A Well Educated Mind Will Always Have More Questions Than Answers

The oldest creation hymn in the Rigveda, the Nasadiya Sukta, asks who really knows and who can say where this creation came from. It ends with the thought that the one who surveys it from the highest heaven surely knows, or perhaps even he does not know. A civilisation at the height of its intellectual confidence chose to close its greatest cosmological poem with a doubt. The topic suggests that this was not an accident of temperament but a feature of mature knowledge, and the essay asks what that feature is and what it demands of a person and a society.

Other traditions tell the same story. The oracle at Delphi declared that no one was wiser than Socrates, and Socrates, puzzled, went about Athens questioning those who claimed expertise until he concluded that he was wiser only in not thinking that he knew what he did not know. In the Katha Upanishad the boy Nachiketa asks Yama, the lord of death, the one question that Yama is reluctant to answer, what happens after death. He refuses gold, long life and kingdoms offered in place of a reply. In both stories the hero is distinguished from others by the quality of his question and not by the quantity of his answers.

Science repeats the pattern at larger scale. In the 1890s the physicist Albert Michelson told an audience that the most important fundamental laws of physical science had probably all been discovered, and within a few years relativity and quantum theory overturned the picture. Today cosmologists say that ordinary matter makes up only about five percent of the universe, and that the rest is dark matter and dark energy whose nature is unknown. A saying attributed to the physicist John Wheeler puts it well, that as the island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of ignorance. Each advance extends the coastline along which new puzzles are found.

The mechanism is not mysterious. A first year student sees a subject as a list of facts, and a researcher sees it as a map with large blanks. Training teaches a person where the answers stop, which is a form of knowledge that a beginner does not have. It also teaches how to ask a question that can be tested. In the early 1980s the Australian physicians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren doubted the settled view that stress and acid caused stomach ulcers and suggested that a bacterium was responsible. When sceptics were unmoved, Marshall swallowed a culture of the organism to prove the point, and the two won the Nobel Prize in 2005. A question that everyone else considered answered had been the most valuable thing in the field.

A first year student sees a subject as a list of facts, and a researcher sees it as a map with large blanks.

The practical implications for education are serious. Systems built around examinations tend to reward the person with the quickest answer and not the person with the best question. The Annual Status of Education Report for 2022 found that fewer than half of the children in the fifth class in rural India could read a text meant for the second class, which suggests that the problem begins long before questions can be asked at all. The National Education Policy of 2020 states a goal of moving away from rote learning toward critical thinking and inquiry. Whether that goal is met will depend less on the text of the policy than on whether a child in an ordinary classroom can ask why and be taken seriously. A teacher who rewards an awkward question and does not punish it is extending, in a small way, the boundary of what the classroom can know, and the habit she builds may last longer than anything the syllabus contains.

A critic will point out that a mind full of questions is not always useful. A surgeon, a judge and an engineer must act on incomplete knowledge, and a graduate who answers every request with the remark that it is complicated is a poor colleague. Doubt can also be manufactured. A memo written in 1969 by an executive of a tobacco company stated that doubt was the company's product, since it was the best way of competing with the body of fact in the public mind. A person can be armed with endless questions and use them to block a decision that the evidence has already made.

The objection is fair and it sharpens the claim. The topic says more questions than answers, not no answers. The educated mind holds some things firmly, such as the laws of arithmetic, the evidence for evolution and the links between smoking and cancer, and it knows the difference between a question that is open and one that has been closed. It treats its conclusions as provisional without treating them as optional. What marks it is the quality of its doubt, which is specific, responsive to evidence and willing to be ended by a good answer, and the manufactured kind is all of the opposite.

The idea has an institutional form as well. The Right to Information Act of 2005 gave every citizen the means to put a question to the government and to expect a reply. It rests on the same belief that a society is healthier when more of its members are trained and permitted to ask. The questions that come in are often small and awkward, concerning a ration card or a road repair, and they are the kind of inquiry through which a democracy tests its own claims.

There remains a puzzle that the proverb does not touch. Every earlier age that thought it was near the end of knowledge was wrong, and it may be that the feeling of having more questions than answers belongs to our moment and not to education as such. It is also possible that a point exists beyond which the questions begin to shrink as the answers accumulate. Whether any mind or any civilisation has reached such a point, and whether it would know if it had, is a question that only a well educated mind could ask and none can yet answer.