After weeks discussing the U.S. economy and the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, I gave my students an unusual assignment: Act as financial journalists and prepare three questions for a senior Fed official.
I told them I would not be grading their answers.
I would be grading their questions.
The reaction was immediate — and telling. Students who were comfortable explaining concepts suddenly hesitated. Others leaned in, thinking more carefully than they had all semester. The exercise revealed something simple but unsettling: While students are trained to answer questions, they are rarely taught how to ask them.
In a world in which answers are increasingly easy to generate, the more important skill is knowing what to ask. Yet our education system is not designed to teach it.
If we are serious about preparing students for the future, we must rethink what we value. We must shift from teaching what to think, to teaching how to think — prioritizing curiosity, reasoning, judgment and the ability to engage with complexity. And we must place greater emphasis on questions.
For generations, education in the United States and elsewhere has followed a familiar model: Teachers deliver knowledge, students absorb it and success is measured by how accurately the students can reproduce it. Standardized tests reward precision. Grades reward correctness. The system rewards answers.
That model made sense when information was scarce.
But today, information is abundant — almost overwhelmingly so. With a smartphone, students can access more knowledge in seconds than previous generations could in years. Artificial intelligence (AI) can summarize, analyze and generate content almost instantly.
Yet our classrooms still operate as if access to information is the central challenge. It is not. The real challenge is making sense of it.
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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.
But we continue to emphasize memorization over meaning and answers over inquiry.
In doing so, we risk producing students who are well-trained to respond but poorly equipped to think. The rise of AI has made this gap impossible to ignore.
Much of the concern around AI focuses on job loss. And it is true that routine tasks — both physical and cognitive — are increasingly automated. But this does not make human intelligence obsolete. It changes what kinds of intelligence matter.
Machines excel at processing information, identifying patterns and executing well-defined tasks. But processing information is not the same as exercising human judgment — especially when problems involve context, ambiguity, ethics and creativity.
In other words, the more capable our machines become, the more valuable human skills become.
Among those skills is the ability to ask meaningful questions. AI, of course, can generate answers in seconds. But the quality and usefulness of those answers depend greatly on the questions and instructions given. A vague question produces a vague answer. A thoughtful question produces insight.
The tool does not define the problem. We do. Yet from elementary school through college, students are assessed on how well they answer questions posed by others.
The questions are structured. The parameters are clear. The solutions are known. But the real world does not present problems this way.
It presents challenges that are messy, evolving and often poorly defined. Before solving them, one must first determine what the question actually is.
And that is precisely what we are not teaching. We are preparing students for a world of answers while they are entering a world of questions.
That classroom experience stayed with me. My students had spent weeks learning about the economy and monetary policy. Yet when asked to move beyond answering questions to framing their own, many struggled.
That is the challenge before us. The United States has long prided itself on innovation. But innovation does not come from a system that effectively discourages questioning. It comes from one that cultivates it.
We now face a choice.
We can continue refining an education system designed for a different era — one that rewards correct answers. Or we can build one that prepares students for a world defined by uncertainty, complexity and constant change.
That world will not reward those who simply know. It will reward those who can think. And thinking begins not with answers — but with better questions.
Hiranya K. Nath is Distinguished Professor of Economics at Sam Houston State University. He has taught economics at the university level for more than two decades. The views expressed are his own.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
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