What Should Our Kids Study in the Age of AI?

In the age of AI, the most valuable education might be the most human one.

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.” — John Keating, Dead Poets Society (1989)

Lisa and I were at Chileno Bay in Cabo for Lauren and Andrew’s 50th epic birthday celebration. 150 people. Two days poolside. Karaoke and dancing at night. Drinks flowing. And at some point, the poolside small talk turned into the big talk.

“So what should our kids actually be studying?”

Not in a casual way. In a real way. I heard it three separate times, from three different couples, all circling the same anxiety. Forty-something parents in swimsuits, nursing spicy margaritas, quietly panicking about the future of the labor market. If that’s not peak 2026, I don’t know what is.

The first instinct most parents have is to steer their kids toward AI itself. Learn to code. Learn machine learning. Become the person building the tools. That’s not wrong exactly, but it’s incomplete. The number of people who will build foundational AI models will fit in a single room. The number who will need to use AI fluently is everyone. Teaching your kid to build GPT-7 is like teaching them to build a combustion engine in 1920. A few people needed to do that. Everyone else needed to learn how to drive.

The real skill isn’t building the machine. It’s knowing what to ask it, how to judge the output, and when to ignore it entirely. Of course technical literacy matters. Every kid should understand how these systems work at a basic level. But fluency with tools is table stakes. What separates people is something deeper. Something unfashionable. Being deeply, unapologetically human.

And that means the liberal arts aren’t just alive. They might be the whole game.

Think about what AI actually does well. It computes. It summarizes. It produces competent, average work at zero marginal cost. Everything that can be systematized will be. So what can’t be? Literature. Philosophy. History. Art. Psychology. The disciplines that teach you how to read between lines, construct and dismantle arguments, think in long arcs instead of quarterly cycles, and sit with ambiguity long enough to find something true inside it. These aren’t cute electives. They’re survival skills in a world where the first draft of everything will sound plausible and mean nothing.

Yes, I’m telling you that your kid’s philosophy degree might actually be worth something. I know. I need a minute too. Our daughter Katie is studying sociology at Wake Forest, and I’ve never felt better about it. She’s learning how people actually behave in groups, why systems form, how power moves through institutions. That’s not abstract. That’s the operating system for understanding markets, culture, and consumer behavior.

The founders who win are rarely the most technical people in the room. They’re the ones who can feel when something is off, a design, a pitch, a hire, a number that’s too clean. That instinct comes from taste, and taste comes from exposure. From reading widely. From studying how people actually behave, not how models predict they will. You don’t learn that in a computer science curriculum. You learn it by living a broadly curious life.

AI made adequate writing free. Which means adequate writing is now worthless. The ability to write with precision and genuine voice, the kind that makes someone stop scrolling, that’s rarer than it’s ever been. Your kid doesn’t need to write like Hemingway. But they need to think clearly enough to say something a machine wouldn’t.

And then there’s the skill with no department at any university. The ability to collaborate with people who are nothing like you. AI will automate a staggering amount of individual work. What it cannot automate is getting six people in a room to align on something that matters. Negotiation. Persuasion. Reading a room. These aren’t soft skills. They’re the hardest skills.

Expose your kids to making things. Physical things. Cooking, woodworking, pottery, building a go-kart in the garage. There is something irreplaceable about working with your hands, where the material pushes back, where you can’t just hit “regenerate.” That builds a relationship with quality that no screen can replicate.

We can’t optimize our way through this. There is no perfect major, no five-step framework that future-proofs a 14-year-old. I’m a VC. My entire job is pattern-matching and placing bets on the future. But even I can’t tell you what the job market looks like in 2040. Anyone who says they can is selling you a course.

The parents poolside in Cabo were all asking the same question. But the real question underneath it was the one nobody said out loud. Are our kids going to be okay?

I think about this constantly. Not as an investor. As a dad.

And here’s where I land. AI isn’t replacing what makes us human. It’s stripping away the rote, the templated, the average, all the work we probably shouldn’t have been doing in the first place. What’s left is the good stuff.

I stood by that pool watching my friends wrestle with this, and I didn’t feel anxiety. I felt something I wasn’t expecting. I felt hopeful. Because for the first time in a long time, the answer to “what should our kids study” isn’t some narrow, defensive bet on the right technical skill. It’s not about survival. It’s about something bigger.

Teach them to read deeply. Teach them to make things with their hands. Teach them to write one true sentence that no machine ever could. Teach them to walk into a room full of strangers and actually see the people in it.

Teach them to be human first.

The future will meet them there.