Modern education systems have increasingly shifted toward specialization. From an early age, we are encouraged to choose tracks, majors, and careers that lead to expertise in ever narrowing knowledge domains. General education such as history, philosophy or ethics, has been reduced to a formality, a set of requirements to tick off. We end up as highly skilled specialists who are poorly equipped to understand, evaluate or even question the broader systems within which we work.
This has consequences.
When most people only understand their own silo, who is left to see the whole?
Who is responsible for considering side effects, unintended consequences, or systemic feedback loops?
Engineers optimize for efficiency. Doctors follow protocol. Economists model behavior. Administrators enforce compliance. Each works competently, yet often in isolation, without overall context or perspective.
But how safe is the assumption that if every expert does their part, the system will work as a whole?
Decisions in one domain have consequences in another.
Technology and AI
Programmers and engineers build tools with increasing power, often without training in the social, ethical, or philosophical implications of those tools. Platforms that shape public discourse are designed with attention to engagement metrics, not civic health. Those who understand the algorithms rarely understand the consequences. Those who understand societal consequences rarely understand the algorithms.
Environmental policy
Ecologists understand habitats. Engineers understand infrastructure. Economists understand incentives. But climate policy needs to be about more than all three. When specialists disagree, or when trade-offs span decades, who mediates? Without integrative thinking, decisions are made based on incomplete pictures, each drawn by an expert who sees only part of the problem.
Bureaucracy and governance
Public institutions are built on compartmentalization. Ministries, departments, and agencies each operate within narrowly defined mandates. This division obscures accountability: everyone follows their own brief, and no one owns the outcome. When responsibility for the whole is assigned to no one, it effectively belongs to everyone—and thus, to no one at all.
Public health
Virologists focus on infection rates. Epidemiologists model spread. Pharmaceutical companies develop and distribute vaccines. And who consideres the impact of school closures, isolation, deferred screenings, and disrupted livelihoods? The decision-making process largely lacked people with a training, and mandate!, to evaluate long-term consequences. Each expert did their job.
Finance and risk management
Quantitative analysts build risk models using advanced mathematics, assuming that past volatility predicts future outcomes. When systemic risk builds (the 2008 crisis) it tends to be invisible until it’s too late. Each team optimizes its own position; no one carries responsibility for the system.
A systemic problem
What ties these examples together is not individual failure or bad intent: it is a structural over-reliance on narrow expertise.
Modern education is increasingly shaped by the pursuit of measurable results: test scores, standardized metrics, and direct job market relevance. We have collectively bought into this and ultimately sideline history, ethics, critical reasoning.
We’ve become excellent technicians and poor citizens: vulnerable to manipulation, ideology, and shallow narratives outside our fields of expertise.
If we want wiser collective decisions, we must realize that general knowledge is not a luxury. It is what allows a society to integrate specialized work in a coherent, ethical, and resilient way.