How to ask questions: It helps to know stuff

Our education system rewards correct answers, writes Hiranya K. Nath. We need to focus on thinking, which "begins not with answers -- but with better questions."

After weeks discussing the U.S. economy and the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, Nath told his Sam Houston state economics students to "act as financial journalists and prepare three questions for a senior Fed official." He told them he'd grade their questions, not their answers.

"Students who were comfortable explaining concepts suddenly hesitated," he writes. "Others leaned in, thinking more carefully than they had all semester."

Answers are easy to generate these days, he writes. "The more important skill is knowing what to ask. "If we are serious about preparing students for the future," we must prioritize "curiosity, reasoning, judgment and the ability to engage with complexity. And we must place greater emphasis on questions."

When information is scarce, education is about access. When information is abundant, it must be about discernment — about deciding what is reliable, what is relevant and what is worth attention.

Students must be prepared for "a world defined by uncertainty, complexity and constant change," he writes.

It's remarkably similar to what I said in 1966 when I gave the eighth-grade graduation speech, always titled "As I See It" at Edgewood Junior High School. What was important, I said, was not to know the right answers but to ask the right questions. We'd be entering, I said, a rapidly changing world.

I gave the speech from memory at the graduation. I was wearing my first pair of heels, and decided not to wear my brand-new contact lenses. I couldn't handle both at the same time. I didn't think I could see the words without holding the printed speech up to my eyes, which would be dorky, so I didn't take it with me as back-up. (Wearing my glasses also would have been dorky.) I tottered out, launched into the speech and went dry halfway through. Then I remembered and kept going. Nobody noticed the pause, except for my mother, who shared my split second of panic. I learned a valuable lesson: Don't let fear of dorkiness set you up for humiliation. Take the speech with you.

In my journalism career, I learned how to ask useful questions. There was a lot of "deciding what is reliable, what is relevant and what is worth attention." However, I now question whether asking questions is more important than knowing answers. Knowledgeable people ask the best questions -- and understand the answers, so they can ask good follow-up questions.

If Nath hadn't spent weeks explaining monetary policy to his students, none of them would have been able to tackle the assignment. If they'd gone online to access all that information, they probably wouldn't have understood it very well.

Our education system has been denigrating knowledge for a long time now in favor of higher or deeper or broader thinking. I think I first heard "oh, they can just look it up" more than 30 years ago. It doesn't seem to be working very well.

Yes, it's a rapidly changing world. It always is. Knowing that the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell is not enough to compete with AI. But it beats not knowing anything.