“To career” means “to move at a fast, reckless, or uncontrolled speed, similar to the original meaning of a horse’s gallop.” That’s about right. It should be clear by now that for many (if not most) people, the idea of a single, lifelong career is a relic of the past—something you’d expect to learn about on a tasteful Ken Burns PBS miniseries filled with black-and-white photographs of men in bowler hats. The question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” assumes that life can be neatly preordained. The audacity. So let’s bury that idea with a stake through its heart and move on, shall we?
Today’s young people will change careers, sometimes radically, multiple times, and will flourish because of that volatility. They were made for it. A humane and effective education system, therefore, must do the following three things:
1. Embrace the inevitability of multiple career changes in life
A major 2024 study by researchers in Europe and Australia emphasizes that modern career trajectories are increasingly nonlinear, with widespread patterns that include multiple transitions, job/occupation changes, and midcareer moves.
Young people are less willing to be pigeonholed as any one thing, understanding that versatility makes them not only more competitive in the working world but happier. Some shift out of necessity; industries evolve, companies collapse, technologies “obsolete” entire professions. But many are doing it by choice.
The trouble is, they’re figuring all this out on their own. Our educational systems are still built for the previous era. We imagine that we’re prepping students for a single professional identity. This is not the case.
We should be equipping them for serial reinvention—teaching flexibility, curiosity, and the ability to learn quickly, not to mention the skills and personality traits of the entrepreneur. The professional educator’s gig should be endowing kids with the intellectual dexterity to pivot from biology to business, art to engineering, from a salaried position to blissful freelance employment, all without panic or shame.
In this model, career change is not failure but laudable self-discovery and evolution. It’s a sign that someone is alive, paying attention, and moving with the world instead of clinging to a life raft of outdated skills. A healthy education system would expect students to change careers and encourage them to see a new direction not as a detour but as the next chapter in a well-lived life.
There is one more additional factor to take into account: longevity. Set aside the empty hype of the Silicon Valley biohackers who insist we’ll all soon be living to 150 and one fact remains inarguable: People are living longer and healthier, and that means longer spans of working. Today’s educational system wasn’t designed to accommodate a working life that might run from age 18 to age 98 . . . but a new one must.
2. Nurture, develop, and celebrate the polymath
Specialization has its place, but we’ve gone too far. We’ve built schools that churn out narrow experts who know everything about almost nothing. But the world’s greatest innovators, thinkers, and creators—the people who’ve shaped history—were rarely pure specialists. They were polymaths. Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, engineer, anatomist, and inventor. Ada Lovelace was both a mathematician and a poet. Buckminster Fuller designed buildings and reimagined systems. They didn’t “stay in their lane.” They invented the lanes.
We tell college students, “Pick a major,” and then we wonder why they’re anxious, bored, or unprepared. We should be encouraging the opposite: the habit of exploring wildly, connecting disparate ideas, and following curiosity wherever it leads. It should be ordinary, even praiseworthy, for a student to be a generalist with tendrils in science, art, sociology, the humanities, business, cuisine, astrophysics, and the fluid dynamics of airflow over a thrown baseball.
When we nurture the polymath, we produce people who can think laterally—spot patterns others miss, blend ideas from multiple domains into something fresh. That’s the kind of mind that thrives in an unpredictable world, which, if you haven’t noticed, is the one we’re living in.
The first move: abolish majors. If students must choose a course of study, let them choose from categories of intellectual exploration based on the full human experience: The Mind, How We Know What We Know, Creation, Macro and Micro, and so on. You could call these “majors,” but they’re really tangential fields of knowledge that fall under a wide umbrella of interrelated subjects—psychology, the quantum physics of consciousness, and Eastern sacred wisdom traditions, for one example. Courting such intellectual agility is vital given the speed with which career paths and specialties are changing. “Minors” become rabbit holes in which students deep-dive into subtopics of personal fascination.
Imagine a system where every engineer also learned about Kant and Spinoza. Where every aspiring poet learned about quantum entanglement and behavioral economics. Where every business student or financier also got a deep grounding in Viktor Frankl and Martin Seligman. That ecosystem would produce thoughtful beings who can collaborate across fields, innovate responsibly, and see the big picture.
3. Honor every form of work
We’ve built an education system that ranks professions like U.S. News & World Report ranks universities. In effect, the path you choose determines where you fit into the social hierarchy. Doctor or lawyer? Your parents must be so proud. Founder of a unicorn tech company? See you at Davos. You’re a plumber, carpenter, or run an urban farm? Oh, how . . . nice. That’s not just snobbery—it’s cultural blindness. The new school must end the fetishization of university education and the universal idea that the only way to achieve fulfillment and prosperity is by getting the right four-year degree. Education must recognize that there is deep intelligence in manual skill, in craftsmanship, in building a boat or assembling a soufflé—particularly in a world where artificial intelligence is rendering work built around the rote memorization and retrieval of facts extinct.
It’s time to erase the false divide between “academic” and “vocational.” Every form of honest work deserves respect, and every form of work benefits from education. A mechanic who understands physics is better at problem-solving. A software engineer who’s studied ethics writes better code. A nurse with a background in art might communicate with patients more compassionately.
When schools honor every kind of work equally, they’ll produce citizens who understand that there are many kinds of intelligence, and that one’s economic class does not correlate to intellect or value. Everyone has value. In the system we live in, all of this is plugged into a hierarchy framework based on the ability to make money. Mitigating this—decoupling young people’s personal value from their ability to generate wealth—and maximizing the value of their knowledge, versatility, and passion is a process worth undertaking.