Hey students, ask questions.

I often tell students that education is not merely about answering the questions I or any other faculty ask them, but is a lot more about learning how to ask questions--intelligent questions.  As we develop and fine-tune the thinking skills, it becomes less of a conscious effort.  Like most things in life, whether it is bicycling (which I can do) or swimming (which I can't, despite all my attempts) how to ask questions is something that we need to work hard to learn--and get a few bruises along the way!

I suppose like many things I talk about, well, this too often gets neglected.  No wonder Rodney Dangerfield is one I relate to, a lot :)

In an undergraduate program, that exercise of asking questions is built into every course, if only students would do those exercises.  But then, faculty, too, do not seem to be keen on this important aspect of education..  Which is a shame, because, as this Boston Globe piece notes:

“The challenge is that, as adults, we lose our curiosity over time. We get into ruts, we become experts in our fields or endeavors,” McKinney said.
Ironically, the tendency to be blinded by our existing knowledge may be at its most extreme among a set of people specifically charged with asking questions: analysts and researchers. Duncan Watts, who studies networks and collective social dynamics at Microsoft Research and is the author of the book “Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer,” said he has noticed that many of the PhD candidates he comes into contact with are essentially taught to answer other people’s questions, and can be disconcertingly at sea when trying to ask their own.
“There are students who are incredibly good at answering questions but have no idea how to ask one,” Watts said, “and they’ve never thought about what it means.”
For Watts, a good question is one that is both “interesting” and “answerable.” “It’s relatively easy to come up with an answerable question that is not interesting,” he said, “and it’s relatively easy to come up with an interesting question that is unanswerable.” 

I remind students that if they figure out how to how to ask pointed questions and then, equally important, learn how to go about in search of answers for them, well, those are skills that will be of immense value to them throughout their lives.

Of course, all these are not new ideas:

यः सततं परिपृच्छति शृणोति संधारयत्यनिशं ।
तस्य दिवाकरकिरणैर्नलिनीव विवर्धते बुद्धिः ॥

- पञ्चतंत्र, अपरीक्षितकारक

He will become a wise man who will keep asking questions, listens to answers and contemplates on each of them.
His knowledge will bloom like a lotus when sun rays fall on it.

- Panchatantra, Aparikshitakaraka

Source

All these remind me about a great-uncle--dad's uncle--who always told us youngsters to ask questions.  Well, his exact phrasing was to "put questions."  This uncle's intellectual ability to ask questions was unrelated to economic success, or lack thereof; this great-uncle was one of those highly qualified people whose careers never got a start because of the Great Depression.  He earned a masters degree, when it was extremely rare those days, but there was nothing available for him when the entire world economy was contracting, and India was being sucked dry by Britain.

He did ask a lot of questions.

I am the merely the latest in the long line of questioning and argumentative Indians :)