– Prof. Padmakumar Nair, Vice Chancellor, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology (TIET), Patiala

For an enterprise called education, we spend surprisingly little time asking a fundamental question: What exactly is learning? We discuss curricula, credits, examinations, rankings, accreditation, placements, infrastructure, technology, artificial intelligence and employability. All of these matter. Yet I increasingly worry that education has become very good at organising the machinery around learning while paying insufficient attention to learning itself. A student can attend classes, complete assignments, pass examinations, accumulate credits and graduate with an excellent CGPA without necessarily undergoing much intellectual transformation. That should concern us because learning is not simply the acquisition of more information. It is the process through which we revise the way we understand the world and, occasionally, ourselves.

Increasingly, I believe that one of the deepest forms of learning is something we rarely teach: learning to interrogate our own questions. We often tell students to ask questions. We encourage curiosity and, particularly with the arrival of artificial intelligence, have begun saying that asking the right question may be more important than knowing the right answer. I agree, but I would go one step further. Before learning to ask better questions, perhaps we must learn to question our questions. Before asking, “What is the answer?”, we should sometimes pause and ask, “Why am I asking this question in the first place?” That small intellectual pause may represent one of the most important capabilities education can develop. Questions do not emerge from an intellectual vacuum. Every question has a history. It arises from our experiences, ambitions, fears, assumptions, ideologies, incentives and emotions. Sometimes a question genuinely seeks understanding. At other times, it merely seeks evidence to support something we have already decided to believe. The ability to recognise the difference is an important form of metacognition: thinking about our own thinking. I find it useful to interrogate a question through a simple framework of four Ps: Purpose, Passion, Philosophy and Pragmatism. They help us examine not only the content of a question but also its origins, assumptions and consequences.

The first is Purpose: Why am I asking? Am I genuinely trying to understand something, solve a problem or explore possibilities, or am I merely trying to confirm what I already believe? Human beings are remarkably good at converting prejudices into questions. A leader who has already concluded that an employee is incompetent may ask, “Why is this person repeatedly failing?” A more open question might be, “What explains this person’s performance?” The first question contains a verdict; the second creates space for inquiry. The difference is subtle but intellectually significant. Learning begins when we become capable of recognising how the purpose behind a question shapes the range of answers we are willing to consider. The second P is Passion: What emotions are shaping the question? We like to imagine intellectual inquiry as something purely rational, but it rarely is. Fear, insecurity, ambition, anger, curiosity, affection and resentment influence both the questions we ask and those we avoid. A student may ask, “Will this come in the examination?” not because the subject lacks intellectual value, but because the educational system has trained the student to optimise for marks. A manager may ask, “Who is responsible for this failure?” when fear or frustration makes the more useful question, “What can we learn from this failure?” much harder to ask. Passion is not the enemy of reasoning; curiosity itself is a passion. The challenge is not to eliminate emotion but to become conscious of it. Intellectual maturity requires us to ask what our emotions are making easier for us to see and what they may be preventing us from seeing.

The third P, Philosophy, may be the most difficult because every question contains assumptions, and those assumptions are often invisible to the person asking it. Consider the question, “How can we make students attend more classes?” It already assumes that attendance is the problem. Perhaps a more fundamental question is, “Why do students not find some classes worth attending?” We could go deeper still and ask, “What should happen in a classroom that cannot happen equally well elsewhere?” The question we choose determines the universe of answers available to us. This is why many major intellectual advances begin not with better answers but with challenges to the original question. What if the problem has been framed incorrectly? What if something we consider obvious is merely conventional? What evidence would make us abandon our present explanation? Education must train students to identify these hidden assumptions; otherwise, highly intelligent people can expend enormous intellectual energy producing sophisticated answers to poorly constructed questions. The final P is Pragmatism: What will I do with the answer? Will it change my thinking, behaviour, decision or strategy? Or am I asking merely for reassurance, intellectual entertainment or ammunition for an argument? There is, of course, nothing wrong with curiosity for its own sake, and universities must protect such curiosity. But when our questions concern decisions, policies or actions, intellectual honesty demands that we ask what evidence would actually make us change our minds. If no possible answer can alter my conclusion, I may not really be asking a question at all. I may simply be defending a position. Purpose, Passion, Philosophy and Pragmatism therefore provide a way of turning questioning itself into a learning process.

This matters enormously in the age of artificial intelligence because AI is rapidly reducing the scarcity of answers. A student can ask a machine to explain quantum mechanics, write computer code, compare economic theories, analyse a case study or summarise centuries of philosophical debate within seconds. The educational challenge is therefore shifting. When answers become abundant, judgement becomes scarce. The role of education cannot simply be to help students acquire answers more efficiently. We must help them decide which questions deserve to be asked, recognise why they are asking them, discover the assumptions concealed within them, understand the emotions shaping them and judge what they will do with the answers. In such a world, the capacity to question one’s questions may become more important than the capacity to produce answers quickly. This also changes the role of the teacher. A great teacher of the future may not be the person who knows the most answers; AI may know more. Instead, a great teacher may be the person who pauses when a student asks a question and asks in return: Why do you ask? What are you assuming? What evidence would change your mind? Is there another way of framing the problem? And if you knew the answer, what would you do differently? That is not avoiding the student’s question. That is teaching. The teacher’s role is increasingly to help students examine the architecture of their own thinking, not merely to supply information.

Perhaps bringing learning back into education therefore requires something surprisingly simple but intellectually demanding. We need classrooms in which students do not merely answer questions but learn to examine them, dismantle them, reconstruct them and occasionally abandon them. They must become comfortable with discovering that the problem may lie not in the answer they produced but in the question with which they began. Intellectual maturity is not demonstrated merely by our capacity to answer difficult questions. It is demonstrated by our willingness to ask: Why this question? Why now? What assumptions created it? What emotions are shaping it? And what will I do with the answer? Before we teach young people to question the world, perhaps we should teach them something even more difficult: question your questions. That may be where learning truly begins.

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