Is it because I'm a kkondae who is used to finding answers. The first thought I had while reading the book "Beyond IB to KB," which contains the field of international baccalaureate (IB) education, was "When will Jindo leave?" The Jeju Pyojeol graduate introduced his alma mater as "a school where ten objections come out, not ten answers to a single question." When a student answers, new questions are poured out. "Why do you think so?" "From a different point of view," "What is the limit of the evidence?" As a result, I spend two or three hours in math class with a single question, "What is the difference?" I thought the class would be 'a mess'.

However, shortly after, I met a person who changed the character of the word used in bust into praise. Kim Min-hyung, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, defined the development process of mathematics as "a mess" at a mentoring event for scholarship students with math talents at the Woongjin Foundation (Chairman Shin Hyun-woong) on the 23rd of last month. Mathematics is a world of rigor that does not allow even an inch of error to an outsider like me. But I was surprised that such a master of the field called the history of mathematics.

The case is a masterpiece. The paper "Pjin Hodge Theory," published in 1988 by Gerd Faltings, the winner of the Fields Medal, the most prestigious mathematics prize, had many logical leaps and errors, so no one read it properly at the time. The wrong paper became the subject of a generation of research. After 24 years of fuss, when questions were raised and objections were raised again, Peter Scholce presented a new concept of "perfectoid space" and received the Fields Award. Professor Kim said, "Another Fields Award came out because of Faltings' wrong thesis."

Isn't it an exception? Professor Kim said no. "It is rare that mathematics develops through logic that is always correct," he said. "If you try to understand it better through incorrect speculation and flawed logic, you will get good math," he said. Then error is the driving force of creation.

This 'productive error' may be the reason for the existence of humans in the artificial intelligence (AI) era. AI is much better at giving answers. The answer is poured out in one click. The price of goods that have become common is bound to become cheaper. The price of the correct answer will converge to zero.

I remember the old principles of economics. When the price of a good converges to zero, the value of the complementary good increases. As calculations became common thanks to calculators, the ability to determine what to calculate became valuable.

The same is true. When answers become common, the ability to object to them and ask insightful questions becomes important. The more questions and objections within the group, the more value is created. Such a chaotic situation is the scene of creation. That's why Professor Kim asked at the end, "Can this chaotic development process be reproduced with AI?"

On the other hand, Korean education is the opposite. One answer is required for one question. Students who get it right are praised, and students who get it wrong are intimidated. The wrong answer is not the object of ssireum, but the object of removal. Chaos is downgraded to another name for class collapse. It drives students to hell to produce goods whose prices converge to zero.

Now the IB class looks different to me. Two or three hours spent on "What is the difference?" is not a waste. It was a time to reenact the questions and objections that Newton would have raised while inventing the concept. Park Ha-sik, former principal of the civil accident, said that ordinary public school students showed the power to ask more fundamental questions, not to lag behind those of prestigious universities. The source would have been training to ask 'why' and to establish 'reason'.

Korean education should also be changed from education that answers the answers to education that refutes, and from a classroom that erases incorrect answers to a classroom that wrestles with incorrect answers. Classrooms should be much more fussy than they are now. It is a difficult conclusion to swallow for an old man like me who is worried about progress, but you have to swallow it.

[Kim Insoo Editorial Writer]