Humanity has developed technologies that are becoming so complex that, increasingly, we know how to use them without truly understanding how or why they work. This was already true of radio, television, VHS, the internet, mobile phones, and many other technologies. As a result, the gap between the complexity of the tools we use in everyday life and our understanding of those tools is steadily widening.

With AI playing an increasingly important role in the development of everyday technology, that gap is likely to widen even faster. Our current educational system seems increasingly unable to bridge it. We therefore have to make choices about what knowledge and skills future generations will need most.

At the same time, we are confronted with widespread unscientific thinking, misinformation, and an increasing tendency to base social and political decisions on emotion, ideology, or oversimplification rather than evidence and careful reasoning.

This raises an important question about the future of education. At first sight, there seem to be two competing directions.

[1] We could place much greater emphasis on distinctly human capacities such as social skills, ethics, empathy, judgement, and human values.

[2] Alternatively, we could place much greater emphasis on science, mathematics, technology, and analytical reasoning, giving future generations a deeper understanding of the increasingly complex world in which they live.

Both approaches carry risks if pursued in isolation. An excessive emphasis on the first could leave people with too little scientific understanding to critically assess the technologies and information that increasingly shape their lives. This could widen the gap between technological complexity and public understanding, leaving more room for misinformation, pseudoscience, and manipulation.

An excessive emphasis on the second approach presents a different problem. Not everyone can, or needs to, become a scientist, engineer, or technical specialist. The growing complexity of science and technology means that deep technical expertise will inevitably remain concentrated among a relatively small part of the population.

The real challenge, therefore, may not be choosing between these two approaches, but determining the right balance between them. How much scientific understanding does every citizen need in order to reason critically about a technologically complex world? And how much emphasis should education place on ethics, judgement, social responsibility, and the distinctly human abilities that technology cannot replace?

Where, then, should we place the emphasis in our education system if we want future generations to remain scientifically literate, socially responsible, intellectually capable, and mentally resilient.