The email came in on a Tuesday afternoon, right in the middle of my prep period. It was from a parent of a senior in my English class. The subject line read, “A question about relevance.” The body was polite but pointed: “I’m just wondering how reading a 19th-century novel is going to help my son get a job in computer science. He’s stressed about his portfolio, and the university admissions landscape feels so competitive. I want to make sure his time is being used wisely.”
I sat with that for a while. It’s a fair question, and one that echoes a lot of the chatter around education right now. We are living in a moment where the tangible returns on higher education are under a microscope. Parents are looking at tuition costs, graduate employment statistics, and the fast pace of technological change, and they’re asking hard questions about what college is for. At the same time, teachers are standing in front of classrooms, wondering if the skills they’re trying to build still hold value in a world where information is free and instantly accessible.
I didn’t have a clean answer for her right away. Instead, I remembered something that happened in that same classroom a week earlier. The students were split into groups, working on a presentation about the social context of Frankenstein. I walked over to a cluster of three boys who had their laptops open. One of them had a search engine result pulled up, and he was reading a summary of the novel’s themes aloud to his partners.
“Okay, so, like, the monster is basically a metaphor for the dangers of science,” he said, scrolling.
“Just copy that down,” said another, typing furiously.
I stood behind them for a moment. They had the answer in thirty seconds. They had the facts, the summary, the key quotes. They didn’t need me to tell them what the book was about; the internet could do that. What they needed, I realized, was a reason to care, and a framework for arguing with the text rather than just absorbing it.
I pulled up a chair and asked them a different question. “Forget the metaphor for a second,” I said. “The creature, as a being, is rejected by his creator, chased out of villages, and denied any chance at companionship. Is he being treated fairly by the society around him, and what does that say about our own tendency to ostracize people who look or act different?”
The boy who had been scrolling stopped. He looked up at the ceiling. “Huh,” he said. “I never thought about it that way. It’s not just a scary story, right?”
That is the part that is hard to explain to the parent who is worried about a resume. We are not in the business of just delivering facts anymore. That part of the job was outsourced years ago. The university and the classroom are no longer the primary gatekeepers of information. They are the gatekeepers of interpretation, of critical thinking, of the slow, messy process of learning how to formulate a question that a search engine can’t answer.
When I think about the role of universities today, I see a shift from a lecture hall model to a coaching model. The professor who stands at a podium and monologues for an hour is a fossil. The teacher who hands out a worksheet and waits for the bell is ineffective. But the mentor who sits beside you, listens to your half-formed idea, and asks the question that causes you to reconsider everything—that role has become more vital than ever. It’s a resource that no algorithm can replicate.
I told the parent that her son was probably right to be stressed. The job market is brutal, and the cost of tuition is daunting. But I asked her to consider that the computer science degree alone isn’t what gets a foot in the door—it’s the ability to work in a team, to communicate a complex problem to a non-technical person, to manage time, to absorb rejection and pivot. Those are not skills you learn from a coding bootcamp alone. They are practiced in group projects that go off the rails, in ungraded class discussions where an idea fails publicly, and in office hours where a student has to articulate what they don’t understand.
That Tuesday, after school, I had a student come in for office hours. She was a sophomore, quiet, and she was struggling with an essay about the ethics of data privacy. She couldn’t get started. She told me she felt paralyzed because there was “too much information” online.
This is the new classroom anxiety. It isn’t a lack of data; it’s an overflow. My job was not to give her my opinion on data privacy. My job was to help her build a filter. We sat there and mapped out her arguments on a scrap piece of paper. I gave her a concrete phrase to use: “I don’t need the definitive answer, I just need you to take a stand and defend it.” We set a small timer for fifteen minutes just to write a messy, terrible paragraph on purpose. The act of doing something imperfectly broke the spell.
For parents, I think the takeaway is less about grilling your kids on their grades and more about asking them different kinds of questions around the dinner table. Rather than “What grade did you get on the test?” try moving to “What did you push back on today?” or “What question did you ask that didn’t have an easy answer?” The shift is subtle, but it recalibrates what we value. It sends a message that the cognitive struggle is the goal, not the grade.
It’s easy to look at the whole system and feel that it’s broken. There are real reasons for skepticism. Universities are slow to change, tuition inflation is real, and student debt is a crushing weight. Teachers feel the pressure of high-stakes testing while simultaneously being asked to teach “soft skills” that are hard to measure. We are standing in the middle of a contradiction.
But where does that leave us? I think it leaves us in the messy middle. The university will survive, but it will survive as a place for networking, for structured experimentation, and for the kind of intense, face-to-face friction that creates actual change in a person’s thinking. Teachers will survive, but we have to give up the pretense of being the “sage on the stage” and get comfortable being the “guide on the side,” as the old saying goes.
As for that stressed-out parent, I responded to her email by telling her about the boys and Frankenstein. I told her that her son will be fine if he learns that knowledge isn’t just something you pick up—it’s something you wrestle with. He will be fine if he learns to ask for help when he’s stuck. He will be fine if he knows that creativity isn’t a magical bolt of lightning; it’s often just the persistence to keep going after the first three attempts fail.
I don’t know if I convinced her. I’m honestly not sure I convinced myself fully. But I ended the email with a note that her son had actually asked a really perceptive question during that class discussion about the monster. For a brief second, he looked up from his screen, engaged with the abstract—not just the text. That small, hard-to-see moment is the whole ballgame. We just have to keep hoping the rest of the world recognizes it.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » The email came in on a Tuesday afternoon, right in the middle of my prep period