Opening: The Conversation
The conversation itself was unremarkable in its setting and familiar in its contours. We spoke, as so many do, about the cost of higher education: about tuition figures that now feel abstract in their enormity, about student debt normalized as a rite of passage, about institutions that increasingly resemble financial instruments rather than places of learning. At some point, a claim surfaced that was meant to steady the discussion, perhaps even to resolve it: education exists for the sake of education.
I did not disagree. In fact, I found myself nodding in assent. And yet, almost immediately, the phrase revealed its insufficiency. It was true in a way that no longer felt adequate. Education may exist for its own sake in theory, but in practice it exists within systems that demand justification, profitability, and demonstrable utility. The deeper question, the one that refused to let the conversation rest for me after is was over, was not whether education has intrinsic value, but whether our institutions still behave as though that were true.
What lingered for me was the sense that we were talking past something fundamental. The problem is not merely that education has become expensive, though it certainly has. The problem is that the meaning of education itself has been quietly redefined. Degrees still signal achievement, but the nature of that achievement has shifted. Completion has replaced formation. Credentialing has displaced cultivation. What we now celebrate is not the disciplined development of thought, but successful navigation of a system designed to sustain itself.
It is tempting to narrate this as a betrayal, to imagine a moment when education “sold out” to the business community. But that framing is too simple, and too comforting. What occurred was slower and far more subtle. Universities adapted. At first to industrialization, then to mass access, then to economic pressure. In doing so, they gradually absorbed the logic of the market. Education did not cease to matter; it learned how to justify itself in economic terms. Over time, that justification became its identity.
What troubles me is not the presence of vocational training within higher education, nor the legitimate desire of students to secure meaningful employment. It is the inversion that followed. Education no longer prepares individuals to think rigorously and work meaningfully; it increasingly prepares them to work first, and to think only insofar as thinking serves productivity. The question shifts from What kind of person is this education forming? to What role will this graduate fill?
This is where the metaphor of René Magritte’s The Son of Man began to impose itself on my thinking. The figure stands upright and respectable, clothed in the uniform of modern professionalism. He is not lacking dignity. He is not incoherent. And yet, his face, the site of identity, perception, and moral agency, is obscured. Something essential is present but hidden, replaced by a symbol that gestures toward meaning without granting access to it.
That, increasingly, is how higher education appears to me. The structure remains. The language of excellence persists. But the animating purpose, the formation of independent thinkers capable of judgment, critique, and imagination, has slipped behind something else. What we are left with is not an absence of education, but a version of it that has learned to survive by becoming something adjacent to what it once was.
This essay grows out of that unease. It is an attempt to slow the conversation down, to refuse the comfort of easy explanations, and to ask what has been obscured in the process of adaptation. If education still matters, and I believe it does, then the question is not simply how much it costs, but what we believe it is for.
The Obscured Face
René Magritte’s The Son of Man presents itself with deceptive simplicity. A man stands before us, frontal and composed, dressed in a dark overcoat and a bowler hat. Behind him stretches a low stone wall and a restless sea beneath a clouded sky. The figure is unmistakably modern. He is neither heroic nor marginal, but respectable, anonymous, and orderly. And yet, at the precise point where recognition should occur, where face meets gaze, an apple hovers, blocking access.
Magritte insisted that this was not concealment for the sake of mystery, but a statement about perception itself. What we see, he argued, always hides something else. Visibility does not guarantee understanding. In The Son of Man, the man is not absent; he is withheld. His identity is implied but deferred, suggesting that the surface we are offered is never the thing itself.
This distinction matters. The apple does not erase the face; it replaces it with a symbol. We are given an object rich with cultural meaning—knowledge, temptation, nourishment, even transgression—but we are denied the human specificity behind it. The substitution is clean, elegant, and acceptable. It asks us to be satisfied with representation rather than encounter.
The business suit, too, is not incidental. Magritte’s recurring bowler-hatted figures populate his work as emblems of modern conformity. As men shaped by external norms rather than interior vocation. They are interchangeable, defined less by who they are than by how well they fit. In this sense, The Son of Man does not depict an individual so much as a type: the modern subject rendered legible through dress and posture rather than through thought or expression.
It is difficult not to see the contemporary university reflected here. The institution stands upright, respectable, and rationalized. It wears the uniform of legitimacy: accreditation, rankings, outcomes, and strategic plans. Its face, however, is obscured. Where one might expect to find a clear articulation of educational purpose like formation, wisdom, and ethical reasoning we encounter instead an apple: employability, market relevance, workforce readiness. These are not meaningless concepts, but they function as substitutes. They signal value without revealing substance.
The apple reassures. It is familiar. It promises nourishment. And yet, it prevents us from asking who stands behind it.
What makes Magritte’s image particularly resonant is that the concealment is voluntary. Nothing forces the apple into place. The figure does not struggle against it. There is a quiet acceptance in the pose, a willingness to be known through symbol rather than self. This, too, parallels the modern university’s posture. Institutions rarely claim to have abandoned deeper educational ideals; they simply stop foregrounding them. Over time, the language of formation recedes, replaced by the language of function.
The sea behind the figure complicates the scene. It suggests instability, motion, and depth—forces that cannot be fully contained or managed. In contrast, the man stands rigidly, aligned with the wall, contained within the frame of respectability. The tension between these elements mirrors the tension within education itself. Human inquiry is inherently unsettled, resistant to closure. Institutional structures, by contrast, seek predictability and control. The apple becomes a means of stabilizing what is otherwise unruly.
In reading The Son of Man as an educational metaphor, the question is not whether the apple belongs there, but what its presence costs us. When education presents itself primarily through the language of utility, it risks obscuring the human face of learning, the slow cultivation of judgment, the capacity to question inherited assumptions, the courage to think independently. We are shown outcomes instead of minds, credentials instead of thinkers.
Magritte does not resolve this tension. He leaves us suspended between curiosity and frustration. We know there is more to see, but we are not permitted access. That refusal is instructive. It forces us to confront our own willingness to accept substitutes for substance, symbols for realities, surfaces for depths.
If the university now wears the business suit, the problem is not the suit itself. It is the quiet agreement that the suit is sufficient. It is that the suit tells us everything we need to know about what education is and whom it serves. The Son of Man insists otherwise. It reminds us that whenever something essential is hidden, the task is not to look away, but to ask why we have grown comfortable not seeing.
When Education Changed (and Why That Matters)
It is tempting to locate the transformation of higher education in a single moment. To link it to a policy decision, an economic downturn, a cultural betrayal and to name it as a fall from grace. That narrative is emotionally satisfying, but historically false. What changed was not education’s existence, but its orientation, and that change unfolded slowly, almost imperceptibly, as universities responded to shifting cultural demands. The danger lies precisely in that gradualism. When change occurs incrementally, it rarely announces what it costs.
The earliest universities in Europe, institutions such as the University of Bologna and the University of Paris, understood themselves as communities ordered toward inquiry rather than output. Their purpose was not to serve an economy in the modern sense, but to preserve, interpret, and extend bodies of knowledge deemed essential to human understanding. Even when these institutions trained clergy, jurists, or physicians, they did so through a framework that emphasized intellectual formation prior to professional application. Knowledge preceded function.
This began to shift as universities became increasingly entangled with the needs of the modern state. During the early modern period, education was called upon to produce administrators, legal thinkers, and professionals capable of sustaining bureaucratic governance. The humanities remained central, but their justification subtly changed. They were no longer merely avenues toward wisdom; they became instruments of social order. Still, the scholar’s identity remained intact. Education served power, but it had not yet been subsumed by it.
The decisive transformation occurred with industrialization. As economies reorganized around manufacturing, efficiency, and specialization, knowledge itself was reclassified. Applied sciences, engineering, and technical expertise rose in prominence, not because they were inferior forms of knowing, but because they aligned cleanly with emerging economic needs. Universities adapted, as institutions must in order to survive. In the United States, this adaptation was formalized through the Morrill Acts of the nineteenth century, which established land-grant universities explicitly tasked with advancing agriculture, industry, and mechanical arts.
This expansion was, in many respects, a democratic achievement. Higher education ceased to be the preserve of a narrow elite and became accessible to broader segments of the population. But accessibility came with new expectations. Universities were no longer judged primarily by the quality of their intellectual culture, but by their utility to the nation’s economic development. Education acquired a public justification rooted in productivity.
The twentieth century accelerated this trend. Following World War II, universities expanded dramatically, fueled by government investment, corporate partnerships, and mass enrollment. During this period, higher education increasingly adopted the language and structures of business. Departments were evaluated by measurable outputs. Research was valued for its grant-generating potential. Students were reframed as investments whose success could be quantified through placement rates and earnings data.
At no point did universities announce that they were abandoning the cultivation of thought. They did something more subtle: they learned to speak about education in terms that could be defended economically. Over time, that defensive posture became internalized. Institutions began to understand themselves less as guardians of intellectual tradition and more as competitive enterprises operating within a marketplace of credentials.
This is where something fundamental was lost. What was lost was not rigor, not ambition, but patience. The kind of thinking fostered by the humanities requires time that cannot always justify itself in quarterly reports or strategic plans. It values uncertainty, ambiguity, and critique. It values qualities that resist efficient measurement. As universities became self-sustaining businesses, these forms of thinking grew increasingly difficult to defend, not because they lacked value, but because their value was not easily monetized.
The change, then, was not malicious. It was adaptive. Universities responded to real pressures with rational strategies. But adaptation is never neutral. Each accommodation subtly reshapes identity. When survival depends on alignment with market needs, institutions begin to internalize those needs as purposes. Education shifts from asking what kind of human being it hopes to form to asking what kind of graduate the economy requires.
Understanding this slow transformation matters because it prevents both nostalgia and resignation. The problem is not that universities evolved, nor that they engaged the world beyond their walls. The problem is that in learning how to sustain themselves, they quietly redefined what education was for. What was lost was not a romantic past, but a clear sense of orientation. What was lost was an understanding of education as a formative good rather than a transactional one.
This historical context sharpens the distinction that now presses forward: the difference between a scholar and an employable graduate. The erosion did not happen all at once, but its consequences are now unmistakable. To recover what matters about education, one must first recognize how slowly, and how reasonably, it drifted from its original center.
The Scholar’s Robe
Before the scholar became a professional, before knowledge became a commodity, the scholar occupied a distinct social and moral space. The robe was not merely ceremonial attire; it was a visible declaration that the scholar stood in a different relationship to time, value, and obligation. To wear the robe was to signal withdrawal from immediate utility and immersion in study. It marked a life oriented toward contemplation rather than production.
This separation mattered. The medieval and early modern scholar was not understood primarily as a worker, but as a steward of inherited knowledge and a participant in its ongoing refinement. The work of learning was slow, recursive, and dialogical. Authority was earned through sustained engagement with texts, arguments, and traditions, not through efficiency or output. The robe signified patience. The robe signified an acceptance that understanding unfolds over time and often resists closure.
At the heart of this scholarly formation stood the trivium: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. These were not subjects in the modern sense, but disciplines of mind. Grammar trained attention to language, cultivating precision, nuance, and care in expression. Logic disciplined reasoning, teaching the scholar to distinguish coherence from persuasion, validity from assertion. Rhetoric, far from mere ornamentation, addressed the ethical responsibility of speech within communal life. Together, these disciplines formed thinkers capable of judgment rather than mere performance.
What is striking, in retrospect, is how little the trivium concerned itself with application. It assumed that if one learned how to think clearly, speak responsibly, and reason well, usefulness would follow but indirectly, and on terms shaped by judgment rather than demand. The scholar was not trained to fill a role; the scholar was formed to discern which roles were worth filling.
The robe thus represented more than intellectual status. It marked a refusal to collapse learning into labor. Scholars were not above society, but they were not reducible to its immediate needs. Their value lay precisely in their capacity to stand at a critical distance. There value lay in there ability to question assumptions, to preserve inconvenient truths, and to engage questions that had no obvious payoff.
This distance is what the modern university has found increasingly difficult to justify. As institutions became embedded within economic systems, the scholar’s posture of separation came to appear indulgent, even irresponsible. The robe, once a symbol of dedication, began to look like an anachronism. In its place emerged the language of professionalism: productivity, relevance, deliverables. The scholar was recast as an expert, then as a knowledge worker, and finally as an employee within a complex organizational hierarchy.
The business suit did not replace the robe because it was more practical; it replaced it because it communicated alignment. It signaled that the scholar now operated within the same temporal and economic logic as everyone else. Research was expected to produce outcomes. Teaching was evaluated through metrics. Thought itself became accountable.
Something essential was lost in this transition. Not because scholars should be exempt from responsibility, but because the conditions necessary for genuine intellectual formation were eroded. When every activity must justify itself through measurable impact, the kinds of questions that define scholarship become harder to pursue. Why ask what justice is when one can measure compliance? Why linger with ambiguity when clarity is rewarded? Why risk dissent when alignment ensures stability?
The scholar’s robe once protected a space where such questions could be asked without apology. Its disappearance marks not simply a change in fashion, but a change in expectation. The scholar is no longer permitted to be unproductive in the short term, no longer granted the freedom to think beyond immediate usefulness. The world the robe signified, a world in which education was trusted to matter even when its benefits were not immediately visible, has grown fragile.
This does not mean that we must return to a cloistered academy or deny the realities of contemporary life. But it does require acknowledging that something irreplaceable was carried in that older identity. The scholar was not merely someone who knew things, but someone formed by the discipline of thinking itself.
The loss of the robe, then, is not about nostalgia. It is about the disappearance of a cultural permission. The permission to think slowly, deeply, and critically without first proving one’s economic worth. To understand what education has become, we must first understand what it no longer protects.
From Formation to Function
If the scholar was once formed, the contemporary student is increasingly prepared. The distinction may appear semantic, but it marks a profound shift in educational identity. Formation implies an open-ended process concerned with who a person becomes. Preparation implies readiness for a predefined role. The modern university, shaped by economic pressure and cultural expectation, has largely embraced the latter.
This shift did not occur because universities suddenly rejected intellectual depth. It occurred because function became easier to justify than formation. As higher education expanded in the twentieth century, particularly in the postwar era, institutions were asked to explain their value to governments, families, and students themselves. The answer increasingly took the form of employability. A degree was defended not as an initiation into a life of the mind, but as a credential that translated learning into economic opportunity.
Over time, this translation became the primary language of legitimacy. Programs were evaluated by placement rates. Majors were ranked by earning potential. Students were encouraged, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, to think of education as an investment and themselves as future returns. In this framework, learning becomes instrumental. Its worth lies not in what it cultivates internally, but in what it produces externally.
The figure that emerges from this logic is the employable graduate. This graduate is adaptable, credentialed, and aligned with market needs. They possess competencies rather than convictions, skills rather than questions. Again, this is not a caricature; such graduates are often capable, hardworking, and earnest. The issue is not their character, but the narrowness of the educational horizon offered to them.
When universities center employability as their defining purpose, they implicitly teach students how to relate to knowledge. Knowledge becomes something to acquire efficiently, apply predictably, and monetize successfully. Learning is framed as accumulation rather than transformation. The question shifts from What does this idea mean? to How will I use this? Meaning is subordinated to utility.
This orientation subtly reshapes pedagogy. Courses are designed around outcomes rather than inquiry. Assessment privileges demonstration over exploration. Risk—intellectual, moral, or imaginative—is discouraged in favor of clarity and correctness. Students learn quickly what is rewarded: alignment with expectations, mastery of frameworks, and the reproduction of accepted answers. Independent thought becomes optional; compliance becomes strategic.
The employable graduate, then, is not trained to ask whether the structures they enter are just, humane, or sustainable. They are trained to function within them. Education becomes a mechanism of social reproduction rather than social critique. It produces workers capable of sustaining systems, but less capable of imagining alternatives.
This is where the distinction becomes urgent. A scholar is formed to interrogate the world; an employable graduate is prepared to inhabit it. A scholar understands that knowledge is provisional and contested; an employable graduate is taught to deliver solutions within existing parameters. One is oriented toward thought as a moral responsibility; the other toward productivity as a social expectation.
The tragedy is not that universities prepare students for work. It is that work has become the dominant metaphor through which learning is understood. When function replaces formation, education risks losing its capacity to surprise, to unsettle, and to provoke. It becomes efficient, legible, and safe.
And yet, the challenges facing contemporary society—ethical crises, political polarization, technological acceleration, environmental collapse—are not problems of insufficient skill. They are problems of judgment, imagination, and moral reasoning. They require thinkers capable of questioning assumptions, not merely executing plans.
The rise of the employable graduate thus reveals a deeper tension at the heart of modern education. We have learned how to prepare individuals to enter systems efficiently, but we have grown less confident in forming individuals capable of asking whether those systems deserve their allegiance.
Scholar versus Employee
The distinction between a scholar and an employee is not a matter of prestige, nor is it an argument for elitism. It is a distinction of orientation toward knowledge, toward authority, and toward the self. When education collapses these identities into one, it does not merely change outcomes; it reshapes the moral posture of learning itself.
A scholar is defined less by what they know than by how they stand in relation to knowledge. Scholarship is marked by attentiveness, skepticism, and humility. The scholar understands that ideas are provisional, that truth emerges through contestation, and that certainty is often a warning sign rather than an achievement. To be a scholar is to accept intellectual responsibility. To be a scholar is to recognize that thinking carries ethical weight and that inherited frameworks must be examined rather than merely applied.
An employee, by contrast, is defined by function. Their value lies in reliability, efficiency, and alignment with organizational goals. This is not a moral failing; societies require coordinated labor in order to function. But the employee’s relationship to knowledge is instrumental. Knowledge is something one uses to accomplish tasks, solve problems, and meet expectations. Questions are welcome insofar as they improve performance; doubt is tolerated only when it leads to resolution.
The problem arises when education treats these orientations as interchangeable.
When universities imagine the ideal graduate primarily as an employee-in-waiting, they tacitly teach students how to inhabit authority. Authority becomes something external and given located in systems, metrics, and managerial frameworks rather than something to be examined, challenged, or negotiated. The student learns that success depends on correctly interpreting expectations and delivering acceptable outputs. Thinking becomes adaptive rather than critical.
The scholar, by contrast, is formed to be uneasy with authority. Not hostile, but alert. The scholar asks who benefits, whose voice is missing, and what assumptions remain unspoken. This posture is inherently inefficient. It slows decision-making, complicates narratives, and resists closure. For precisely these reasons, it is often inconvenient. But it is also indispensable.
This distinction matters because societies advance not through obedience, but through friction. The ideas that reshape cultures rarely emerge from smooth compliance. They arise from individuals educated to see beyond what is immediately given, to imagine alternatives, to recognize contradictions, and to speak when silence would be easier. Such capacities are not accidental byproducts of education; they must be cultivated deliberately.
When higher education prioritizes employability above all else, it risks producing graduates who are highly capable but intellectually deferential. They know how to operate within systems, but not how to question them. They follow procedures, but struggle to articulate why those procedures exist or whether they should. In this way, education can unintentionally train people to mistake order for wisdom and efficiency for truth.
A system optimized for employability tends to reward conformity masked as professionalism. Original thought becomes risky. Moral dissent becomes inconvenient. The goal is not to form minds capable of resistance, but personalities capable of integration.
The scholar resists this reduction. To be educated as a scholar is to learn that thinking is not merely a tool, but a responsibility. It is to understand that one’s highest loyalty is not to productivity, but to truth-seeking even when that truth unsettles existing arrangements. This does not make scholars unemployable; it makes them dangerous in the most necessary sense of the word.
If education abandons this distinction, it forfeits one of its most important social functions. It ceases to be a space where alternative futures can be imagined and becomes instead a mechanism for reproducing the present. The question, then, is not whether universities should prepare students for work, they must, but whether they will also insist on forming thinkers capable of asking what kind of work, and what kind of world, is worth sustaining.
Teaching How to Think versus Training What to Do
At the center of this distinction lies a deceptively simple claim: education should teach people how to think, not what to think. It is a phrase often repeated and rarely examined. In practice, teaching how to think is far more demanding, more disruptive, and more difficult to institutionalize than training students to perform tasks correctly. It resists standardization. It cannot be rushed. And it does not always produce outcomes that can be predicted in advance.
To teach how to think is to invite uncertainty into the classroom. It requires confronting students with questions that do not resolve neatly, arguments that unsettle prior assumptions, and texts that refuse easy moral alignment. This kind of education privileges process over product. It values the quality of engagement more than the correctness of conclusion. Above all, it insists that thinking is an active, ethical practice rather than a technical skill.
Training, by contrast, is oriented toward execution. It asks what must be done and how efficiently it can be accomplished. Training rewards clarity, repetition, and compliance. It assumes that the goals are already known and that the task of education is to prepare individuals to meet them. Within this model, thinking becomes subordinate to doing. Reflection is permitted only insofar as it improves performance.
The humanities historically occupied the space where thinking itself was the subject. Philosophy trained students to recognize flawed reasoning and to sit with ambiguity. History taught them that institutions are contingent, not inevitable. Literature cultivated empathy and moral imagination by placing readers inside lives not their own. These disciplines did not aim to produce consensus; they aimed to produce discernment.
What makes such education uncomfortable, particularly for institutions under pressure to demonstrate value, is that it cannot guarantee agreement. A student who has learned how to think may arrive at conclusions that are unpopular, inconvenient, or disruptive. They may question authority, challenge inherited norms, or refuse the premises upon which systems operate. From the perspective of efficiency, this looks like failure. From the perspective of democracy and cultural vitality, it is essential.
When education shifts its emphasis toward training, it subtly reshapes student behavior. Students learn to anticipate what instructors want rather than to pursue questions that matter to them. They optimize for grades, credentials, and approval. Risk-taking becomes irrational. Intellectual obedience masquerades as professionalism. Over time, this produces graduates who are adept at navigating systems but hesitant to interrogate them.
The fear that education is increasingly shaping individuals to follow instructions and generate products rather than to cultivate ideas is not a speculative anxiety; it is structural. It is woven into curricular architectures, reinforced through assessment regimes, and echoed in institutional language that defines success as alignment with predetermined outcomes. Within such a framework, intellectual divergence comes to appear not as curiosity, but as risk. Creativity is welcomed only insofar as it can be repackaged as innovation, and thought that resists immediate economic justification is quietly edged toward the margins.
This is not merely an academic concern; it is a civic one. Societies depend on individuals capable of critical judgment, moral reasoning, and imaginative foresight. The most pressing challenges of our time such as technological power without ethical clarity, political polarization without dialogue, economic growth without meaning are not problems that can be solved through training alone. They require people educated to think beyond instruction.
Teaching how to think does not guarantee wisdom. But it creates the conditions under which wisdom remains possible. It prepares individuals not merely to function within the world as it is, but to question whether that world ought to remain unchanged. In doing so, it honors education’s deeper responsibility: not to reproduce society efficiently, but to renew it thoughtfully.
When universities replace this mission with the language of readiness and relevance, they risk mistaking immediacy for importance. The question is not whether graduates can do what is asked of them. The question is whether they have been taught to ask whether what is being asked is worth doing at all.
The Degree as Commodity
When a degree becomes a commodity, its meaning shifts in ways that are subtle yet profound. Commodities are valued not for what they are, but for what they can be exchanged for. Their worth is determined by market conditions, scarcity, and perceived return on investment. Once education enters this logic fully, it does not cease to be education but it is compelled to speak a language that steadily erodes its deeper claims.
The contemporary degree functions increasingly as a transactional object. Students purchase access, complete requirements, and receive a credential that promises future economic benefit. This promise is not incidental; it is often the primary justification offered to prospective students and their families. Marketing materials emphasize career outcomes, salary projections, and employability statistics. Education is framed less as a formative journey and more as a product with deliverables.
In this framework, achievement is redefined. The degree no longer signifies sustained engagement with ideas, traditions, and modes of thought; it signifies successful compliance with institutional procedures. Credit hours replace mastery. Benchmarks replace judgment. Completion becomes the dominant metric, regardless of what has been completed internally. The credential certifies endurance and conformity as much as understanding.
This is not to deny the real labor students undertake, nor the genuine learning that still occurs. Rather, it is to note that the meaning attached to the degree has been thinned. When education must justify its cost primarily through economic payoff, it invites a narrowing of purpose. Students learn, often implicitly, that the value of their education lies not in who they become, but in what the credential allows them to access.
Universities, operating as self-sustaining businesses, are not immune to this pressure. Rising operational costs, reduced public funding, and competitive markets force institutions to frame education in terms that attract enrollment and investment. The result is a feedback loop: students demand economic justification because institutions market it; institutions market it because students demand it. In the process, education becomes both expensive and fragile, priced highly while defended narrowly.
This commodification also alters the student’s relationship to learning. When education is purchased, dissatisfaction is framed as consumer grievance rather than intellectual struggle. Difficulty becomes a service failure. Ambiguity becomes inefficiency. The slow, often uncomfortable work of thinking is reinterpreted as poor design. Education, once understood as transformative, is now expected to be smooth.
What is lost here is not merely romance, but integrity. A commodity must satisfy the consumer; education, at its best, unsettles the learner. A commodity confirms preference; education challenges assumption. When these logics collide, education is pressured to behave like something it is not. The degree becomes a proxy for value rather than a testament to formation.
This dynamic helps clarify the paradox at the center of contemporary higher education: education becomes increasingly expensive even as its meaning is quietly diminished. Rising costs reflect expanding infrastructure, administrative complexity, and market competition, while the substance of education is narrowed by the pressure to promise certainty and measurable return. The result is a steady inflation of credentials accompanied by a corresponding deflation of intellectual ambition.
Seen through the lens of The Son of Man, the degree functions much like the apple. It is tangible, recognizable, and reassuring. It signals legitimacy. But it also obscures the face behind it. It obscures the the actual work of thinking, questioning, and becoming. We accept the symbol because it is easier to exchange than the reality it replaces.
If education is reduced entirely to commodity, it risks hollowing itself out. Not because markets are inherently corrosive, but because learning cannot be fully captured by transactional logic. The value of education lies precisely in what exceeds immediate exchange: the capacity to think critically, to imagine alternatives, and to act with moral awareness.
When the degree becomes the goal rather than the byproduct of formation, education begins to mistake its own symbol for its purpose. And once that confusion takes hold, reclaiming the deeper meaning of achievement becomes not only difficult, but urgent.
The Civic Consequences of a Narrow Education
The consequences of an education oriented primarily toward employability do not remain confined to campuses or career centers. They radiate outward, shaping the intellectual and moral texture of civic life itself. When universities narrow their purpose to the production of efficient workers, society inherits not merely a workforce, but a citizenry trained to function rather than to judge.
Democratic societies depend on more than technical competence. They require citizens capable of interpreting complex information, recognizing manipulation, and engaging disagreement without retreating into slogans or certainty. These capacities are not natural; they are learned. Historically, they were cultivated through exposure to philosophy, history, literature, and rhetoric; disciplines that trained individuals to weigh arguments, recognize contingency, and tolerate ambiguity. When such formation weakens, public life becomes brittle.
A narrow education produces a particular civic posture: deference to systems that present themselves as inevitable. Graduates trained primarily to operate within existing structures are less likely to question the assumptions those structures rest upon. They may be skilled at implementation, but they are often hesitant when confronted with foundational questions: Who benefits? Who is excluded? What alternatives exist? In the absence of these questions, efficiency becomes a substitute for justice.
This helps explain a paradox of contemporary life. Never before have societies possessed such technical capacity, and yet public discourse feels increasingly shallow, polarized, and reactive. The problem is not a lack of information, but a lack of interpretive skill. Citizens are flooded with data but underprepared to evaluate it. Opinion replaces argument. Certainty replaces inquiry. These are not failures of intelligence; they are failures of education.
When education emphasizes compliance and performance, it habituates individuals to external authority. Metrics replace judgment. Expertise is deferred to rather than examined. Over time, this produces a civic culture in which people are either obedient or cynical, but rarely engaged in sustained, reflective participation. Thought becomes outsourced to algorithms, to institutions, to experts rather than exercised as a shared responsibility.
The humanities once served as a counterweight to this tendency. They did not provide answers so much as they cultivated habits of questioning. They taught that history could have unfolded differently, that language shapes reality, and that moral clarity is often hard-won. Without these habits, societies struggle to imagine futures that differ meaningfully from the present. Innovation becomes technological rather than ethical. Progress is measured by speed rather than wisdom.
The concern that education increasingly produces followers rather than thinkers finds its civic consequence here. A society shaped primarily by followers may appear orderly, but it remains fundamentally vulnerable and susceptible to demagoguery, to the seductions of simplification, and to the gradual erosion of democratic norms. Without citizens formed to think critically and independently, public life shifts from deliberation to performance, from shared reasoning to managed spectacle.
This is not an argument for abandoning practical education, nor for retreating into an ivory tower. It is an argument for balance. Work matters. Skills matter. But when education forgets its responsibility to cultivate judgment, society pays a quiet but enduring price. The ability to earn a living does not guarantee the ability to live well together.
In this sense, the loss being traced is not merely academic, but civic and moral. An education that once sought to form individuals capable of critique now risks shaping individuals optimized for compliance. The former sustains democratic life by cultivating judgment and dissent; the latter stabilizes existing systems while leaving their legitimacy largely unquestioned.
If the university has become a business, then the question is not whether it can remain profitable, but whether it can still serve the public good in its deepest sense. The answer depends on whether education can reclaim its role as a space where thinking is valued not for its efficiency, but for its capacity to orient society toward justice, meaning, and shared responsibility.
Returning to the Painting: What Remains Hidden
At this point, it becomes necessary to return to The Son of Man, not as an illustration of the argument, but as its quiet adjudicator. René Magritte’s painting has waited patiently in the background, offering no solutions and demanding no conclusions. Its power lies precisely in its refusal to resolve the tension it creates.
The man remains standing. The suit remains impeccable. The apple remains suspended. Nothing has been corrected.
This is important. Magritte does not remove the obstruction. He does not reward our analysis with revelation. The face, the symbol of subjectivity, agency, and moral presence, remains hidden, not because it has been destroyed, but because it has been replaced by something easier to accept. The apple is not violent. It is ordinary, even comforting. And yet, it blocks the encounter that matters most.
In this way, the painting mirrors the condition of contemporary education with unsettling accuracy. The scholar has not disappeared. The intellectual life has not been eradicated. It has been covered. It has been covered by credentials, outcomes, employability statistics, and marketable assurances. These are not false goods. But they function as substitutes. They promise legitimacy while diverting attention from formation.
What remains hidden is not knowledge, but thinking. Not information, but judgment. Not productivity, but purpose.
The business suit in the painting is crucial here. It signals respectability and belonging. The figure is not marginal or rebellious; he is compliant with social expectation. This is not the image of an enemy of learning, but of its domestication. Education, too, now stands respectably clothed, fluent in the language of markets and metrics. It appears successful. It appears rational. And yet, the face behind it, the question of what education is ultimately for, remains obscured.
The sea behind the figure continues to trouble the composition. It suggests depth, instability, and forces that exceed containment. It is the realm of uncertainty, possibility, and risk. Education, at its best, belongs partly to this sea. It invites students into intellectual waters that cannot be fully mapped in advance. It exposes them to questions that do not resolve neatly into outcomes. But institutions, seeking stability, prefer the wall in front of the sea. They prefer a boundary, a safeguard, a manageable horizon.
The apple hovers precisely at the intersection of these forces. It keeps the subject legible while protecting the system from the unpredictability of genuine thought.
What this painting ultimately reveals is not deception, but accommodation. The man has accepted the apple. He does not push it away. Likewise, universities have largely accepted the substitution of formation with function, not because they reject thinking, but because they have learned to survive without foregrounding it. Over time, survival becomes justification. Justification becomes identity.
And yet, Magritte reminds us that what is hidden still exists. The face is there. The scholar remains. The capacity for education to form thinkers rather than merely produce graduates has not vanished. It has simply been covered by symbols that promise clarity without depth.
It is here that this essay must resist the temptation of a tidy resolution. There is no simple restoration, no return to robes and cloisters, no wholesale rejection of work or economic life. The task is more demanding than nostalgia allows. It requires learning to see beyond the apple. It requires us to recognize the moment when symbols of value begin to stand in for value itself.
To return to education, then, is not to abandon employability, but to refuse its dominance. It is to insist that thinking is not a luxury, but a responsibility. It is to remember that societies do not move forward merely by producing more efficient workers, but by cultivating minds capable of imagining alternatives, resisting injustice, and asking uncomfortable questions.
Magritte offers no prescription, only a demand for attention. He reminds us that whenever something essential is hidden, the ethical task is not to accept the substitution, but to ask what we have agreed not to see.
Conclusion: Reclaiming the Face
To reclaim the face in The Son of Man is not to remove the apple, but to recognize what it conceals. René Magritte does not invite us to destroy the symbol; he invites us to become aware of our willingness to accept it. That awareness, applied to education, is where any honest recovery must begin.
The transformation of higher education into a self-sustaining business did not occur because institutions abandoned their ideals, but because they learned to survive in a culture that increasingly demands justification in economic terms. Over time, survival logic hardened into identity. The degree became a product. The graduate became an outcome. Thinking became valuable insofar as it could be operationalized. What was lost was not learning itself, but confidence in learning as a human good that exceeds immediate utility.
Reclaiming the face of education, then, does not mean rejecting employability or denying the realities of work. It means refusing to allow employment to exhaust education’s purpose. A society that educates only for function risks becoming efficient but hollow. It risks become an education capable of producing goods without producing meaning, systems without wisdom, and compliance without judgment.
The scholar matters because the scholar embodies a different relationship to the world. The scholar is not opposed to work, but oriented toward understanding. Not resistant to structure, but alert to its limits. Not indifferent to outcomes, but unwilling to let outcomes replace inquiry. This posture, slow, critical, and reflective, is increasingly difficult to defend in institutions shaped by speed, scale, and market logic. Yet it is precisely this posture that enables societies to correct themselves.
To teach people how to think rather than what to think is to accept risk. It is to form individuals who may challenge authority, disrupt consensus, and resist inherited assumptions. Such individuals are inconvenient. They do not always integrate smoothly. But they are necessary. Without them, societies stagnate. They repeat themselves efficiently until they collapse under the weight of unexamined belief.
The tragedy being named is not merely educational, but moral. When education trains individuals primarily to follow instructions and deliver outcomes, it relinquishes its responsibility to cultivate conscience and imagination. Obedience is privileged over judgment, productivity over purpose, and in that exchange the very face that gives education its meaning is quietly obscured.
And yet, the face remains.
Behind the credentials, behind the metrics, behind the language of readiness and relevance, there persists a quieter truth: education matters because thinking matters. Not thinking as technique, but thinking as an orientation toward truth, toward justice, toward the possibility that the world might be otherwise than it is.
The task before education is not restoration, but remembrance. To remember that a degree is not an end, but a begining. That employability is not a telos, but a consequence. That the deepest work of learning cannot always justify itself in advance, because its value lies in what it makes possible rather than what it produces.
Magritte leaves us standing before a figure we cannot fully see. Education stands before us in much the same way. Both stand before us recognizable, respectable, and partially obscured. Whether we choose to accept the apple or to ask what it hides will determine not only what our universities become, but what kind of society they sustain.
To reclaim the face is to insist that education is not merely preparation for life, but participation in its meaning. It is to defend thinking not as a luxury, but as a civic and moral necessity. And it is to affirm, quietly but firmly, that an educated person is not simply someone who can do what is asked, but someone who knows how and when to ask otherwise.