Essay plan: opinion (agree or disagree)

Should a student touch nothing but the subjects that lead to employment? I disagree with this view to a large extent: careers are the reason we can afford a life, but education exists to prepare the whole of that life, and even the careers argument collapses on inspection. The employment-first position is not foolish. Education is expensive, competition is harsh, and for a family investing its savings in a degree, employability is not a detail. Courses with no thought for the labour market can strand graduates in unemployment with elegant but unsellable knowledge. The first problem is that nobody can name tomorrow's job subjects. Technology is already automating tasks inside accounting, law and medicine, while creating work in fields that did not exist a decade ago. The workers who adapt are those trained to learn, reason and write clearly, capacities built by history's arguments, literature's empathy and philosophy's logic as much as by any vocational course. Second, society needs more from its citizens than output: voters who can detect a lie, parents who can tell a story, neighbours who understand where their laws came from. A country of pure specialists is cheaper to fool and poorer to live in. The sensible design is therefore a core of career-relevant training wrapped in genuine breadth. Students should graduate able to earn a living and able to question what the living is for. Education that aims only at the first produces employees; education that aims at both produces adults.