Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
What does being human really mean? Professor Gallagher weighs in as to how and why the study of the humanities is a good of perennial relevance. He considers the true aim of education at Ralston College. Many students arrive already equipped with practical skills and abilities that can secure employment and meet the immediate demands of the modern world. Yet such competencies, however useful, do not exhaust the purpose of education.
For what is increasingly clear in our age is that skills alone (trainable, replicable, and ever more susceptible to automation) cannot suffice. As artificial intelligence expands its reach, what can be reduced to technique will be. What remains, then, is the deeper question: what does it mean to be human?
The humanities take up this question in earnest. They cultivate not only knowledge, but judgment; not only competence, but depth; not only expression, but the capacity to encounter others as human beings. To be educated in this sense is to become more fully present to oneself, to others, and to the enduring questions that shape a life.
This is why such an education is not bound to passing trends or technological change. It is perennial. It concerns those dimensions of human existence that cannot be automated, outsourced, or outgrown.
Ralston College is dedicated to preserving and renewing this form of education. An education rooted in the great works of the past and oriented toward the formation of free and thoughtful human beings.
What does being human really mean? Professor Gallagher weighs in as to how and why the study of the humanities is a good of perennial relevance. He considers the true aim of education at Ralston College. Many students arrive already equipped with practical skills and abilities that can secure employment and meet the immediate demands of the modern world. Yet such competencies, however useful, do not exhaust the purpose of education.
For what is increasingly clear in our age is that skills alone (trainable, replicable, and ever more susceptible to automation) cannot suffice. As artificial intelligence expands its reach, what can be reduced to technique will be. What remains, then, is the deeper question: what does it mean to be human?
The humanities take up this question in earnest. They cultivate not only knowledge, but judgment; not only competence, but depth; not only expression, but the capacity to encounter others as human beings. To be educated in this sense is to become more fully present to oneself, to others, and to the enduring questions that shape a life.
This is why such an education is not bound to passing trends or technological change. It is perennial. It concerns those dimensions of human existence that cannot be automated, outsourced, or outgrown.
Ralston College is dedicated to preserving and renewing this form of education. An education rooted in the great works of the past and oriented toward the formation of free and thoughtful human beings.
