Universities should teach students how to live, not just how to get a job

A radio-controlled bird swoops down from the balcony. Then a handmade boulder rolls across the stage. The lecturer heaves it on to his shoulders like Sisyphus, condemned to push his rock uphill for eternity. Roughly 400 students watch, rapt.

This is not a theatre class. It is a course called “Life Worth Living”. It is one of nearly 200 options on the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core programme, which ranges widely across science, ethics, culture, technology, history and the arts.

If that breadth sounds uncommon, it is. In Hong Kong, and even across much of Asia, few undergraduate programmes are built around this degree of intellectual breadth. But that needs to change.

If you walk across any campus today, you will see students well equipped to optimise their futures. They know how to secure internships, pass exams and build impressive CVs. Yet even as we teach them the means of life – finance, engineering, medicine – we cannot leave them to figure out its ends entirely alone.

For most of human history, the question of how to live was never a private matter. Aristotle built a school around it. Confucius debated it with rulers. Today, however, we ask students to ponder it in their spare time. We imply they should read a self-help book or download a meditation app when things go badly.

Life Worth Living, co-taught by Daniel Chua, chair professor of music, and Jonathan Johnson, a research assistant professor in the School of Humanities, attempts to reverse this abdication. The course does not hand students easy answers. Instead, it introduces them to traditions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Christianity, Judaism and secular humanism. It asks them to engage seriously and collectively with competing visions of the good life.

It is all the more engaging because it challenges standard pedagogy. When I attended the classes recently, I was entertained not just with homemade boulders and electronic birds but also (during a lecture on utilitarianism by guest speaker Yale theologian Matt Croasmun) the Pharrell Williams’ pop anthem Happy and a burst of a viral dance called APT. The point was to challenge students to interrogate whether the culture’s most popular definition of happiness could withstand philosophical scrutiny.

The tutorials are even more subversive. They run as a live-action role-playing game. Students split into adventurers and monsters, rolling oversized dice to resolve moral dilemmas in character. The pedagogical trick is brilliant: the mask of a character grants students permission to take ideas seriously without fear of personal embarrassment. When a student argues from the perspective of a Confucian scholar, they are insulated from judgement. The psychological distance allows them to test-drive worldviews they might otherwise dismiss.

And it works. After the tutorials end, the students refuse to leave the room. They linger to debate suffering and failure, not because it will be on the exam but because they are suddenly desperate to know how to cope when their own lives inevitably go wrong.

The student mental-health crisis is treated as an administrative problem to be solved with more counselling staff. But it needs to be recognised for what it is: a profound crisis of meaning that demands a curricular response.

The arrival of generative artificial intelligence has only sharpened the question of what universities are actually for. A student can now prompt a large language model to summarise Kantian ethics and receive a beautifully written essay about it in three seconds. That may help them understand it better, but what the AI cannot do is decide, on their behalf, whether to adopt his views or how to live in light of them.

As Chua puts it: “If AI can answer it for you, it is not your answer.” The examined life requires labour. It is slow, uncomfortable, and irreducibly personal. It is the one intellectual task that cannot be outsourced to a machine.

“What is a life worth living?” has no right or wrong answer, and no recruiter is scanning for “meaning of life” on a graduate’s CV. Yet here our students are – hundreds of them – doing what a university education rarely creates space for: examining life.

This should give pause to educators far beyond Hong Kong – a city so often characterised by pragmatism. If higher education wants to survive the coming technological disruption, it needs to offer what no algorithm can replicate: not merely the transmission of knowledge, but the slow, uncomfortable work of making it your own and turning it into something you can actually live by.

HKU’s Common Core is one such model, but it should not be the only one. There is room and need for many more.

McQueen Sum is an assistant lecturer in the Common Core programme at the University of Hong Kong. She does not teach on the “Life Worth Living” course.