and avoid anything that makes students ask difficult questions.

The great LinkedIn misconception

Now to a myth I meet every week, usually in a confident LinkedIn post. It goes like this: liberal arts only teach students to protest, to criticise, to romanticise poverty and to hate business. A professional who has never opened a book on political theory or sociology explains with certainty that humanities graduates are “unemployable activists.”

Let me answer this plainly, as someone who has spent a career both in the classroom and in public life.

Liberal arts do not teach protest. It teaches inquiry. A history student learns to weigh evidence from conflicting sources. A philosophy student learns to build and break an argument. A literature student learns to read between lines and to understand how people feel when they cannot say it. A political science student learns how institutions, interests and incentives shape outcomes. An economics student learns why markets work and sometimes fail. A sociology student learns why the same policy lands differently in a Chennai fishing village and a Delhi apartment complex. A psychology student learns why people behave irrationally with money, with power and with each other.

Is a questioning mind uncomfortable to those who prefer obedience? Yes. But the same questioning mind is what a company needs when a strategy is heading for a cliff. The best chief executives, regulators, diplomats, founders and editors I know did not become great by memorising frameworks. They became great because they could see systems, read people, weigh trade-offs and communicate clearly. Many of them studied the humanities.

And let us be honest about protest itself. Peaceful dissent is not a defect. It is a pillar of a democracy and a feature of our own freedom struggle. Gandhi was a lawyer who read widely, wrote constantly and reshaped how an empire could be challenged. Ambedkar, an economist, jurist and scholar, gave us a constitution because he had mastered law, economics, history and sociology together. These were not narrow technicians. They were integrated minds. If we mock liberal education, we mock the very roots of the republic that allows us to post our opinions on LinkedIn.

What we must do, urgently

I do not want to end with despair, because an educator who gives up has no business in a classroom. So here is what I believe must happen.

First, every professional programme, whether MBA, M.Tech, MMS, law, design or medicine, must carry a serious liberal arts core. Not one token elective. A real sequence in history, philosophy, ethics, economics, literature, sociology, political science and writing, taught by committed faculty and assessed through essays, debates and reading, not recall.

Second, we must treat reading and writing as non-negotiable. A graduate who cannot write a clear page of argument will not survive in a world where machines can generate fluent nonsense. Our task is to build people who can tell sense from nonsense.

Third, regulators must demand honest disclosure. Placement data, salary figures, faculty qualifications, student-faculty ratios and the content of curricula should be independently audited and made public in a standard format. Parents deserve the same protection in education that they get when buying a house or a medicine.

Fourth, institutions must be rewarded for learning outcomes, not for admission volume. Public funding, accreditation and recognition should favour those that protect academic freedom, invest in faculty and show real evidence of intellectual growth.

Fifth, employers must stop writing narrow job descriptions and then complaining about narrow graduates. Hire for curiosity, writing, judgment and learning ability. Train the tools later. Tools change every eighteen months. Minds last forty years.

Sixth, students and parents must ask a different question during admissions. Do not only ask, “What is the average package?” Ask, “What will my child be able to think, write, question and understand at the end of this programme that a machine cannot do for her?”

The tree and the lion

Let me return to the Panchatantra.

The fourth friend did not save himself by being ignorant. He saved himself by being wise enough to ask a question the three scholars never thought to ask: should we do this? That is the question of the humanities. It is the question that comes before capability and after it. It is the question that every engineer, manager, marketer, analyst and policymaker must learn to ask.

We are now building lions faster than any civilisation in history. Algorithms that shape what a billion people see, models that decide who gets a loan, robots that replace hands, platforms that rewrite attention. If the people building them have only learned how, and never why, we will repeat the fate of the three scholars at national scale.

India has always known better. Takshashila and Nalanda did not teach a single craft in a single silo. They taught logic, grammar, medicine, astronomy, ethics and debate side by side, because the ancients understood that a mind is not a machine with separate compartments. Somewhere between the colonial clerk factory and the modern placement mill, we forgot this.

The time to remember is now, before the lion fully wakes. Our children do not need to choose between employability and wisdom. They need both, together, in the same classroom, taught by teachers who are free to teach and regulated by systems that value truth over marketing. Fourteen years of watching bright young faces go dull under the weight of narrow syllabi has convinced me of one thing. A nation that stops teaching its young to think broadly will soon find that it has forgotten how to think at all.

Let us give our children the roots of the tree, not only the fruit. And let us pray, and work, so that the next time a lion rises, someone in the room has the wisdom to say: wait.

Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.

Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.

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