Why do kids ask so many questions? But more importantly: Why do they stop?
A while back I was discussing the subject of "questioning" with Richard Saul Wurman, the original creator of the TED Conference and a man who's pretty much obsessed with questions.
He immediately focused on the educational system. "In school, we're rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question," Wurman pointed out. Which may explain why kids—who start off asking endless "why" and "what if" questions—gradually ask fewer and fewer of them as they progress through grade school.
This also came up in a recent Newsweek story, "The Creativity Crisis," about signs of declining creativity among our school children. Interesting fact cited in the article: Preschool kids ask their parents an average of 100 questions a day. By middle school, they've basically stopped asking questions. Around this time, the article points out, student motivation and engagement plummets. Which raises an interesting question: Have the kids stopped asking questions because they've lost interest? Or have they lost interest because the rote answers-driven school system doesn't allow them to ask enough questions?
There's a lot to explore here and I'm just getting started on it. I know that there are many teachers, and progressive schools, and programs within schools, that are much more geared to allowing kids to question and experiment. I plan to take a closer look at some of those efforts and ask whether they should be embraced more widely. Meanwhile, if you have thoughts, ideas, anecdotes (and of course, questions) about the role of questioning within our educational system, please share. Oh, and just for fun, here's a wonderful video riff by comedian Louis C.K. all about kids and questions.
Go to the 7 minute mark to get to the bit about questions (if you can't abide 4-letter words, you may want to skip it):
