A new PM. A new cabinet. Who are these people? The BBC helpfully informs us, with a brief sketch of each key individual.

Take Kwasi Kwarteng, for instance. The BBC’s Lora Jones tells us he is not lacking in “intellectual firepower”, has a “double first from Cambridge University and a PhD in economic history” and, in the same gushing paragraph, is a “past winner of notoriously tough BBC quiz show University Challenge”. Notoriously tough? It’s hardly deep.

When I was younger, I might have been impressed by this description. I’d have thought: here’s a well-educated and clever individual, the sort we want running the country. But experience has shown – albeit I was typically slow on the uptake – that there is no reason to suspect someone who is ‘well-educated’ in our culture to have sounder judgement or more wisdom than someone who is not. What our education system does do is make people more skillful at arguing a point-of-view, be it reasonable or perverse.

If we simply filled the cabinet with twelve adults selected randomly from the street, would the resulting government make worse decisions? As for expertise: our leaders might not know much about their respective briefs, but that wouldn’t be a change. As for wisdom: it seems to me that it would make no difference whether or not someone has finished school and attended university, because our education system does not teach it.

In Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton describes the failure of education to help us navigate our way through life. He set up his School of Life to address the failure, but is battling against centuries of practice. Not even that charismatic social reformer, Charles Dickens, who railed against the education system’s obsession with “facts” in books such as Hard Times, apparently achieved much of a breakthrough.

A wise education might address questions such as:

• what is the purpose of your life?
• how does fear of death affect our behaviour?
• why do I feel the need to acquire lots of stuff?
• how can we live in harmony with nature, and each other?
• why do I repeat the same mistakes?
• do you act in ways that make you and others happy?
• do we inherit the Earth from our parents, or borrow it from our children?

Even without conclusive answers, it might help us learn about ourselves and how to survive and enjoy life.

A common rebuttal is that children need to learn basic skills first. What skills? Numeracy and literacy are most often cited. Yet the majority of us adults are pretty innumerate, unable to estimate quantities without resorting to a computer, and easily swayed by numbers taken out of context in the media. The teaching of this “basic skill” largely fails, a failure that undermines the pre-eminence it is given. Even if it were more successful, are we any happier than the Munduruku, an indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon that have no words for numbers bigger than five? I love maths, which is usually misrepresented as arithmetic, but cannot see any compelling logic for the latter’s preferred status.

Isn’t wisdom “basic”? Isn’t it more important to have a government that leads us wisely, than one which might perform well on a quiz show?