Malala Yousafzai first came to my attention when a friend posted a link to a video of an interview she gave on The Daily Show. He is someone for whose intellect and soundness of judgment I have great respect, and he praised her in remarkably extravagant terms. Obviously I watched the clip.

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

This was confusing. I was (and remain) in unconditioned support of her cause. At 17, she has probably already done more good in the world than I can reasonably hope to accomplish in my lifetime. Her presentation in the interview was near flawless: poised, self-possessed, and with clarity of purpose enviable by people of any age. All of this I tremendously admire. So what, then, was going on?

There is no question that it had something to do with her age. Yousafzai is still in high school, and, in becoming an internationally recognized public figure, she has lost the opportunity to have the normal experiences we in the developed world typically enjoy. The experience of learning to socialize in more diverse and complex situations under increasingly autonomous conditions is an important part of human development in many countries in much of today’s world. However, as Yousafzai wrote in her autobiography for young readers, “I want to have fun, but I don’t quite know how” (quoted in The New York Times).

Her experience in college, where she will face substantial social barriers not faced by her peers, will be the same. This would have been true before, but it will be even more so now that she is a Nobel Laureate. Not only her peers, but even her professors will be overawed, and her contributions to class discussion will be accorded a hugely disproportional weight. Can you imagine her in your ethics class and finding you must assign a poor mark to the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize—just because, let’s say, she failed to understand Kant’s categorical imperative? I could do it, but I must confess that I would feel compelled to justify my mark in especial detail.

Her youth, then, definitely has something to do with that experience of distaste. By assuming the role of a public spokesperson for the universalization of girls’ education at such a young age, she has forfeited a normal life, and will miss out not just on much of the typical awkwardness, uncertainty, frustration, and embarrassment of adolescence, but also on the occasional magic of it, the expanding sense of autonomy to explore hitherto unimagined realms, the unself-conscious friendships that develop along the way and can last a lifetime, the freedom to make truly stupid mistakes and recover with only a small loss of pride.

Nevertheless, in place of these decidedly ambiguous benefits and satisfactions of what I’ve described (not too problematically, I hope) as the “normal” course of adolescence, she enjoys the satisfaction of being a global spokesperson for a huge social justice issue, thereby raising awareness and instigating change in a way most others of any age only dream about. There’s genuine loss, but it’s a loss offset by something arguably much greater.

And this is where it finally came together. My problem is not with Yousafzai’s age and my reservations about the sacrifices she’s made. My problem – the distaste I experienced when I first saw her on The Daily Show and experience again every time I hear the name “Malala” in the news – is with that fact that we need a Malala. The West has been long aware of the situation of women in Pakistan, in many other countries in the Middle East, and elsewhere around the world. But it was only when we had a charismatic young woman with a dramatic personal history usefully demonizing extremist forces with which we’re actively at war that anyone could be bothered to care about any of the issues she raises. Only when we’re presented with a pretty face, a personal anecdote, and the sheer novelty of such an articulate young activist, do the media converge and the public come together to applaud the scope of their moral sympathies by applauding the courageous young Malala.

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Still, I do not want to end on such a pessimistic note. Let’s step back again, away from the question of whether you or I are really doing as much as we should to advance the cause of girls’ right to education, to return to what I’ve diagnosed as the core of my distaste with the media phenomenon “Malala.”

The question I suggest we should be asking is this: What kind of social transformation would need to take place such as we no longer require novelty spokespeople to respond proportionally to social injustice around the world? There is no silver bullet, but much of the answer – as is clearly recognized by Yousafzai – is education. People need to expand their moral and intellectual horizons, and this is what education, particularly education in the humanities, is uniquely suited to do.

Even in my own country, not enough people get an education of the quality to which they ought to be legally entitled. I am an American citizen who went to a “brand name” university in Canada, one that could very well have been my top pick of those schools that accepted me if cost were no factor. But, as is the case for most of us, cost was a factor. Even though my parents very generously paid the “international rate” larger than those of my Canadian peers, the cost was still commensurate with my local state university and less than a third of what it would have cost to attend most if not all private U.S. universities—even one that offered me a scholarship worth more than the cost of full tuition at the private Canadian institution. The decision between that school and the Canadian one was a no-brainer. My country’s education system may be the envy of much of the world, but its cost is an embarrassment, and I see little political will to change this.

In addition to making higher education more universally accessible, I believe that we must ensure that the humanities are emphasized every bit as much as the also incontestably important STEM subjects. When confronted by someone skeptical about the intrinsic value of the humanities, the best response I know how to make is to elaborate the many ways in which the study of history, literature, philosophy, art (and the list goes on) are for a properly flourishing democracy. (An excellent articulation of such an argument can be found here at Harper’s.)

Any undergraduate philosophy major could present an entire litany of respects in which it is outrageous to classify corporations as people. It should take no special training of any kind to see that, so long as donating money is considered a protected form of political speech, a country in which the top one percent of the population controls, at a conservative estimate, 30% of its economic resources is not a county accurately described as a democracy. The way my country is currently run, we routinely sacrifice the well-being of the majority for the sake of the GNP, which the deeply flawed and fatally over-valorized pseudo-science* of economics all-too-often accepts as a proxy for human happiness. (And yes, I intend that “fatally” in more than just its figurative sense.)

This isn’t difficult to see. All it takes is a little bit of critical perspective. Study of the humanities is the best way I know to cultivate such perspective. I do not suggest that the humanities be the centerpiece of everyone’s educational experience. More citizens with a basic competence in statics, for instance, would be a boon, as would more of those capable of assessing the methodology of a scientific study. I argue only that the humanities have a full seat at the table. Universities, and most especially state universities, fail us all when they insist that all departments justify their existence in terms of dollars and cents. Our educational system cannot be run on the model of a business governed by the bottom-line.

What Yousafzai contributes to this argument is the extent to which higher education – and, especially, the serious study of the humanities – is important not only for the proper functioning of democracy, but also, indirectly, able to mitigate the suffering of men, women, and children around the world. The broader the moral horizons of those with the greatest military and economic power, the better the world as whole may actually become.

Simply put, eleven-year-old girls should not have to risk their lives advocating for basic human rights. The onus should be on the adults with the power and the privilege. I just wish I knew what to do to make this happen. To take Malala Yousafzai’s laureation as an occasion for this discussion would be at least a small step in the right direction.