At almost every family gathering in Bangladesh, there is a familiar conversation. One student studies engineering, another medicine, and another computer science. Then comes the young man or woman studying literature. The room becomes quieter. Someone eventually asks, often with genuine concern, “But what will you do with that degree?”
Behind that question lies a deeper assumption about education itself. We have come to believe that the value of a subject can be measured only by the speed with which it leads to a job, a salary, or a title. Education is increasingly treated like a factory where students enter as raw materials and emerge as employable products. The purpose is not to create thoughtful citizens but efficient workers.
Bangladesh is hardly alone in this. Around the world, universities are cutting literature and philosophy departments while expanding science, technology, engineering, and business. Students are told, directly or indirectly, that subjects without immediate financial return are luxuries. Literature is admired as a hobby, not respected as knowledge. Philosophy is dismissed as abstract. The humanities survive only as decorative ornaments attached to the serious business of employability.
Yet something strange has happened in this age of extraordinary technological progress. We have become more connected than ever, but also more intolerant, more impatient, and less capable of listening to one another. Public debate, especially online, often collapses into insults, outrage, and tribal certainty. Complex issues are reduced to slogans. People no longer try to understand before they judge. This is not simply a political crisis. It is an educational one.
A society that teaches young people only how to calculate, compete, and comply should not be surprised when they struggle to understand other human beings. Technical education can teach us how to build bridges, write software, or operate machines. It cannot by itself teach us why certain lives are ignored, why suffering matters, or why power must be questioned.
The philosopher Martha Nussbaum warned that when nations pursue growth while neglecting the humanities, they produce ‘useful machines’ rather than complete citizens. Her warning feels painfully relevant today. Our education system excels at producing graduates who can memorise facts, pass examinations, and repeat information. What it often fails to cultivate is moral imagination: the ability to enter another person’s world, to recognise complexity, and to think critically about society.
Literature performs this task in a way few other disciplines can. A novel or poem does not merely provide information. It asks readers to inhabit unfamiliar lives. Through literature, we see the world through the eyes of a refugee, a widow, a prisoner, a child, or someone standing at the margins of society. We encounter people whose fears, desires, and contradictions are different from our own.
When readers follow the journey of Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, they are forced to confront the dangerous temptation of believing that intelligence alone can justify cruelty. When they read George Orwell’s 1984, they begin to understand how language itself can be manipulated to control truth. Toni Morrison’s Beloved reveals the psychological scars left by slavery long after physical chains are removed. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart shows the devastation of colonialism not through statistics but through the collapse of an entire human world. Such books do not make people morally perfect. But they make it harder to remain indifferent.
In Bangladesh, this neglect of the humanities has serious consequences. We are producing graduates with impressive technical credentials but limited capacity for dialogue. Disagreement is increasingly treated as hostility. On questions of religion, gender, language, or politics, people often respond not with curiosity but with outrage. The inability to tolerate ambiguity has become one of the defining features of our public life.
Literature offers an antidote because it teaches that human beings are rarely simple. The greatest literary works resist easy judgments. Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire forces readers to confront the tension between patriotism and fanaticism. Begum Rokeya imagined women refusing the limitations imposed upon them by society. Albert Camus, in The Plague, showed how ordinary people respond to crisis with courage, selfishness, denial, and sacrifice all at once. These works remind us that reality is messy, that people contain contradictions, and that certainty is often more dangerous than doubt.
This is especially important in the age of artificial intelligence. Machines can now summarise books, compose music, generate images, and imitate human speech. Many of the skills once considered uniquely human are being automated. In such a world, what will distinguish us from the machines we create?
It will not be speed. It will not be memory. It will not even be technical efficiency. Machines will likely surpass us in all of these. What will remain uniquely human is the capacity for ethical reflection, empathy, imagination, and self-doubt. These are precisely the qualities cultivated by literature and philosophy.
Mary Shelley understood this long before the arrival of artificial intelligence. Frankenstein is often misunderstood as a warning against science itself. It is actually a warning against science without conscience. The tragedy does not arise because Victor Frankenstein creates life. It arises because he abandons responsibility for what he has created. Today, as societies race to develop more powerful technologies, that warning feels more urgent than ever.
Will literature get you a job? Will philosophy pay the bills? These are not unreasonable concerns, particularly in a country where economic insecurity shapes almost every decision. But they are incomplete questions. The better question is this: what kind of society are we building if education produces skilled professionals who cannot think critically, communicate clearly, or understand the people around them?
The irony is that even the modern workplace increasingly demands the very abilities that the humanities teach. Employers regularly complain that graduates cannot write persuasively, solve problems creatively, or work with people different from themselves. A programmer may understand code, but can they explain their ideas? A doctor may know the science of disease, but can they understand a patient’s fear? A politician may possess authority, but can they imagine the lives of those who suffer under their decisions?
Education without literature may produce competent workers. It cannot produce wise citizens. The true crisis is not that fewer students are studying literature. It is that we are forgetting why literature matters at all. If we continue to treat empathy, reflection, and imagination as optional extras rather than essential parts of education, we may one day discover that we have created a society full of brilliant machines and empty human beings.
Progress is not measured only by how fast a nation advances, but by whether it remains capable of compassion while advancing. The classrooms of the future must therefore contain both laboratories and libraries, both equations and poems. Otherwise, we may gain every instrument of civilisation and still lose the wisdom required to use it.
The writer is an academic, journalist, and political analyst. E-mail: [email protected]
