Why don’t adults ask as many questions as kids do? How is our schooling to blame?
Inquiry is an incredibly important skill, but we tend to stop asking questions as we get older. Warren Berger points the finger at schools—the exact place where curiosity should be most encouraged—and says that formal education too often trains people out of asking questions.
Read more to learn about the woeful neglect of inquiry in education and the difference it makes.
Inquiry in Education
Berger says the problem is that schools rely on rote learning and discipline. Instead of encouraging children to ask questions, formal schooling does the exact opposite: It trains them to sit quietly and memorize whatever information they’re given. Furthermore, students are judged by their ability to recall facts during tests, rather than by their creativity or their curiosity.
(Shortform note: Studies have shown that rote learning is extremely effective when studying foundational concepts, such as the alphabet or the periodic table. Therefore, it may be valid for elementary schools to use this approach to some extent. However, some experts in child psychology agree with Berger that schools rely on rote memorization much too heavily—or, they use it for the wrong reasons, such as to improve students’ test scores, rather than to better understand complex ideas. Students tend to quickly forget information they learned by rote memorization, which is why it can be useful when cramming for an exam but not for promoting a real understanding of complex topics.)
Because of this rigid approach to learning and the resulting absence of inquiry in education, students have almost completely stopped asking questions by the time students graduate from high school. Unfortunately, that leaves them ill-prepared for adulthood, when the ability to ask important questions could change their lives—or change the world.
For example, when Sir Isaac Newton asked why an apple had fallen to the ground, searching for the answer led him to develop the theory of gravity that we still use today. When eBay founder Pierre Omidyar asked how he could use the internet to create a worldwide marketplace, he created one of the most successful companies to emerge from the 1990s dot-com bubble.
(Shortform note: Stifling curiosity doesn’t just leave students unable to ask questions after they graduate, but it also counterproductively stifles their learning while they’re in school: Classrooms where students ask fewer questions may have less individualized, and therefore less effective, lessons. Some teachers have noted that their students’ inquiries help them tailor lessons to their classes’ specific needs; this is because the questions people ask can give clues about their background knowledge and assumptions, their areas of interest, and their thought processes.)
