When your intelligence is judged by a stupid question.

You do not notice it at first, because the question is presented as challenging and intelligent. But if you do not answer in the way the institution expects, your answer is dismissed. That is why so many students learn by rote: to meet the demands of the education system. They then graduate without being able to explain even the basic concepts of their field.

In the humanities, at least, reality has a way of revealing itself. Express your point of view and you will be told, “That is your interpretation. It does not reflect reality.” They define the boundaries of the academic world, while leading you to believe that all the answers lie within it. They champion diversity, yet are often the first to reject those who think differently—or who simply have a broader range of life experience. Decades in the same profession may make you good at your job, but they do not prove that you understand the world beyond it.

If you study the social sciences, you will encounter plenty of traps like these. Some lecturers, however, are candid enough to admit that institutions enrol more students than they can accommodate because “some will drop out anyway,” allowing them to cover their costs. And these are the better lecturers. They do not lie, pretend otherwise or insult your intelligence.

Universities are under fire everywhere. But are we asking what the real problem is?

If you use different words to reach the same conclusion, they will steer you back to that inane question you barely know how to answer. To get any further, you have to descend to its level of superficiality. If you believe a university degree is a prerequisite for success, you are sorely mistaken. The older I get, the harder I find this capitalist system to stomach. You no longer study to understand, but to become like those who studied before you, chasing one piece of paper after another—until, after collecting enough of them, you begin to wonder what any of them are worth.

The most intelligent people I have met are those who have walked away from this charade. Once you understand how the system works and the criteria by which you are judged, you realise that it has little to do with intelligence. It has to do with power.

The power to keep you beneath them. The power to stop you crossing the line with an idea of your own. And so they turn out countless alienated people while teaching theories they have repeated by rote for decades, within increasingly compressed and tightly controlled schedules. Meanwhile, the world has moved on. Acknowledging that would require the lecturers themselves to reconsider their assumptions—and to ask whether they have mistaken their own map for the entire territory.

Young people take to the streets, protest and rebel, yet those in authority carry on as though nothing is happening. This is a more perceptive generation, increasingly unwilling to listen to stories that stopped making sense long ago. They are labelled disrespectful, yet they have inherited a world shaped by a generation that claimed everything for itself, building houses and bridges as though nothing it constructed could ever fall.

Do you really think the achievements of people such as Elon Musk, Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein can be explained solely by what is taught inside the university box? Because perhaps that is what we should call it now: a box. It brings to mind the black box of behaviourism, where internal processes are left outside the scope of observation and attention is directed towards observable behaviour.

Dysfunctional behaviour seems to emerge from this box. But try to understand it and you will be told that you cannot know what happens inside another person’s mind. Constructivism is brushed aside—even though, as an approach to learning, it views students as active participants in building knowledge: connecting ideas, asking questions and revising their understanding. Learning therefore requires more than memorisation. Yet when you become critical, they retreat to a narrow behavioural explanation, avoiding questions they cannot answer.

On one point, they are right: we cannot claim to understand another person’s mind completely. They can present you with every theory in the world, but theories remain open to revision, change and replacement.

If you stray beyond the fence, even without realising it, they no longer know how to assess you. You unsettle their frameworks and create more work for them. They criticise you for giving the same answer to seventeen questions, without noticing that they have asked you the same question seventeen times—and overlooked the fundamental one: “What is it?”

In my view, this is also why certain problems persist: those who should help us understand them end up reproducing them.

Something similar happens in philosophy: arguments unfold without ever reaching a resolution, while thinkers defend positions they never quite untangle. There is, however, one difference: they keep asking questions.

If those within these institutions asked why so many people withdraw from social life and no longer feel part of the system, they would also have to examine their own role in creating a dysfunctional society.

On the one hand, they denounce capitalism and neoliberalism. On the other, they reproduce their logic, shaping students to fit institutional expectations: outwardly compliant, inwardly alienated, and forced to swallow a medicine that silences questions. Anyone who proposes an alternative is steered back towards conformity, as though fitting in were the measure of wellbeing.

But homeostasis does not guarantee wellbeing. A dysfunctional system can maintain its equilibrium too. Keeping it stable does not make it just. Yet we keep waiting, as though oil slicks on the surface of the sea will somehow disappear of their own accord, sooner or later.

Try to raise the issue and you become the problem: you cannot adapt, it is your fault, you brought it on yourself. Then they refer you to someone who shares the same assumptions, completing the circle without questioning anything.

This is the very neoliberal logic they claim to oppose: turning collective contradictions into individual failings. They teach it, analyse it and condemn it in words, while keeping it alive through their actions—with our money.

It is a theatre in which the actors come to believe their own performance, while those who live with its contradictions pay the price.

So remember: when a question serves only to check whether you can repeat the expected answer, it is not measuring your intelligence. It is measuring your obedience. And when a university rewards obedience and penalises independent thought, it betrays its purpose: it produces people trained to keep the system that shaped them standing.

An institution that must discourage questions to survive should be the first to come under examination.