A More Beautiful Question (7 page)

Not that it’s easy for a child to ask a question. Harris has described it as “a series of complex mental maneuvers.” It starts with knowing that you don’t know. The asking of a question also indicates that the child understands there are various possible answers: “When they ask what’s for dinner, they can imagine that it might be soup or pasta,” Harris writes in his book
Trusting What You’re Told
. “Without the ability to conceive of more than one possible way that things might stand in the world, why ask a question?” Lastly, it means children have figured out an efficient way to fill this gap in their knowledge—by asking someone who might know.

Why is the sky blue?
⁵

It may be the ultimate child’s question, one that every parent is asked at some point. If you find it hard to answer, you are in good company: Great minds from Aristotle to Isaac Newton grappled with this query over a span of several centuries, notes Nicholas Christakis, writing for edge.org. Christakis credits Newton and his light-refraction experiments with first showing that “white light could be decomposed into its constituent colors.” But this only raised another question:
What might refract more blue light towards our eyes?
Scientists eventually learned that the way incident light interacts with gas molecules in the air causes the light in the blue part of the spectrum to scatter more. Meanwhile, biologists identified another contributing factor: our eyes are more sensitive to blue. As Christakis observes, much of the world of science is contained “in a question that a young child can ask.”

As children venture out into the world—synapses firing in their heads—they constantly encounter things they cannot classify or label. As the children’s neurologist Stewart Mostofsky
⁴
puts it, they have not yet developed “mental models” to categorize things, so part of what they’re doing when questioning is asking adults to help them with this huge job of categorizing what they experience around them, labeling it, putting it in the proper file drawers of the brain.

When innovators talk about the virtues of beginner’s mind or
neoteny
, to use the term favored by MIT Media Lab’s Joi Ito, one of the desirable things they’re referring to is that state where you see things without labels, without categorization. Because once things have been labeled and filed, they become known quantities—and we don’t think about them, may not even notice them.

Somewhere between ages four and five, children are ideally suited for questioning: They have gained the language skills to ask, their brains are still in an expansive, highly connective mode, and they’re seeing things without labels or assumptions. They’re perfect explorers. The physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks
⁶
about young children being scientists because they turn over rocks and mash things together; Harvard’s Harris points out that they’re also like anthropologists—they don’t just conduct experiments, they ask the people around them questions.

People tend to think that kids don’t care much about the answers—that, as Louis C.K. suggests in his “Why?” routine, no matter what you answer, they’re just going to ask Why again. But they do, in fact, seem to care very much about the answers they get. A recent University of Michigan study
⁷
found that when preschoolers ask Why, they’re not just trying to annoy adults or simply prolong a conversation—“they’re trying to get to the bottom of things.” In the studies, when kids were given actual explanations, they either agreed and were satisfied, or they asked a follow-up question; whereas if they didn’t get a good answer, they were more likely to be dissatisfied and to repeat the original question.

The INSEAD professor and questioning expert Hal Gregersen says that if you watch closely what’s happening when kids ask adults questions, “the reason kids ask ‘why’ over and over again is often because
we
don’t understand their questions, or we’re just not listening. And by asking over and over, they’re saying to us, in effect,
‘You are not hearing me—you’re not understanding what I’m asking
.
’
”

As children begin preschool, a curious change starts to happen around questioning. Preschoolers are entering a stimulation-rich environment, surrounded by other presumably inquisitive kids, with ready access to an adult question-answerer known as the teacher—seemingly ideal conditions for questioning. Yet they immediately begin to ask fewer
⁸
questions, according to Harris, who cites studies done in various cultures around the world, all showing the same result. He theorizes that a “comfort” factor is at work here; at home with a parent, children are more willing to share their questions than they are at preschool.

But even so, preschoolers are still asking questions at a higher rate than older schoolkids. Most preschool environments are relatively unstructured and allow for more free-form play and exploration—which may be key to helping kids maintain their propensity to inquire and learn at this level.

Interestingly, the more preschool models itself after regular school—the more it becomes a venue for loading kids up with information and feeding them answers to questions they have not yet asked—the more it seems to squelch their natural curiosity. The child psychologist Alison Gopnik has
⁹
been outspoken in criticizing the trend of turning preschool into school—which, she notes, is driven by overambitious parents and (in the United States, at least) by federal mandates requiring more standardized teaching in preschool.

When we start teaching too much, too soon, says Gopnik, we’re inadvertently cutting off paths of inquiry and exploration that kids might otherwise pursue on their own. As Gopnik puts it, “Children are the research and development division of the human species.” If they are permitted to do that research—to raise and explore their own questions, through various forms of experimentation, and without being burdened with instructions—they exhibit signs of more creativity and curiosity.

Gopnik says young kids learn in much the same way scientists do, by exploring and experimenting, and that we should beware of trends toward more structured and academic early-childhood programs. That academic rigor comes soon enough, as students begin grade school—which is when questioning by kids really starts to disappear.

Why does questioning fall off a cliff?

In 2010, Professor Kyung-Hee Kim
¹⁰
at William & Mary College observed that results of creativity tests given at schools in the United States, using the well-known Torrance system, had begun to decline in 1990—and had been dropping since. This finding triggered a wave of articles in the U.S. media, including a
Newsweek
cover story, “The Creativity Crisis,” which focused on the complex question of how to address this problem by doing a better job teaching creativity to children. Amid the article’s deep discussion of creativity and neuroscience—covering neural networks, differences between right- and left-brain functions, and the relationship between divergent and convergent thinking—was a throwaway line buried deep in the piece that seemed, to me, to cut to the heart of the matter: “Preschool children, on average, ask their parents about 100 questions a day. By middle school, they’ve pretty much stopped asking.”

If you chart what happens to kids’ questioning—and the Right Question Institute
¹¹
has done that, using data from the 2009 U.S. “Nation’s Report Card”—it looks as if questioning (denoted by the solid line in the chart) falls off a cliff, even as children’s use of reading and writing skills steadily climbs through the school years.

That steep decline in questioning might not be alarming, in and of itself: One might conclude that children just don’t need to question as much once they’re reading and writing (and texting and googling). But the problem is, as kids stop questioning, they simultaneously become less engaged in school. When the engagement level of students
¹²
is measured, as in a recent Gallup study, we see the same falling-off-the-cliff phenomenon as students move from elementary school through high school. (When Gallup released this study in early 2013, at the same time as the American “fiscal cliff” crisis, the author Daniel Pink asked
¹³
on his blog, “
Does the ‘student cliff’ matter more than the fiscal cliff?”)
.

This suggests there may be a relationship—which many teachers could tell you without needing to conduct a formal study—between students asking questions and their being engaged and interested in learning. Admittedly, there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation here:
Do kids stop questioning because they’ve lost interest in school, or do they lose interest in school because their natural curiosity (and propensity to question) is somehow tamped down?

I’ve asked that question of a number of children’s neurologists and psychologists, as well as teachers and education experts. Clearly, various factors can influence kids’ question-asking and their curiosity levels as they grow up. For instance, at around age five, the brain starts trimming back some of those neural connections that were expanding so rapidly the first few years; this “synaptic pruning” could translate to less questioning and less wondering about the surrounding world. Also, as we develop mental models of that world—with more categorization, more labels—we have less need to ask “What’s this?” and “What’s that?”

But many educators and learning experts contend that our current system of education does not encourage, teach, or in some cases even
tolerate
questioning. Harvard’s Tony Wagner says, “Somehow, we’ve defined the goal of schooling as enabling you to have more ‘right answers’ than the person next to you. And we penalize incorrect answers. And we do this at a pace—especially now, in this highly focused test-prep universe—where we don’t have time for extraneous questions.”

Wagner told me that he often sits in on classes to observe the questioning dynamic. “I was in a seventh-grade science class and this kid started asking all kinds of questions about the universe and stars—and the teacher was just trying to say, ‘Look, here are the planets, now memorize this.’ And this was powerful to me. The message was that in this class ‘we don’t have time for questions—because that will take time away from the number of answers I have to cover.’”

To be fair, many teachers feel helpless in the face of this. As one California high school teacher lamented, “I have so many state standards
¹⁴
I have to teach conceptwise, it takes away time from what I find most valuable—which is to have [students] inquire about the world.”

Dominic Randolph,
¹⁵
principal of the Riverdale Country School in New York, uses the corporate term
product-driven
to describe many of today’s schools. Under pressure to improve test scores, they’ve tried to instill businesslike efficiency into a process designed to impart as much information as possible to students, within a given time frame—leaving little or no time for student inquiry.

Why do we want kids to “sit still” in class?
¹⁷

As normal twelve-year-olds, the sixth-grade students at Marine Elementary School near Minneapolis tended to squirm, slump, kick, and fidget in their seats—they had an abundance of energy, and controlling it required them to focus so much on sitting still they had trouble concentrating on their schoolwork. Their teacher Abby Brown wondered:
What if they didn’t have to sit still?
Brown learned from the latest research at the Mayo Clinic about “activity-permissive education,” which advocates letting kids move as they learn. Brown then helped design a new kind of school desk with a raised seat that puts the user in a semi-standing position and allows more freedom of movement. With the new desks, her students’ attentiveness immediately improved—and Brown’s creation is being looked at as a model for other classrooms.