“When I would come home from grade school, my parents would NOT ask, ‘What did you learn at school today?’” reports brilliant scientist Ellis Cowling, North Carolina State University Professor and later Research VP at the University of North Carolina.
“My parents would ask me, ‘What good questions did YOU ask today in school?’”
Thanks to Steve for sharing this memory from his friend at NCSU.
It occurs to me that the question to Ellis is a good one for adults, as well for children. What good questions are you asking today?
A critical mind may not be the key to bliss, but it is the only antidote to answers that make no sense. “The unexamined life is not worth living” (Socrates). Which also means, I suppose, that “the examined life IS worth living.”
After two weeks of partisan convention answers without questions, “What good questions are YOU asking?”
Share them here, if you like. NO platitudes, please. No answers. Just good questions.
Thanks,
Gordon
Views from the Edge 
Hi, Gordon. I have a few related questions, and it is possible that if one could find a child of the right age, and with just the right amount of the right kind of curiosity, they might better be asked by such a child than by any adult. The questions:
1) Did God create the earth? (N.B. No timeline mentioned, neither 4,000 nor 400 trillion, nor yet anything in between.)
2) If God created the world, is it OK for us to put poisons and pollution into the air and water and land? Why?
3) Do you believe global warming is happening?
3A) why do you disagree with all the independent scientists who think it is happening?
4) Do you think anything we are doing makes global warming worse?
5) Is there anything we could do differently to stop, or at least slow global warming?
6) Why don’t we do these things?
7) Who would pay for it?
8) How much will global warming cost if we don’t do these things?
9) Who will pay for that?
10) Why would the people let that happen?
How am I doing? I’m beginning to remind myself of tenth grade geography with Mr. Williams. I am, of course, inferring a number of answers from adults.
Unfortunately we then branch out into the politics of pure greed, and speculation, speculation on an incredible, but who knows what’s incredible these days, conspiracy of sorts. Enough for now, maybe too much. These are my questions, really. I am certain of my own answers, maybe too certain. I find it hard to believe that most of the polluters have built themselves a dome, or dug themselves a cave with a closed ecosystem that will support them and their offspring for years and years. If so, we might yet see a miracle — big energy business with a conscience — without a miracle, an oxymoron.
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Carolyn, thanks for the questions and the memory of Mr. Williams. And how about Mrs. Martino way back in the third grade? And Miss Andress in 8th or 9th who taught us Latin but also had us become pen palls with other students in Wales becasuse she wanted us to think less provincially, more globally? And, most of all for me, Mr. Miller who taught social studies, civics, government (I can’t remember what they called his courses), wbo insisted on critical thinking – how to read a speech or the newspaper and the importance of substantiating one’s own point of view facts and solid reasoning? And then there was your Mom and Dad who asked LOTS of hard questions over the years at home, at work, and at church, who taught their kids and your Dad’s Sunday School Class to love not only the Phillies but the life of inquiring faith, faith in search of understanding (Anselm). At the end of their lives they were appalled by the Christian and political right as high-jacks of the Christian faith and of a Republican Party that, in their time, had been big enough to include the likes of Nelson Rockefeller and Mark Hatfield. Above all, they knew that it would be the intelligent, persisting questions (not the platitudinous answers) that deserved our live commitment. Thanks, Carolyn. I think Gordon and Dotie Kidder did well around the dining room table. They taught you and BJ to ask questions. May the rest in peace.
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I missed Miss Andress for Latin — I had with Mr. Katchur, but I had one year of English with her. We read Great Expectations, and I wish we had read A Tale of Two Cities. I would have started my long addition to Charles Dickens several years earlier.
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I forgot Mr. Katchur. Keep reading Dickens.
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I am going to literally take your advice with my kids. This is exactly what I will ask them Monday afternoon. I’ll let you know if I get any good answers. And just so you know, I’ve been asking a lot of good questions lately. I asked someone just today, “How on earth could you possibly consider voting for Romney?”
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Oh, my! There’s nothing like a good question, is there? Scout, Jack, and Davie are so blessed!!! thanks for sharing.
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I would like to rephrase that:
In our ministry with children, do we teach them the answers or guide them in the questions to ask?
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David, Good question. It seems to me that there are no answers for questions that haven’t been asked. Too often I think we have tried to fill children’s brains with answers before they had the questions. Children’s native sense of wonder – just watch a baby attending to the mobile feflecting light above his/her crib – is the beginning of faith, or so it seems to me. A sense of astonishment. Call it reverence maybe. Or Mystery. And, as the curiosity grows, so do the questions, and the search for answers follos naturally. I think that’s good pedagogy for any subject, but especially fof faith. But…for Christian faith, the whole enterprise begins and ends with “God is Love” – the childlike (not childish) sense of security and uncontinonal regard. What do you think?
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Indeed.
Tapping into the sense of wonder and curiosity is a point well made.
These questions are on my mind as I am providing resources for a small group group of children who come along to our Sunday service. I have been pulling together the material myself as I am dissatisfied with most of what I have found. Also, we need things that 2-3 children can do together while the service is going on. Most stuff is aimed at teaching in groups away from the service.
So your post encouraged me to keep going with questions as a important part. And also finding things to be curious about in the everyday.
So you have kept me thinking – thanks.
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DAve, Great to hear from you over there in New Zealand. The more we in the States veer into the wonder-less (except for Alice in Wonderland rabbit holes) of this long campaign season here in the U.S., the more I am drawn away from it all – back to that which is less “adult”; into that which is more “childlike”. I love what you’ve shared here – your creative time with the small group of children. There is a curriculum, incidentially, called “Godly Play” that is uses a Montessouri teaching method of honoring the children’s native capacity for wonder and curiosity. It works best with a group of six to eight, but I think you might find it interesting. All the best!
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In your ministry to children, do you teach them the answers or the questions?
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