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I recently read an essay by Paul Graham about how universities should prepare students to become founders. His central argument stayed with me. Entrepreneurship, he suggests, isn’t something universities can teach particularly well as a subject. Students learn by making things, starting projects, encountering problems and trying to solve them. What universities can do is create an environment in which this happens.

I have long believed the same is true of many of the qualities we hope children develop such as discipline, curiosity,  integrity, hard work, resilience, initiative and responsibility. We want them to care about other people, respect other living beings and understand that the world they inhabit is something they have a responsibility towards. We talk about these things. We send children to school hoping they will learn these things too, alongside everything else.

Schools teach values. We have leadership programmes and civic studies. We put words like integrity and responsibility on walls. But being taught what is right is not the same as becoming someone who lives it. We see the gap everywhere. People can understand civic responsibility and still treat shared spaces carelessly. They can speak about integrity and compromise it when it becomes inconvenient. They can value hard work in principle and avoid situations that demand sustained effort. They can care about the environment as an idea without feeling responsible for the world immediately around them.

So what is missing?

Perhaps knowing something is not the same as becoming someone.

What is missing, perhaps, is not another lesson. It is the opportunity to practise these qualities until they begin to become part of us.

This is where sustained pursuits such as ballet, sport or music can be powerful. Not because they are somehow morally superior to school, but because they create repeated situations in which certain qualities have to be lived rather than discussed.

A child learning ballet cannot simply understand the idea of practice. They have to return to the same movement, receive correction, adjust and try again. Progress is slow enough that the relationship between effort and capability becomes difficult to ignore.

You cannot cram for a pirouette the night before an exam.

The same is true in swimming, football, music and many other pursuits. The skill itself is built through repetition. Over time, a child experiences something quite profound: what I can do today is partly the result of what I have repeatedly practised.

Perhaps the real gift of practice is not only the skill being learnt. It is discovering, through experience, that capability can be built.

That distinction also makes me think about discipline.

Schools can certainly cultivate discipline. They have deadlines, timetables, examinations and rules. But there is a difference between discipline and compliance. A child who arrives on time because lateness carries a punishment has learnt to follow a rule. Rules are necessary in any institution, including a ballet school. But discipline becomes something more when the child begins to organise themselves, show up, practise and persist because they understand that their own progress depends on it.

External structure may begin the process. The hope is that, over time, some of that structure becomes internal.

This is why I believe sustained commitments beyond the classroom matter. Ballet, sport, music and other serious pursuits give children places where discipline, resilience, patience, responsibility, humility and hard work are not merely ideas. They have to be practised.

And the environment matters just as much as the activity.

Children are constantly noticing what is normal, what is valued, what gets rewarded and what is possible.

An environment can cultivate responsibility by giving children something real to be responsible for. It can cultivate resilience by allowing them to struggle without immediately removing the difficulty. It can cultivate integrity by making honesty matter even when nobody is watching. It can cultivate care by showing that shared spaces, other people and other living beings deserve respect.

In that sense, the environment is teaching all the time, even when there is no lesson.

Perhaps we need to pay less attention to what children are being taught, and more attention to what their environments are cultivating.

If so much of what matters is cultivated rather than taught, what kinds of environments are we creating for our children?

Interstellar holds a special place in my heart.

Partly because I have always been fascinated by space. Partly because it isn’t the typical science-fiction film about aliens and spectacle. But mostly because, underneath all the science, space and time, it is a story about a father and his daughter.

I am a father to a daughter too. And there are few things in my life for which I am more grateful. Watching her blossom, grow her roots in the earth and reach for the sky has been one of life’s great privileges.

Perhaps that is why the relationship between Cooper and Murph gets to me every time.

There is a small moment near the beginning that I particularly love. Murph is upset about being named after Murphy’s Law. Her brother has been teasing her that it means whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

Her father tells her that’s not what it means. Murphy’s Law, he explains, means that whatever can happen, will happen.

“And that sounded just fine with us.”

Possibility.

Later, Cooper is called to school.

His son Tom’s teachers have decided that he will become a farmer. Cooper asks about university. They explain that the world doesn’t need more engineers. It doesn’t need more astronauts. Food is scarce.

The world needs farmers.

And they are right.

At least, given everything they know about their world at that moment, they are being perfectly rational.

That is what makes the scene so interesting to me.

They aren’t bad teachers trying to limit a child. They are sensible adults looking at the world around them, deciding what the future will require, and preparing a child accordingly.

Don’t we do versions of this ourselves?

We look at the world as we understand it and tell our children what will matter.

Study this. Don’t study that.

This has a future. That doesn’t.

This is a good career. That’s too risky.

Learn this skill. That’s where the jobs will be.

But how much do we really know?

We are living through another period when people are trying to predict which jobs will survive, which will disappear, and which skills children will need. AI has only made those questions more urgent.

But what if we are wrong?

How much of what we call preparing our children for the future is actually preparing them for our present understanding of the future?

That is precisely what happens in Interstellar.

The world needs farmers.

Yet the world is eventually saved by an astronaut and his daughter—a daughter who never stopped looking towards science, space and possibility.

The very capabilities their society had decided were no longer particularly useful become essential to its survival.

I find that deeply unsettling as a parent.

What possibilities might we close because we are too confident about what tomorrow will require?

What if the professions we are steering our children towards change beyond recognition?

What if the work they will eventually find meaningful doesn’t exist yet?

And what happens when a child chooses a path different from the one we believe is sensible?

I don’t think the answer is blind trust. Children need us. They need exposure, guidance, good teachers, standards, correction, encouragement and sometimes a push to stay with something when giving up would be easier.

But guidance and prescription are not the same thing.

Loving a child deeply doesn’t give us ownership of their becoming.

Perhaps our responsibility is less about predicting where they should end up and more about creating the conditions in which they can discover what draws them, become capable of pursuing something deeply, and remain able to learn and adapt as the world changes.

What would we give our children if we thought about their future that way?

Curiosity?

The ability to learn something difficult?

The experience of practising until something they couldn’t do becomes something they can?

Judgement?

Adaptability?

The confidence to begin again?

The ability to form relationships, care for other people and contribute to something beyond themselves?

And this is where Interstellar asks an even bigger question for me.

After all the equations, spacecraft, black holes and the struggle to save humanity, we eventually see an elderly Murph in a hospital bed, surrounded by generations of her family.

She has lived an extraordinary life. She helped solve a problem that saved humanity.

But she has also lived.

Which makes me wonder whether, in all our anxiety about our children’s education, skills and careers, we sometimes make the future too small.

Are we preparing our children to make a living, or preparing them to live?

I don’t know what world my daughter will inhabit twenty or thirty years from now. I certainly don’t know what work will look like by then.

Perhaps admitting that is a better place to begin.

What if our job is not to prepare children for a particular future at all, but to help them become people capable of flourishing in many possible futures?

We need farmers.

And astronauts.