Seoul, SOUTH KOREA – Everything has a beginning, a starting point, where someone or something is able to cause or experience a eureka moment.
And it’s the same situation when it comes to ‘questions.’
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Every question needs somewhere to start – somebody to ask it – before it can set out into a world full of queries, searching for its perfect match, its answer.
For Seoul National University, that one question eventually ended up as an entire academic movement.
The Seoul National University Grand Quest Initiative began in 2022 merely as a research cluster under the university’s future planning office, and it began to slowly grow from there.
It started as a series of yearly “seasons” that produced dozens of open-ended scientific questions.
But this year, organizers decided to expand the program to a permanent platform that stretched across fields of science, technology and the humanities.
The idea driving all of it was pretty simple but a little uncomfortable for a place as achievement-driven as Seoul National University. Instead of chasing problems other people have already defined, the university wanted to be the one asking questions that nobody ever thought to utter out loud yet, even if there’s no rock-solid guarantee that they’ll ever be answered.
At a June forum, six new “Grand Quests” were unveiled to the public.
The program mainly targeted the younger generation, students and young people, to think about a variety of topics such as whether artificial intelligence can forget, whether the pace of aging can be controlled, whether asking questions is important, whether democracy and capitalism can hold up under the pressure of AI and more.
Two lectures at the forum featured prestigious professors who took the stage to make the case of why the act of asking questions matters as much as the answers themselves.
Professor Choe Jae Chun (최재천) is a sociobiologist and within the South Korean public, is best known as the ‘Ant Doctor,’ a reputation built over decades of fieldwork, working closely with mammals both on the ground and at sea.
He’s also the reason why we have the word “consilience,” or 통섭 in Korean, which is his own translation of an idea he absorbed studying under Edward O. Wilson at Harvard University.
The premise is that real understanding doesn’t come from mastering one field. Instead, it comes from forcing separate fields to collide.
In a 2024 interview, Choe said, “Knowing is loving,” his most iconic sentence and his own translation of the Korean phrase “알면 사랑한다.”
It’s the idea that the more you learn something, the more your affection for it grows.
Choe built his lecture around consilience and transformed the line, “Knowing is loving” from a random scientific quote into sharing his whole perception, compressed into three words.
Choe talked about “talking together, jumping together.”
Not one discipline towing another behind it, he explained, but two fields willing to leap into unfamiliar territory at the same moment, being able to explore new ideas, new things together collaboratively.
He pointed to American university culture and the way students debate with their professors and peers instead of just transcribing what they said into their notes. And the workshops where students let their voices be heard instead of guarding them before continuing their discussions over lunch or after school instead of packing it away when the class ends.
“That’s the model,” he argued, “Korean education needs to study and take note of American schools.”
Not because American classrooms are smarter, according to Choe, but because they’re louder. Ideas get stress-tested in the open instead of polished alone and presented only once they’re safe.
South Korean students, on the other hand, tend to do the opposite: work through ideas privately, keep half-formed thoughts to themselves until they’re completely sure it makes sense and treat class time as something to sit back and absorb instead of actively participate.
Choe emphasized that a culture that talks and jumps together doesn’t run on students protecting their ideas until they’re finished. It runs on people willing to think out loud in front of each other, before they’re ready.
Professor Choi In-Cheol (최인철) teaches psychology at Seoul National University and is founding director of its Happiness Research Center. Established in 2010, it’s one of the first research centers in South Korea that was built entirely around studying happiness.
Choi’s lecture, “The Power of Questions,” opened with a disarmingly simple point: people who ask questions, especially follow-up questions that build on what someone just said, tend to be favored more.
It’s the kind of observation that could’ve remained a piece of social advice and nothing more.
But Choi wasn’t interested in stopping there.
“Ask more,” he said, “and you understand the whole world better – the most obvious payoff, but the one everything else is built on.
“Ask more, and people will warm to you, particularly when the question proves you were actually tracking what they said instead of just waiting for your turn to talk.”
Choi said that the distinction mattered to people because a question isn’t proof of listening just because it’s phrased as one. It has to actually follow from what the other person said.
“And ask more,” he continued, “and you build a kind of intellectual humility that makes you harder to trap inside your own certainty.
This is the point where the lecture stopped being about conversation skills and turned into something more pointed: Choi tied it directly to the polarization splitting apart so much of public life right now.
He also named a habit, similarly to Choe’s remark, that a lot of Korean students in that room probably recognized in themselves before he’d even finished describing it: the urge to over-prepare before raising a hand.
Choi said this tendency is especially common among Korean students, who tend to sit on a question until they’re confident it qualifies as “good” or “exceptional” before ever speaking up.
But he said that this was not only targeted at Korean students specifically. Students everywhere, he said, will probably run into some version of this at least once – that specific panic of worrying your question isn’t good enough and that it’ll get quietly filed away by everyone in the room as “low quality” the moment it leaves your mouth.
But, he said, “Questioning was never really about how much you know was being reflected. It was about having the nerve to speak before you’re sure.”
Choe made the case for the courage to cross disciplinary lines. Choi made the case for the courage to just ask.
Neither is really about having the correct answer or being right. They both, in the end, pose an argument that the future belongs to whoever is willing to speak up before they’re sure.
Josephine Yein Lee is a Reporter with Youth Journalism International.
