To bring the matter down to earth, a system of education that prepares people for “careers” rather than for life in all its dimensions, especially its tragic dimension, will readily lead its graduates into Thoreau’s trap of “improved means to an unimproved end”. We will unthinkingly build bigger and supposedly better mousetraps that do little or nothing to improve the quality of our lives or that even make them worse.

Without judgement – the ability to assess the nature of the reality that confronts us, to conceive the likely consequences of alternative courses of action, and then to weight the delicate balance between ends and means – we are little more than skilled barbarians whose short sighted and imprudent decisions will terminate in ruin.

– William Ophuls in Plato’s Revenge, p107.