Education & AI for Africa

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"I don't want to reason"

Published Monday, 26 October 2026 · 3-minute read

When most of us went to school, the deal was simple, and we all understood it without anyone having to explain it. The teacher gave you the notes, you copied the notes, you crammed the notes the night before, and on the day of the exam you poured the notes back onto the paper as faithfully as you could, and if you poured well enough you passed, and if you passed you moved on to the next set of notes.

Nobody really asked whether you understood anything, because understanding was not on the paper, and what was not on the paper did not count.

It is a deal that has served a lot of people well enough, and I don't say that lightly, because many of us have built our careers on the back of it.

But it is a deal that trains one muscle and leaves the other one sleeping, and at New State Schools we have been asking ourselves for some time what happens to a child who goes through twelve years of school having only ever been asked to remember.

So this term we decided to try something new. Alongside the usual term tests, our students now sit a separate test with just two questions, one on reasoning and one on thinking, where the answers are not in the notes because the questions are not about the notes. They are about what you can do with what you know.

Which brings me to Bayo's story (not his real name). In a senior literature class studying the William Shakespeare play, Antony and Cleopatra, a teacher tested her students by asking what she must have thought was a gentle enough question: could the students give the play another name? Not the title on the cover, which anyone can copy, but a title of their own, one that showed they had understood the story well enough to name it themselves.

It is not such a strange thing to ask, either. When Professor Ola Rotimi took Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, the old Greek tragedy of a king who cannot escape his fate, and carried it home to a Yoruba kingdom, he did not keep the old name. He called it The Gods Are Not to Blame, and in six words told you exactly what he thought the story was about, which is a good deal more than the original title ever did.

But Bayo said, with what I can only describe as remarkable honesty, that he did not want to reason.

I laughed when I read it, and I suspect you are laughing too. But the longer I sat with it, the less funny it became, because he was not being rude and he was not being lazy. He was simply telling the truth about the deal he had been raised on. Reasoning was never part of the deal. So why should it start now?

And yet it has to start now, because the world he is walking into will not keep that deal with him. Any phone can now summarise any play in seconds, recite the themes, list the characters, and hand over the notes more faithfully than any student ever could. The child who has only learned to remember is now competing with that phone, and that is a competition he will not win. The child who has learned to reason, on the other hand, is the one telling the phone what to do.

That is why we now ask our students to reason and think about what they have learned. We need to move our children from consumers of what they are given, to learners who can think about it, to builders who can make something new from it.

Dr Tai Solarin understood this long before any of us had a phone in our pocket. Writing to young Nigerians in 1974, he reminded them that knowledge is not gained by intuition: "Once we have borrowed ... ideas, however, we enrich them, fertilize them and they become richer for our own use."

Borrowing was never the problem. The notes, the summary, the answer on the phone, all of that is borrowing. What we are asking of our children, of any one of us for that matter, is the second half of his sentence, and a new name for an old play is a good place to start.