Europe’s civilisational influence has never been primarily economic; if it weakens, the question is whether its educational institutions still know how to form the judgement and sense of responsibility on which that influence depends.

Humanism is not a nostalgic alternative to technological acceleration — it is the only framework that keeps the question of what kind of human beings education should form from collapsing into the question of what the economy currently requires.

When the people building intelligent systems begin to doubt their consequences, the moment demands more than technological caution — it demands the kind of institutional and educational seriousness that has been slow to respond.

If technology is advancing faster than our collective capacity to govern it, education must become the place where judgement matures before power does — and it must recognise that it has not yet accepted that responsibility.

The question is not whether credentials retain market value, but whether universities still cultivate the judgement, intellectual formation and capacity for responsible reasoning that no credential can substitute for.

Student choices after secondary school reveal not only preferences but the institutional logics through which two societies imagine the relationship between knowledge, profession and the future of the person.

As execution becomes easier to automate, upper secondary education faces a structural choice: continue rewarding performance, or begin forming the traceable reasoning and disciplined judgement that performance was always meant to evidence.