Learning - Speak Like A child

Kids love to ask questions ... its a built in and natural way of learning ..... I sometimes wonder if there is baby somewhere whose first word was a question - why ... how what or who :)

A study by retailer Littlewoods shows parents are the most quizzed people in the UK, and on subjects far and wide:

The five toughest questions parents get asked:
1) Why is water wet? (35 per cent)
2) Where does the sky end? (34 per cent)
3) What are shadows made of? (33 per cent)
4) Why is the sky blue? (20 per cent)
5) How do fish breathe under water? (18 per cent)

The Littlewood study found the amount of questions asked by children differs with age and gender, four year old girls being the most inquisitive -  asking an incredible 390 questions per day!

However, if you chart what happens to kids questioning as they grow up you find it pretty much falls off a cliff as they grow up (A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas)   

Data from The Right Question Institute (http://rightquestion.org/)

This could be a problem - our increasingly connected world is changing faster than ever - being able to adapt will be more important than ever - being able to learn will be more important than knowing.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change” ~ Darwin

"The important thing is not to stop questioning" ~ Albert Einstein 

"If anything, the ability to ask insightful questions will be even more critical tomorrow than it is today. As change continues to accelerate, tomorrow’s leaders—and the larger workforce—will have to keep learning, updating and adapting what they know, inventing and re-inventing their own jobs and careers through constant, ongoing inquiry" ~ Warren Berger (Why It’s Imperative to Teach Students How to Question as the Ultimate Survival Skill)

We trust our formal education systems to prepare future generations and so our formal education must also accommodate changing reality - education systems must be able to adapt and change. Formal education systems in particular will need to shift from a focus on answers and knowing to a focus on questions and learning.

“Knowledge is having the right answer. Intelligence is asking the right question.” 

Thinking is not driven by answers but by questions.


"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers" ~ Voltair

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions” ~  Claude Lévi-Strauss