Questioning
Stories
No Grazing For Sacred Cows
Tormenting Questions In A Bizarre World
Object:
A plaque showing a young boy curiously, questioningly bent over examining an object on a beach with a quote at the top, "The important thing is not to stop questioning," by Albert Einstein, has hung on my study wall for many years. Earlier in my teaching career, Leon, I did not realize the importance of this message. Now I wonder if it doesn't come close to arriving at the heart of human vitality? Would it be going too far to say that a really alive person is a questioning individual?
For much of my teaching career, I did not really encourage my students to raise questions. I wanted to provide them with answers and I fear I expected them to accept the answers I gave them and not question them. If members of my classes had asked many searching questions during the early years of my teaching, I suspect I would have felt threatened. I was, after all, a new Ph.D. and I was supposed to be well informed in my field of study. Why would anyone be brazen enough to question what I was teaching!
This point of view on my part changed in the latter years of my classroom procedures. I often commenced classes at the beginning of a term encouraging members to formulate and ask what they considered to be important questions related to the subjects we were studying. Sometimes on an examination the students would be asked to formulate and write down what they considered to be four or five of the most important questions related to the particular subject of the course. Some students responded well to this kind of teaching, but many were confused and uncomfortable. They were accustomed to memorizing data and information given to them by their teachers and then poll-parrot back on their examinations what they had copied in class.
Isn't this a widespread tendency, Leon, for adults to relinquish deep, searching, questioning attitudes? We are taught not just to refrain from questioning our teachers, but also our parents, our work supervisors, our priests and clergy, our elected political leaders, and our community leaders. Don't most individuals in positions of leadership feel insecure when followers question their policies and decisions? In many instances is not questioning viewed as some kind of devious behavior?
For many of us to view important areas of life as open to serious questioning, furthermore, is unsettling for us. We want answers to the crucial issues of life. We don't like uncertainty, do we? And don't we seek those clergy, teachers, political leaders, and others who provide us with the answers? The availability of such leaders is usually not difficult to find! Some of us may go so far in our entrusting our lives to these leaders that we die with them in mass suicidal situations. Recent events with some cultist groups are disturbing illustrations of this tendency. Open encouragement of questioning is discouraged if not outright forbidden in many groups in which we may participate.
When our questioning tendencies are stifled, don't we humans lose something vital and unique in our living? Does not a kind of intellectual and spiritual atrophy occur with us? What seems as such a natural, inquisitive, questioning tendency of early childhood we seem to lose as we settle into the grooves of adulthood. If something like this is what happens to many of us, are we not a species to be pitied? Would you say, Leon, that maybe the cosmic powers are disappointed with many of us? Perhaps they thought with the human experiment something noble and extremely creative was under way. But has something gone wrong along the way whereby we have abandoned our birthright? Uncomfortably, I fear, we teachers may bear much of the responsibility for this.
For much of my teaching career, I did not really encourage my students to raise questions. I wanted to provide them with answers and I fear I expected them to accept the answers I gave them and not question them. If members of my classes had asked many searching questions during the early years of my teaching, I suspect I would have felt threatened. I was, after all, a new Ph.D. and I was supposed to be well informed in my field of study. Why would anyone be brazen enough to question what I was teaching!
This point of view on my part changed in the latter years of my classroom procedures. I often commenced classes at the beginning of a term encouraging members to formulate and ask what they considered to be important questions related to the subjects we were studying. Sometimes on an examination the students would be asked to formulate and write down what they considered to be four or five of the most important questions related to the particular subject of the course. Some students responded well to this kind of teaching, but many were confused and uncomfortable. They were accustomed to memorizing data and information given to them by their teachers and then poll-parrot back on their examinations what they had copied in class.
Isn't this a widespread tendency, Leon, for adults to relinquish deep, searching, questioning attitudes? We are taught not just to refrain from questioning our teachers, but also our parents, our work supervisors, our priests and clergy, our elected political leaders, and our community leaders. Don't most individuals in positions of leadership feel insecure when followers question their policies and decisions? In many instances is not questioning viewed as some kind of devious behavior?
For many of us to view important areas of life as open to serious questioning, furthermore, is unsettling for us. We want answers to the crucial issues of life. We don't like uncertainty, do we? And don't we seek those clergy, teachers, political leaders, and others who provide us with the answers? The availability of such leaders is usually not difficult to find! Some of us may go so far in our entrusting our lives to these leaders that we die with them in mass suicidal situations. Recent events with some cultist groups are disturbing illustrations of this tendency. Open encouragement of questioning is discouraged if not outright forbidden in many groups in which we may participate.
When our questioning tendencies are stifled, don't we humans lose something vital and unique in our living? Does not a kind of intellectual and spiritual atrophy occur with us? What seems as such a natural, inquisitive, questioning tendency of early childhood we seem to lose as we settle into the grooves of adulthood. If something like this is what happens to many of us, are we not a species to be pitied? Would you say, Leon, that maybe the cosmic powers are disappointed with many of us? Perhaps they thought with the human experiment something noble and extremely creative was under way. But has something gone wrong along the way whereby we have abandoned our birthright? Uncomfortably, I fear, we teachers may bear much of the responsibility for this.
