The Difference Between Teaching Answers and Teaching Questions 

I am a professor in the humanities at a time when the humanities are shrinking.

At my own university, four full-time English faculty positions have disappeared, leaving one.

Me.

I don't agree with that decision. But I also know my university isn't unique. Across higher education, programs are being asked to prove their value through enrollment numbers, career outcomes, and fairly narrow definitions of usefulness. The humanities don't always fit neatly into those measures.

And I understand the question behind them: What, exactly, are students getting from these classes?

There are easy answers. In my classroom, students learn authors and literary movements, rhetorical strategies and grammatical conventions. They learn how to write an argument, analyze a text, and support a claim. There are things I want them to know when the semester ends, sure.

But I'm not sure those are the things I teach that matter the most.

I teach questions.

Why did the writer choose this word instead of another?

Whose perspective is missing?

What does this argument assume its audience already believes?

Why do we sympathize with this character?

What changes if someone else tells the story?

What evidence would make you change your mind?

And perhaps my favorite:

Why?

These questions can frustrate students at first. They’ve spent years getting very good at figuring out what a teacher wants from them: the teacher possesses an answer, the student learns it, and eventually the student proves that learning by giving the answer back.

I understand the appeal of that model. Answers are comfortable and reassuring. They can be memorized, tested, and awarded points.

Questions are messier. Sometimes a student asks me, "But what's the right answer?" And sometimes I have to tell them that I don't know. Or that there are several. Or that I'm less interested in which answer they choose than in whether they can show me how they got there.

That can be frustrating.

I also think it's one of the most important things we do.

When I teach a poem, I don't want twenty students to leave my classroom knowing what I think the poem means. I want them to know how to make an interpretation and find evidence for it. I want them to hear another student say something they hadn't considered and have to wonder: does my original reading still work?

Knowing an answer and knowing what to do when there isn't one require very different kinds of thinking.

This isn't an argument that other disciplines don't teach questions. Of course they do. I witness it weekly with my colleagues. Scientists ask questions while nurses interpret complicated situations. Business leaders even make decisions without complete information.

But there is something particular about the questions we spend our time with in the humanities.

Our subject, much of the time, is us. Human beings.

We look to our stories and histories, the things we make, the languages we inherit, and the values we claim to hold whie we contradict them. The humanities work to figure out what all of this means.

There isn't an answer key for being human.

Maybe that's part of why I worry about the way we talk about the value of education now. Increasingly, we're evaluating education according to what can be counted most easily: enrollment, graduation rates, salaries, career outcomes, résumé-ready skills.

Those metrics matter. But I’ve started to notice what happens when we treat them as the only questions worth asking.

So yes, I worry about the shrinking humanities. I worry about what it means when English professors disappear, programs close, and the spaces devoted to reading, writing, history, philosophy, language, and art become smaller.

But my concern isn't simply that fewer students will read Shakespeare. It's what else might disappear when those classrooms disappear: places where students are expected to linger over something complicated, disagree about what it means, change their minds, or realize that the question they started with wasn't quite the right one.

The world needs people who know things. I want my students to know things.

I also want them to know when to question what they know.

So, this is your friendly reminder that education isn't only about leaving a classroom with more answers than you had when you walked in.

Sometimes, I think, the better evidence that you've learned something is that you leave with a question you didn't know enough to ask before.