Anyone who knows me knows that I have no children of my own, and in all honesty I try to avoid little kids when I can. However, there is one thing I find really endearing about kids, especially the younger ones: their unbridled curiosity and willingness to ask questions.
I think the reason why I like this curious nature in children is pretty simple: to them the world is so new and fresh, everything is wondrous and interesting. In addition, they come at things so much more openly and honestly than most adults, because they are ignorant in the truest sense of the word and have no embarrassment whatsoever about asking direct questions about pretty much anything. To them, no subject is off limits or taboo; they manifest the spirit of free inquiry in its most unblemished sense.
And this sense of free inquiry and curiosity usually comes out in the form of asking question after question on all manner of topics. I think it is most especially interesting when it is related to topics regarding mythology, religion, life, death, the afterlife, etc. And how many times have you been interrogated by a particularly precocious young child, only to be bombarded by more questions once you’ve provided what you thought were adequate answers? I have had this happen to me more times than I can count, both as an educator and an uncle.Sadly, this wonderful behavior of kids doesn’t often last into their adult years. Somewhere between those wonder-filled years of curiosity and college age, a lot of kids are too often encouraged by the adults around them to specifically not ask questions, especially on certain topics (often on the most important topics). Why this is I’m not sure, but I have a few guesses…
I think part of the problem is that some adults are made quite uncomfortable by the questions that little children can ask, precisely because they tend to break those social taboos which have been conditioned into the adults. Another thing that happens is that some adults tend to discourage children from asking questions because the adults don’t have the answer to the question, or they’re just tired of the kid asking questions, so rather than admit ignorance (or frustration) they tell the child to stop asking questions. And while kids are innately curious, if they get exposed often enough to the adults in their life telling them not to ask such questions, then they’ll eventually start to believe that they shouldn’t be asking such questions. And that’s a sad thing to see.
For example, I witness something along these lines a couple of years ago as I was traveling to Utah with some of my family. One of my nieces, a little girl of six years of age, and I were looking out over the gorgeous scenery of Bryce Canyon, admiring all of the columns, stratigraphy, and erosion patterns within the canyon walls. And, in accordance with that curiosity of young children, my niece asked me where the canyon came from. I proceeded to explain to her about the idea of erosion due to rainfall and the flow of water, pointing out to her some very small rivulets in the dirt off to the side of the trail due to a recent rainstorm. I further explained that given enough time, these erosive processes can eventually produce wondrous geologic structures such as the canyon which stretched out before us.
I eagerly awaited her next question, when something very interesting happened. My little niece’s older sister (a teenager) came along and told her that “God did it, just like we learned in Sunday school and the Bible says in Genesis”. I wasn’t surprised by this reaction from my older niece, seeing as how the members of her immediate family tend to be young-earth creationists who believe the Earth was created in six literal days about 6000-10,000 years ago. But what did surprise me (and delight me greatly) was my younger niece’s response to her older sister’s “explanation”; she looked up at her older sister and, without skipping a beat, simply asked: “Yeah, but how did God do it?”
A good question, and given her older sister’s answer, the natural question to ask. It was also a question which I wanted to know the answer to, so I turned to my older niece and said: “That’s a great question… so how did God do it?” Unfortunately, rather than simply admit ignorance, my older niece just kind of rolled her eyes and walked away. Not a very good way to address a legitimate question being posed by a curious six year old.
Of course, it would not be fair for me to place the blame for the squashing of this childhood curiosity solely at the feet of fundamentalist religious believers. All too often there are those within my own secular teaching profession who are also guilty of similar behavior, though it isn’t so much ideology which leads to the de-emphasizing of critical thinking but other factors.
I think there are too many teachers who are encouraged, either by their own frustrations within the classroom or through external influences such as teaching to standardized tests, to simply give their students the answers as opposed to making the students responsible for engaging in the process of critical thinking: asking questions, evaluating the evidence, making observations, and drawing conclusions based upon this analysis. And I have seen a number of students in my own classes who are cut from this “answers based” mold as opposed to the more useful “inquiry based” mold, and they are often shocked when I refuse to simply give them answers outright. It is almost as if, by the ages of 16 or 17, these kids have been conditioned to not engage in such a process of critical thinking because what is really important, apparently, is to simply regurgitate the correct answer on an exam.
That is why I try, as much as I can, to get my students thinking about things by encouraging them to ask questions, even if they are questions to which I have no answers. I have a number of units in my physics classes which begin with an inquiry-based lab or activity wherein the students are given very little information and they have to actually study the phenomena on their own, with few (if any) concrete answers from me. And then the ideas that are generated within this early work are built upon for the more complex questions addressed later in the unit. It is very time-consuming and hard work to set up these lessons, but it is worth it because it pays off: the kids not only learn the material, they learn that they can learn through inquiry, not by merely memorizing “the correct” answers.
It is my hope that if I can keep doing it, then sometimes – every now and then – I can get some of my students to recapture a bit of that childlike curiosity and wonder which they may have previously lost.
And once you can get to asking questions in an honest and serious manner, then things get really interesting!
Matt Lowry is a high school & college physics professor with a strong interest in promoting science education, skepticism and critical thinking among his students and the population in general. Towards these ends, he works with the JREF on their educational advisory board, and he also works with a number of grassroots skeptical, pro-science groups. In what little spare time he has, he blogs on these and related subjects at The Skeptical Teacher.