Does Education Make Us Curious

Teaching styles and the learners they build

I was barely older than the undergraduates in front of me, and they were waiting for me to answer a query.

The SUNY Polytechnic at Utica, upstate New York. My first time teaching, and I thought I knew the material cold. I had studied it the way I had learned to study. Thoroughly, until I was in flow.

Standing in front of that classroom, I realized that knowing and teaching were not the same skill, and I had only ever learned to know. Teaching required me to explain why an idea mattered, to answer when a student understood it differently than I did, to move a room full of learners from information to understanding.

The SUNY research labs were a similar experience. I was helping a professor on some early neural-network work, and everything I knew about neural networks I knew as theory. Now I was being asked to help create a knowledge application and experiment – all on my own.

I felt like an imposter in both rooms. It was frightening. It was also the most alive I had ever felt inside an academic campus.

• • •

To understand the fear, I have to go back to where I first learned in a university setting. At Panjab University, and then at Thapar, I learned to learn and to share what I learned in response to a predictable set of tests and interviews. Those environments filled me with facts, methods, derivations, and the discipline of long and sometimes hurried pre-exam study. I came out of it with real knowledge and the stamina to master hard things.

Those environments also frowned on my questioning nature. I remember the mathematics class where the professor explained to me that my questions reflected a lack of aptitude that bordered on disrespect.

I quickly learned that expressed curiosity must have a boundary. Asking why an accepted method worked, or where it might break, or whether another reading deserved a hearing, was indiscipline or disrespect. I held thoughts I did not know how to test, and questions I was not sure I had permission to ask. For a long time I aspired only to know more, because knowledge for the sake of knowledge felt like a purpose.

After all, every test and interview that mattered tested that knowledge. India, the country of my birth and early life, celebrates knowing.

And then everything changed. My first morning in a graduate classroom at SUNY. My professors engaged me as an intellectual adult. I was bewildered. Suddenly, I needed to have opinions and questions. They listened when I asked something, and answered thoughtfully, even when my thinking was half-assed. They pushed back on weak reasoning, pointed me toward better evidence, and left conclusions for me to reach with my own hurting brain.

I learned for the first time to be comfortable with being intellectually uncomfortable. Holding more than one expression to be true. Creating my own expressions.

• • •

Teaching and research pressed these lessons into my being.

A student would ask something I had not prepared for. A result from an experiment would come back that the textbook or theory had not explained directly. I learned to think across domains, to apply what I knew to problem sets I had never encountered before, to design a solution and explain my thinking.

Somewhere in those years I stopped aspiring to know, and became comfortable as a learner. The confidence I had chased through mastery arrived quietly, from the quality of the questions instead of the completeness of the answers.

Later, at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business — Booth now, I still say I attended GSB — that comfort met rigor. Chicago has its own register, demanding in a way I had not met before. Data mattered. Models mattered. The assumptions underneath the models mattered as much as either. Classical and behavioral economics could explain the same empirical results in different ways, and the scientific method was foundational in every class — in how a question was framed, how evidence was examined, how a claim was tested.

Opinions were required, but by themselves counted for little. Class participation meant preparation and the quality of the thought behind what you said — an argument you could defend, put clearly, that added something to the understanding of the room. I found my own strengths there. Framing problems that often had no shape. Connecting ideas across fields. Holding a view under real challenge and finding the assumptions that disagreements may turn on.

• • •

For a long time I thought of these as three separate educations.

I don’t see it that way now.

My education arrived in parts. The incompleteness I carried out of India was what made the freedom to question at SUNY meaningful. That freedom was what let Chicago’s rigor become part of who I am as a thought leader.

I did not build the foundation I work from. It was built for me, across three sets of rooms and two countries, by teachers who mostly never knew each other.

What they left me with was the ease of not knowing and the curiosity to learn.

I still walk into rooms where I don’t know the answer, and I am in no hurry to pretend otherwise.

• • •

Thank you for reading and spending some of your day with me.

Please do take a moment to share your thoughts, comments, likes, and questions.

— Adi