From K-12 to post-secondary and beyond, the traditional focus in education is on knowing the right answers. Often this means rote memorisation of answers and stuffing names, dates, and details into short- and medium-term memory where they can be retrieved just long enough to pass a test.

Adult learning, especially in the workplace, is similarly mired in this outdated approach, particularly when we look beyond the exclusive executive-level business and management education. Employees are still expected to memorise compliance rules, safety protocols and technical information about products or processes. Static, computer-based learning presents the same material and questions to every learner — regardless of their background or prior knowledge. Corporate education is widely stuck in an industrialisation paradigm originating in the 1950’s, of preparing employees to be human cogs in a big set of wheels.

Often the only closed loops (i.e. checking that the learning has happened) are a few poorly written multiple-choice questions at the end of a video or a presentation. With the right answers (or enough attempts so that short-term memory saves them) employees can pass the quiz at the end and check the box that they’ve successfully completed the program. But it’s doubtful that they remember, let alone actually comprehend, the information. And if employees are truly able to do something meaningful with that information, it is purely up to chance.

Critiquing memorisation without comprehension is not new. Countries like the US are still heavily reliant on standardised tests such as the SAT, ACT, GRE, MCAT and a long list of other gateway tests. Other countries like Finland or my home country of Denmark have changed to models that focus on comprehension over memorisation. But this is all a decades-old perspective. So, what is new?

The new reality of large language models such as Claude and GPT-4 is beginning to make this problem of memorisation radically more dangerous. Artificial intelligence now performs easily and at fairly sophisticated levels of comprehension. ChatGPT puts a universe of information and comprehension-level knowledge at people’s fingertips. Robots can now even collaborate to solve highly complex tasks. And it does not stop there.

As a result, the future of education has no choice than to move beyond merely preparing learners to answer questions. The bar has been raised: The relevance for humans in a world where answers are already abundant will be the ability to ask the right questions. This realisation comes with a shocking conclusion, as I will discuss later.

 

The Human Edge

Humans have a much better edge over AI when it comes to applying knowledge, by using their inherently human potential to think critically, collaborate, create, and communicate. These are the 21st century skills that enable people to go beyond trying to memorise the right answers and, instead, to ask the right questions.

I will argue that asking the right questions is both a metacognitive skill and a disposition. The drive to understand and explore is an attitude that needs to be encouraged and practiced extensively. This pivotal set of skills must be mastered if people are to move from human hard drives of stored knowledge to creative problem solvers and innovators.

Seeking to understand why, is also a vital component of dealing with the failures that are integral to experimentation and exploration. Mastering the skill sets around asking the right questions — and having the inclination to do so — can help people adopt the important growth mindset of understanding that failing does not make you a failure. Rather, it is an opportunity to understand where to go next — provided you ask the right question about exactly that.

Many of these 21st skills appear to be interrelated. As a Harvard Business Review article observed, The good news is that by asking questions, we naturally improve our emotional intelligence, which in turn makes us better questioners — a virtuous cycle.

It could be tempting to conclude that we need to target all resources directly at these pivotal skills. The reality is far more sobering. I have developed learning architecture (designs for how to make learning happen) for hundreds of learning programs. Their purposes range from problem-based learning for children in school, and high school students working on game design and cyber-security solutions, to corporate executive development and high performance, high reliability programs for special forces, fighter pilots and specialist physicians. Consistent across practically everything I have ever worked on is that development of higher-order thinking happens only in the context of mastering the relevant foundational knowledge and skills.

 

The Value of Questioning: A Personal Journey

My perspective on the importance of asking the right questions has been formed over decades, going back to my own schooling. For example, from the time I was finishing middle school, I was determined to go to medical school. But my capstone project in high school was not in biology or chemistry, as might be expected. Rather, I was fascinated by the 1968 revolt in Czechoslovakia (which today is divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and wanted to understand it. But there was a more important underlying set of drivers at work, from curiosity to a sense of adventure.

Thanks to my parents, I had the opportunity to travel multiple times to Czechoslovakia before the Velvet Revolution in November 1989. Through my parents’ history teacher colleagues, I got to know Jakub Truvan, a priest who was blamed and harassed by communist authorities for inciting a young student to set himself on fire to protest the Soviet Union’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, which ended a short-lived period of government reforms known as Prague Spring. Jakub shared his previously untold story with me and handed over hundreds of original documents from the Charta 77 resistance movement, which corroborated what he shared with me. I carried several shopping bags filled with original documents past the black cars where agents carried out Jakub’s lifelong surveillance. Back in our home in Denmark, a family friend helped translate all these original sources — paid for in hard currency: Czechoslovian beer from Bohemia.

Even now, decades later, I can say this high school project was one of the most impactful learning experiences of my life. Sadly, in contrast, much of what I encountered in medical school was a letdown. While getting a top grade in anatomy or psychology was a challenge in itself — and how human function is intrinsically interesting — it primarily required enough perseverance to store textbook information on the human brain’s biological hard drive.

In time, I began teaching anatomy courses for physiotherapy and medical students. After a few years of mimicking what my teachers had been doing— filling eight, ten or twelve giant blackboards with detailed notes, only to be wiped off and replaced with line after line of new information — I eventually adopted a different approach. Students were challenged to read the textbook ahead of time. Then only the parts that students who had studied found challenging, as well as the most conceptual themes, were discussed in class. This was essentially the flipped classroom, long before it became popularised.

This model was a significant departure from what students had come to expect, and several physiotherapy students in one class complained to the dean about it. However, that class ended up scoring on average a full grade-point higher than the best previous class I had taught. These results convinced me that mindless memorisation for exams was inferior to learning for comprehension and asking the right questions. Almost as important, it was also far more satisfying to teach this way!

 

When the Question is the Answer

At a time when AI continues to make significant inroads in the workplace and elsewhere, we cannot rely on industrial age thinking that treats people like interchangeable widgets and human storage devices. Memorising facts too often results in a rigid mental framework, like an intellectual assembly line that assumes no variation.

The world is too complex and ever-changing for such a static approach. As yesterday’s right answers become outmoded, and today’s answers are available on the chat (aka ChatGPT) in the palm of your hand, the true value of learning will be in the ability to ask the right questions.

(This article was previously published by Forbes.)

 

Ulrik Juul Christensen MD 

Executive Chairman, Area9 Group

CEO, Area9 Lyceum