A poll conducted by Harvard Business Review up
to 80 percent of 200 clients revealed that interactions with their children
comprised of questions. However, only 15-25 percent of adult interactions
comprised of questions.
This is hardly surprising. We are rewarded
for finding answers, not for asking questions. Think about your early days in
school. The answer is king. Questions are invite scorn. At the work place,
asking questions could get one into trouble with colleagues or even the boss.
Does society abhor questions? The great American
poet E.E. Cummings wrote; “Always the
beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question”. At the heart of human
progress is an indomitable, insatiable quest to know. The arc of questioning
stretches from the primordial simple desire to know the what, to the more
complex plane of why and how.
Questions are essentially the tools we
deploy to build tunnels into the minefields of hitherto unknown truths or
construct the scaffolding to scale the heights of new knowledge. Questions are
searchlights that refine our vision, and clarify where else we need to go.
Asking questions is fading fast as way of
relating to our world. The industrial age and the structures of familial,
corporate, religious and state authority have generally not encouraged
questions. Mass education; from primary to tertiary level is built upon rote
learning and unquestioning acceptance of facts delivered through a prescribed syllabus.
Sadly the primary purpose of education is
not to produce skeptical, questioning and thinking citizens. The high purpose
of education in the neoliberal world order is to produce workers, people with
skills. The school is a veritable skill factory.
Capacity to think and ask questions is now a
place of high privilege, which most citizens cannot of the culture and attitude
of asking questions is occurring at a period in human history that demands that
we deal with change and find novel ways of understanding and acting in the
world.
The scale and speed of change demand that we
learn and unlearn fast. Navigating complexity change and uncertainty while
responding new opportunities through creativity and innovation is not going to
be possible if we stay on the path of passive, compliant and unquestioning
engagement with a dynamic world.
The uncertain future must be confronted and
conquered through bold questions and audacious experiments. Our socialization
and especially how we educate our children; from kindergarten to graduate
school must reinstate the question as the core engine of learning. Learning
must be a search or pursuit through questions.
Education must be a search or pursuit
through powered by questions. Education must put a premium on how precisely
learners can express their ignorance. Education must be quest to define through
questions that which we know not. Education and ultimately our adaptive fitness
as a species will depend on the ingenuity of questions.
Our quest for nationhood will be better
served by voters who ask politicians questions so they are less likely to fall
prey of demagogues and despicable ethnic zealots.
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