It all began when schools started devaluing cursive instruction to prioritize science and technology.
I remember as clear as day: a sunny, colorful classroom, I was repeatedly writing cursive “e”s in my practice book, only to meet the disappointed expression of my third grade homeroom teacher every time I walked up to show her my progress. Progress I was genuinely proud of.
By the time I was in middle school, cursive was no longer on the curriculum. Schools preferred teaching keyboard skills and Microsoft Word instead. Kids had started freezing up at the mere mention of reading or writing in cursive.
Now, in 2026, cursive instruction has been mandated in 27 U.S. states, up from 14 states just a decade ago.
This exact pattern is happening all over again. Not in elementary school this time, but in secondary and post-secondary education. And the subject being quietly set aside is not handwriting. It is the arts.
What Internalization Feels Like
There is a difference between memorizing something and internalizing it. Memorization is retrieval: you go in, find the fact, bring it back. Internalization is different. It changes the way you see. Once it happens you cannot unsee it; the structure of a sentence, the logic of a metaphor, the reason a paragraph works or doesn’t. That kind of clarity, when it arrives, tends to arrive violently. It reorders everything you thought you already knew.
I was fluent in English for as long as I can remember, having started reading stories and novels as soon as I could understand them. But it was around high school that I noticed something shift: the first time I had truly internalized the grammar and semantics of the language instead of simply memorizing its rules. It was the first time I had grasped something theoretical so completely that I could teach it rather than just recite it. So I did. I helped friends study for school tests and SAT prep, guided siblings through IELTS preparation. That understanding led me, in my first year of university, to volunteer as a research assistant for my English professor – editing, researching, and writing academic papers, while discovering the world of research for the first time through that experience.
What struck me was how many people never encounter that kind of clarity in their schooling years. Not because they aren’t capable, but because no one gave them the conditions for it. I watched classmates spend sleepless nights on calculus and organic chemistry, yet never develop the ability to absorb a second language deeply enough to comprehend its literature, its history, its inner logic.
The subject matter was different now, but the underlying failure was the same: arts and humanities were never framed as vital, so students, educators, and school boards alike stopped treating them that way.
The Hierarchy We Inherited
They said the computer would do all of our work, so we no longer needed a significant style of handwriting.
Now they say AI will do all of our work, so we no longer need arts education at all.
Was the loss of cursive instruction not a clear enough warning? Or has the oversight of arts and humanities been so long-standing that even that simple critical thought has become difficult to process?
The devaluation didn’t happen because the arts were useless. It happened because their usefulness was harder to measure. Standardized testing rewarded replicable answers. Creativity made unreproducible ones. So, an entire category of human development was quietly reclassified as supplementary – as enrichment, as elective, as the thing you did if you had time left over after the subjects that really mattered.
So Much in the Name of Practicality
I loved the arts from the beginning. And yet I became a STEM major.
In twelfth grade, I committed to a career of practicality and agreed to go into engineering. The reasoning, at the time, felt airtight. Business didn’t appeal to me (accounting and marketing least of all). Architecture seemed like a genuine option but too physically demanding. Medicine and law were never on the table. The only arts programs available in my city at the time were applied English linguistics and translation, neither of which held my interest (at that time).
So, engineering it was.
I wrote my first line of code at nineteen, right when the pandemic hit. Studies moved online. I tried, genuinely, despite language barriers and circumstances I hadn’t anticipated. Long story short: I had to close the curtains before the play could conclude terribly.
So much in the name of practicality.
I shifted directions, moved to Canada, and found the most multidisciplinary program I could: interaction design and business plus a minor in entrepreneurship. Developed an interest in learning design along the way. And here I am.
The Irony Is Almost Too Neat
It has been a year since graduation and the more I go deeper, the more my education comes into focus.
The exact knowledge that was once framed as superfluous is now the most sought-after advantage in the room.
In February, Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, proclaimed “Before, so many resources were dedicated to engineering. Now I think people are going to be much more focused on marketing on distribution.”
We are witnessing a technological shift of a lifetime, and it is not going to be easy on anyone living it day to day.
People in senior positions swapped their titles overnight for something more telling of their quickly acquired expertise in AI-based solutions. Lines between design and development began blurring as if to disprove the decades of intellectual infrastructure that made such a moment possible in the first place. Marketing and communications became the unexpected MVP, not because engineering disappeared, but because delivering technology to people, making it land, making it matter, still requires the kind of judgment and feeling that cannot be automated.
People once studied what was crucial to building technologies. Now that building is the easy part, everyone is focused on making those technologies feel necessary to humans.
The real thing engineered here is demand for tools that will outsource humanity until humanity forgets that itself and becomes a tool.
Co-opted
This is the part that still stings.
The sudden spotlight on creative skills has felt validating to many who spent years being told their profession and talents were supplementary, but that we will finally be able to bring the change we each care about with time has started feeling more real. However. the industry is not actually revaluing creativity. It is instrumentalizing it. Absorbing it into the same extractive logic that devalued it in the first place.
The titles changed overnight but the logic didn’t. Designer engineer, growth hacker, brand engineer. These are not admissions that creative thinking was always foundational. They are the same extractive framework taking over a new resource. Creativity is being adopted not because institutions have recognized its intrinsic value, but because the market has identified it as the next thing to optimize. In some ways, many creatives have already spent their careers living inside exactly this kind of optimization, so the dynamic doesn’t feel new, only the tools do, as well as the sudden influx of people now pivoting toward the arts.
The danger isn’t that arts education will be ignored.
It is that it will be co-opted: stripped of the very qualities that made it valuable, packaged as a competency, and handed back to us as a deliverable.
There are systemic factors at play that deserve their own conversation. But underneath all of them is a simpler failure: public education stopped asking what it means to grow a person and started asking what it means to produce one.
The Polymath Question
Science and art have always shared a history. Both emerged from the same human impulse to observe, interpret, and explain the universe. The separation between them was never natural. It was administrative.
Before disciplines were formalized into distinct silos, to be educated meant something closer to what we would now call being a polymath. The researcher who spends months with a single question, turning it over until it reveals something nobody else thought to look for. The artist with a studio practice returns to the same subject repeatedly, not because they haven’t finished, but because each return teaches them something the last one couldn’t. These are not romantic archetypes. They are people who have protected the conditions for going deep and what they produce is categorically different from what speed and optimization can generate.
That quality of attention is what I find myself drawn to. Not as a rejection of the tools available to us, and not as nostalgia, but as a response to something I notice in myself and in the people around me: a hunger to go deeper into things, to spend real time with a subject, to understand its inner workings rather than skim its surface for applicable outputs. The pace of the current moment makes that kind of attention feel countercultural. But I think it is also the most honest form of resistance available to anyone who wants to do something that actually matters.
More and more people are reaching for the words multidisciplinary, multi-passionate, multi-hyphenate, generalist because they are the closest available language for something that resists the ladder. The question worth sitting with is whether this is a genuine return to polymathic thinking, or whether AI-augmented generalism is simply the latest way the system finds to extract more from people who were already giving everything.
The answer will depend not on what institutions decide to do next but on what each person decides to go deeply into, and why, and whether they protect that depth from being optimized away.
Here’s what I’ve been up to:
- Celebrating a small win! This Lens marks half a year of Kaleido, which feels quietly significant and I find myself genuinely grateful that this small corner of the internet has kept going.
In The Light
- Saffana (IG @saffanabanana): This is the one account that introduced me to the rabbit hole of personal knowledge management (PKM) (and was pushed down into it by the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte) as well as motivated me to read more and write down my favorite quotes, thoughts, and opinions. I’m not one for annotating or scribbling marginalia, so I needed somewhere else to put it all. In a way, that somewhere else became Kaleido.
