Asking Questions

Somewhere between the sixth and 18th year of life, the mind goes from asking the big questions about nature and the universe, to asking questions about "which facts are important to know for the test." After 12 years of schooling, the brain becomes accustomed to simply "channeling" a wide range of information with no clear context, meaning, or significance, from one piece of paper to another. It becomes adept at spitting back information that has been dictated to it and dumped into it, on request. Children slowly lose their curiosity as "learners" the better they become at being "students."

It is not until college and graduate school that "students" are encouraged to once again revisit the natural curiosity that so captivated them in those early years of life, but by that time so many have chosen to give up on their studies and many don't have the resources to go on in it anyways. They essentially grow never "wondering about things" outside of the context of daily living and survival, and just as well know little about how to go about learning things to begin with even if they wanted to. It surprises me how often children will ask "why is the sky blue," only to get an "I don't know" response from an adult 20-30 years the child's senior. It's as if adults just stop wondering about the basics of the world they live in after a while. "How to learn" was just never taught to them in all those years of being fed facts they soon forgot.

Good teachers know all of this to be true, and work to make it work, even given the enormous constraints placed on them by the prevailing 20th-century industrial methodologies. A few observations from human development can go a long way towards actually tapping into that youth's natural desire to "know things" rather than simply "putting that on hold for 12 years." The first observation would be that children, and people in general, don't learn anything by being taught (or told), they learn by learning (which is doing). The second: that people don't learn by retaining random bits of information, they learn by drawing their own connections between information. The third: that people don't learn from accessing tomes secluded away from daily life, but learn best when information has meaning they can relate to issues and themes in daily life that they care about. The fourth: that people don't learn unless they've been shown how to learn.

The young child learns by asking questions and seeking answers. The old child learns by asking questions and seeking answers. The "person" learns by asking questions and seeking answers. At no point does a person learn anything by having questions asked of them, unless the question is, "How will you go about solving/learning this?"  or  "What do you think will happen because of this?" Good teachers are asking, but culture isn't.

Two words: Lev Vygotsky.

If you want to learn more about the man and his work, how would you go about finding out? What did you find out when you did that?