The Education of a Skillful Man
Generalize for Cultivation; Specialize for Penetration
“Do you see a man skillful in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before obscure men.” -Proverbs 22:29
Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) was a Jesuit polymath who is said to be the “the last man who knew everything.” A 2004 book edited by Stanford professor of history, Paula Findlen, even bears the erudite expression in the subtitle dedicated to this particular man of science. Yet, the expression has also been attributed to others, like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), Thomas Young (1773–1829) in a 2006 biography by Andrew Robinson, and even Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) in a 2017 biography by David N. Schwartz.
While the assertion that anyone could possibly know everything is obviously more generous trope than historical reality, the expression is meant to describe the point in time when last of the great, universal scholars lived and worked; it was a time before the proliferation of specialized knowledge made it impossible for any one person to master all fields of human understanding.
The proliferation of specialization, along with the subsequent burgeoning industrial revolution, led 19th-century pedagogues to remake education into various arenas of specialized training (See our short film on this). As knowledge expanded, so did modern education’s reach. For example, specialized training entered higher education through programs like Charles Eliot’s elective system at Harvard. But it soon moved its way down to the high schools, and eventually into middle schools, where adolescent students are encouraged toward specialization by choosing their career paths before the 6th grade.
Notwithstanding, a 2024 report published by Burning Glass Institute and Strada Institute for the Future of Work highlighted that “roughly 52% of recent bachelor’s graduates are underemployed one year out, meaning they work in jobs that do not require a degree and even a decade later, about 45% remain underemployed.”1
Generalization
One implication of the Strada report is that generalized education, not the specialization of modern conception, is better for students. Add to their findings the launch of AI, and you get an already shifting job market that is now morphing at dizzying rates. Many specialized jobs that exist when students start college are gone or will be outsourced to AI before they graduate. Jeremy Tate, CEO of the Classical Learning Test, emphasized this fact in a recent post he wrote on LinkedIn. Tate says,
Specialization is dead. DEAD. For a century we told young people to specialize early. Pick a lane. Master one thing. That made sense in a stable economy with predictable careers. But that world is gone. AI and automation are erasing job descriptions faster than schools can adapt. The narrowly trained specialist is fragile. When the tool changes, they start over. The future belongs to the generalist. Not the unfocused drifter, but the liberally and classically educated mind trained in first principles, history, language, logic, and judgment. These people don’t just know what to do. They know how to think. Generalists move across domains, learn new systems quickly, and adapt without panic. They can become specialists when needed and leave a specialty when the world shifts. The reverse is rarely true. Careers will be reinvented multiple times in a lifetime. The most future-proof education is not job training, but formation. Specialization creates efficiency. Liberal education creates freedom. In a rapidly changing world, freedom is the real superpower.2
This is why the recovery of Classical Christian Education is so important. A collective of pre-19th-century pedagogies, this approach to education emphasizes generalized learning over specialized training. It is, in fact, entirely counter-cultural to modern education, but in a way that is not often fairly recognized. Most critiques of Classical Christian education accuse teachers of attempting to lead students back to the Stone Age, or assert Classical Christian Education is just a Trojan horse for White Supremacy or Christian Nationalism. But Classical Christian Education’s real counter-cultural attribute is its emphasis on generalized human development. Generalization cultivates wisdom and encourages virtue in the student and prepares them to pursue any kind of career in the fluctuating market. As Tate’s post aptly indicates, in a rapidly changing world, human formation is much more important than specialized job training. This is true for both the individual and society at large.
Specialization
Is there any place for specialization, then? I would argue, yes! But specialization comes much later in one’s life.
There’s been a long-standing acknowledgement in higher education that 35-52% of undergraduates will change their major at least once before they graduate. Students who declare their major in a STEM field fall at the lower end of that range while students in other fields land in the higher end of that range. The point being, even in college (well beyond adolescence), large numbers of students are still undecided about their careers; and, once they’ve graduated, most never even work in a career related to their degrees. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that a group study of people born between 1957-1964 changed their career field an average of 12.9 times between the ages of 18-54.3 It’s astonishing that so many educators would think it best for adolescents to choose their specialization so early given these statistics. And, in our present age of rapidly shifting markets, it makes even less sense to specialize early.
But as A. G. Sertillanges rightly notes, “the encyclopedic mind is the enemy of knowledge.”4 In other words, at some point in our life, we will have to sacrifice breadth for depth, “sacrifice extent to penetration,” if we are to do meaningful work in our lifetime. He claims that once we have acquired a throughly generalized education and have some broad range of experience, we are going to discover our capacities, our aptitudes, and our joyful interests.
It is at that point, we must acknowledge that death is inevitable, and instead of merely marking time, we would be wise to choose one road that is defined in its limits and proportional to our strengths, which also means we must turn our backs to the thousand others. Said another way, we will have to specialize. Sertillanges summarizes this dynamic beautifully:
Everyone in life has his work; he must apply himself to it courageously and leave to others what Providence has reserved for others. We must keep from specialization as long as our aim is to become cultivated men, and, as far as concerns those to whom these pages are addressed, superior men; but we must specialize anew when we aim at being men with a function, and producing something useful. In other words, we must understand everything, but in order to succeed in doing some one thing.5
In a nutshell, one’s early education needs to be broad, and as generalized as possible so as to cultivate the best human being possible. That way, when the time comes to specialize, he’ll be able to do penetrating and meaningful work, joyfully, diligently, and influentially. This is the surest way to stand before kings.
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6777c52f82e5471a3732ea25/679a6fadfda4220bbac585d7_Talent-Disrupted-2.pdf
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeremy-tate-3a550a68_specialization-is-dead-dead-for-a-century-activity-7407789416276197376-4Fkx?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAATa_dUB3aikFNAg2LQNzCGPvvkVRqWcIrE
https://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy79.htm
A.-D. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, trans. Mary Ryan (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1962), 118.
Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life, 120.