FOR centuries, British education served a single, noble purpose: to shape independent minds – citizens tempered by moral clarity, disciplined reasoning, and broad cultural literacy.
Today, the draft Schools Bill inching toward its third reading in the House of Lords threatens to swap that heritage for something far smaller.
Cloaked in the vocabulary of ‘suitability’ and ‘safeguarding’, the Bill would replace the forge of thought with a bureaucratic factory, privileging central control and vocational metrics over genuine intellect, parental agency, and full-bodied human development.
At the dawn of advanced artificial intelligence, that trade-off is not simply misguided – it is catastrophic.
Once, parents channelled their children toward the gold-plated vocations – medicine, law, engineering – via a predictable conveyor belt of exams, coursework, and narrow specialism.
The equation seemed irrefutable: succeed in school, secure the profession, prosper for life.
But large language models now draft legal arguments, triage medical symptoms, and design skyscrapers before lunch. Tasks that devoured human decades are now devoured by code in seconds. The covenant between ‘qualification’ and ‘security’ has been summarily shredded.
So, imagine the teenager who sacrificed evenings, friendships, and curiosity on a single technical altar, only to discover on graduation day that a server rack does the same job faster, cheaper, and better. What then?
Take these two cases, for example:
Daniel was groomed for numbers. From age five, every gift, every Sunday, was bent toward mathematics. By sixteen he was a prodigy; by eighteen he aimed to rebuild the world in steel and calculus.
Yet by the time he reached university admissions, design software rendered blueprints in real time. Employers no longer sought living calculators; they sought adaptable visionaries who could weave ethics, creativity, and strategy into the code. Daniel, armed with depth but no breadth, was watching the goalposts glide beyond reach.
David, by contrast, spent his youth plumbing classical texts – legal treatises, historical dialogues, ethical disputations.
He was never taught what to think so much as how to think: how to question, compare sources, and hold conflicting truths in tension.
When AI swept the landscape, David stayed calm. Machines could replicate information; they could not replicate judgement.
In business meetings, civic debates, and cultural life, he flourished because his education was never about producing output; it was about producing insight.
The Bill proposes that the State decide what learning is ‘suitable’ for every child, giving officials unprecedented reach into private schools, home education, and independent learning centres. It exalts standardised results and paper trails, all easily measured by an algorithm.
But therein lies the absurdity: just as the State tightens its grip on industrial-age schooling, the labour market is sprinting in the opposite direction.
Robots do routine. Databases do recall. What our society lacks, and desperately needs, are citizens with supple minds, moral spine, and the imaginative breadth to navigate problems no minister can yet name.
The Bill is a bureaucrat’s answer to a philosopher’s question, and it gets that question dead wrong.
Families who anchor their education in values-based study, great books, and disciplined debate have never been backward. They are laboratories for skills the 21st century cannot automate: reasoned discourse, resilience of character, and an ability to discern, quickly, where technology ends and responsibility begins.
To file such an education under ‘inadequate’ because it refuses to dance to standardised tick-boxes is not merely short-sighted. It is an assault on the very idea of an educated person.
This is not just theory. Strip any community – urban, rural, secular, or spiritual – of its right to impart depth, and the entire nation grows poorer.
We will inherit an obedient workforce unable to question the algorithm that governs it, and that is how civilisations rust from within.
Embracing technology is not the issue; mistaking data for wisdom is. In the age of AI, the one commodity no processor can replicate is sound judgement.
A Schools Bill that reduces classrooms to compliance centres will churn out credentials, not thinkers, and functionaries, not leaders.
Britain can still choose the braver path. It can allow, indeed encourage, educational ecosystems that raise graduates no machine can imitate: young adults who analyse, empathise, and innovate because they have been steeped in disciplines older and deeper than any silicon chip.
This debate is not about nostalgia. It is about survival. The communities asking for room to continue their rigorous, values-driven approach are not shielding children from the future; they are equipping them for it.
They produce citizens who can partner with AI rather than bow to it, who can guide technology toward humane ends instead of drifting in its wake.
If Parliament wants a legacy worthy of tomorrow, it must resist the temptation to treat education as an assembly line.
Leave space, by law, for schools and families to cultivate the only edge humanity will ever hold over its inventions: the capacity to think, to judge, and to envision a world better than the one an algorithm can predict.
The Schools Bill is not a procedural footnote; it is a fork in the national road.
Down one path lies a nation of technicians soon outrun by their tools.
Down the other stand citizens whose minds no circuitry can replace.
Choose wisely.
This article was first published on the Rabbi’s Substack on June 10, 2025, and republished by kind permission.
