Degrees of misunderstanding

My counterargument is that undergraduate education is condemned by its very nature to be inefficient: efficiency is a mirage, or worse, an excuse. Students who are given the task of generating questions on their own go through a long apprenticeship and may experience frustrating failures before grasping that being puzzled is a gift rather than a sign of ignorance.

Those students who answered so confidently about the cause of the seasons were in many ways the products of a university system that privileges answers over questions, certainty over puzzlement, even when that certainty is fake and in error.

Students need an atmosphere in which they can stumble occasionally and not pay a penalty, in which they can return to a question again and again, searching for answers that get more solid with each iteration, and can even ultimately relish the messiness and inefficiency that are the handmaidens of creativity.

If the graduating Harvard seniors had not felt obliged to offer an instant answer for the benefit of the movie cameras, perhaps they might have paused to consider whether the state of Victoria has seasons identical to those in Massachusetts, or even admit what few Harvard students ever bring themselves to say: “I don’t know.”