‘Science is just like spelling. You just have to memorise it and it doesn’t make a sense,’ says one of the elementary school student from America. Questions are a form of thinking and thinking is a form of manifestation. A great deal of questions from the kids like can you drive faster? What do the plants eat? Can we fly like a bird? Why the sky is blue? This inquisitive nature of the children is always inspirational and aspirational. Asking questions are too good an effort to outshine in your own life.
Which questions: Discover curiosity
Straightforward factual answers are the most common least interesting questions. Hence many writers have encouraged the questions that are true, guiding, generating or essential. Meaty questions like why the cure of cancer is not discovered? Why do people lie? Why was Vietnam invaded? Why our country got independence? Intellectual proficiency is developed on finding justice to such rich questions helping the kids to be more curious, be resourceful to figure out the things and be the ‘makers of the world’.
What questions: Purpose
To accommodate the students to the curriculum, the best sort of education is more effective and respectful. Thoughtful questions of the kids should be encouraged. The enthusiastic approach for the teacher should not be how to implement good question and answer interaction, rather, how this should be done to make the standards easier for both the children and the teachers. How one is inclined to make use of their own skills to swim against the tide without any trouble fosters the concepts for the critical thinking and final progression to skies. Here come the teachers’ outrageous norms to use multiple strategies to develop confidence in the child to ask unhesitant.
Talk less, ask more
Apart from asking the subject-matter questions, questions that matter to their interest should be encouraged too. Intrinsic motivation should be developed by welcoming their questions so that the teacher or the giver is more skilful to answering genuine curiosity. Monopolising the right to questions should not be the teacher’s aim to progressive education for the student’s involvement. Purpose and interests of the child are the centres of gravity of the child.
Opportunity to ask
Cultivate scepticism, and model the children by asking them to challenge you. Children should be guided in a way to help them realise that even the basic facts and skills can be accepted as given rather than what actually is the logic which is only conventional, or where experts disagree or are uncertain. Copying, regurgitating, and reluctance to answer make the child more slugging and less expressive.
Questions must reflect not just the curiosity about the world but instead to make the world a better place. Developing contagious curiosity in children may be helpful to make them know on their own instead of depending on the teachers or parents. Thus setting an example to make the sensible rules where legitimate institute introduces justified policies as ‘a part of life’.
Jashan Jot Kaur is a researcher at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana.
