I have always thought of social media as a valuable research tool offering endless arguments, outlandish takes on non-issues, and feeding my instincts to interrogate the things we accept as obvious. And after months of meticulously rummaging through Threads for fodder, I came across an interesting argument. Someone had criticised the tendency of Nigerians to emphasise how difficult their PhD journeys were without mentioning what the research itself had made. To put it succinctly, "What is the value of celebrating six years of suffering without pointing to what those six years produced?”
And it’s a fair argument. There’s something worth questioning about an academic culture that glorifies endurance for its own sake. Six years of hardship, sleepless nights, difficult supervisors, and bureaucratic obstacles; all of which must come before the title, like a sadistic rite of passage. At some point, we have to ask what comes out of the process beyond the credential and the story of having endured it.
Is Education Simply a Means to an End?
As important as the above question is, the haste to subject intellectual work to scrutiny solely on the basis of its “immediate usefulness” betrays our understanding of education and research. We seem to be increasingly inclined to ask what intellectual work produces without asking what the process itself produces in the person doing it, and how it can enrich others' lives and nourish the collective human experience. Much of what we now take for granted as human knowledge and progress has been built upon research whose economic value was not immediately apparent. Ideas that once appeared abstract have eventually become the foundation for groundbreaking innovations.
Consider George Boole, whose nineteenth-century mathematical work seemed far removed from the practical, technological and scientific theories that would eventually flow from it. In particular, his work on invariant theory became part of a mathematical tradition that eventually contributed to the development of Einstein’s theory of relativity. The abstract ideas of this largely self-taught mathematician would also influence the development of digital computing through the later work of people like Claude Shannon (after whom Anthropic named its AI).
In 1968, South African mathematician Ismail Mohamed, with Hermann Heineken, solved a longstanding problem in group theory and opened up new areas of mathematical research. While their work may not have immediately yielded a technological invention or some tangible application, it contributed to the universal body of knowledge. And that, in itself, is impact, even if it cannot immediately be measured with capitalist metrics.
The dichotomy between theoretical education and pragmatic utility should not exist; knowledge and skills are not mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, the distinction is semantic and modern. Knowing and doing are deeply intertwined, and education has historically involved both.
In many pre-colonial African societies, learning was embedded in everyday life rather than confined to a formal institution. Knowledge would be transmitted through observation, apprenticeship, participation in communal life, and practical work. Learning how to farm, fish, hunt, or build took place alongside the transmission of social, moral, and cultural knowledge. And this does not suggest that precolonial African societies lacked specialisation or divisions of knowledge. The point is that the modern institutional division between academic learning and vocational training is neither timeless nor universal.
Ancient European societies also operated similarly. The Greek concept of paideia, for instance, was not merely concerned with occupational preparation. It was concerned with the broader formation of the individual as an intellectual, moral, and civic being. The process would encompass learning about literature, philosophy, sciences, music, physical training, and civic formation. Ancient Greece was also not a society without occupational distinction. Education was simply understood as more than mere preparation for a specific economic function.
The modern tension becomes easier to understand when considered alongside current economic and industrial realities. In his best-known work, Adam Smith succinctly articulated the implications of specialisation for productivity. Using the example of a pin factory, Smith demonstrated how breaking production into a series of specialised tasks increased output. At the time, the world was increasingly embracing industrialisation over subsistence, and modern economists were preoccupied with wealth creation and productivity maximisation. So the equation became straightforward: specialised knowledge produces specialised application, which produces greater efficiency and, ultimately, greater output. Education became preparation for participation in a specialised economy, and this somewhat arbitrary relationship would be crystallised in the theory of human capital formation.
The idea that man relates to his world, makes decisions, and tracks progress primarily through an economic lens has become deeply embedded in modern life. And I am convinced that this is a consequence of capitalist conditioning. This looks especially true when academics like Bryan Caplan interrogate the value of pursuing higher education in fields that the economic system cannot immediately reward. In “The Case Against Education,” Caplan argues that much of the economic return associated with higher education has less to do with the skills actually imparted. Instead, education often functions as a signal for characteristics employers value: intelligence, conscientiousness, conformity, etc.[8] So why spend years acquiring knowledge that the labour market does not need? Why study history, poetry, foreign languages, or advanced mathematics? Why pursue the highest levels of academic study in seemingly abstract fields when they cannot be immediately translated into a job, a product, or a business?
This is the danger of the capitalist reasoning: education becomes a means to an economic end. Modern capitalism seems to resist the idea that man can be more than an economic being, one who constantly seeks financial validation. Man is also a being who desires wonder, purpose, growth, knowledge, self-understanding, and impact. Why should intellectual curiosity matter only when it looks nice on a resume? And since we’ve convinced ourselves that the cultivation of original thought is secondary to the rewards of capitalism, the logic of outsourcing becomes easy to accept. This is where generative AI presents a particularly strange problem.
AI as a Threat to Education
In 2025, a survey was conducted on 350 students and 20 lecturers across Nigerian universities in Lagos, Ogun, and Edo states. The study reported that half of the respondents had admitted to using AI to generate assignments and coursework. A similar study of 200 undergraduates at the University of Ibadan reports that 88.5% agreed that dependence on AI tools can foster academic laziness.[10] But we do not need research papers to show that generating entire assignments with ChatGPT is unethical and damaging. Even as AI regulations and academic policies continue to grapple with the technology's rapid development and its implications, the general concern is clear. Repeatedly outsourcing mentally stimulating activities to AI can undermine the capacity for original thought. Beyond the traditional concept of academic theft, these institutions must recognise that education is being stripped of its value as the process of intellectual—or holistic—formation.
Difficulty isn’t man’s greatest enemy. It is an important mechanism for stimulating growth and learning. Yet, we have become remarkably good at convincing ourselves otherwise. Once again, technology becomes a means for man to indulge his laziness; a tale as old as time. But outsourcing physical, mechanical, or otherwise impossible tasks to AI is not the same as outsourcing the very capacities that difficulty is meant to cultivate. A machine that lifts what I cannot lift expands my physical capacity, but a tool that thinks for me leaves my mental capacity atrophied.
But this could just as easily be a losing argument. When the value of education is understood in terms of the credentials it produces or the income it generates, the intellectual process begins to look like an unnecessary cost. It becomes difficult to convince a student that research is more than just an unnecessary obstacle between them and the finished product—especially when they cannot see how that research will be converted into anything tangible. It becomes idealistic, even naive, to try to convince an external observer that the painstaking effort invested in academic research has value even when it has not been readily converted into an “end.”
As a society, we need to promote education as something to be sought for its own sake. Education opens students' minds to new possibilities and frontiers. It forces them to challenge old patterns of thinking and seek new, innovative ways to harmonise truths from different fields of knowledge. The change begins with you and me. Through personal effort at continuous learning and responsible use of AI, we can create a culture where education is not just a pathway to a paycheck, but a necessary part of a life worth living.
