Everyone can remember a time in their lives when they’ve asked a question and immediately was shut down, either by a teacher, by a parent or by a friend. We all also know how bad it feels when it happens, you want to find the biggest hole and hideaway in it or suddenly possess the ability to make other people forget things. Why do we feel this way? Who gets to decide which questions are stupid and which ones are not? The answer is much more simple than most people would think; in the whole of human history there has never been a truly stupid question asked.
It is human nature to question everything, without questions and inquiry we would never be able to learn or expand our knowledge. It is through asking questions that little kids begin to make sense of their world; it is scientifically proven that the more questions a toddler asks the more they are exploring and understanding their world and the people in it. That is often why they continue to ask the same questions over and over again, usually to the annoyance of their parents, until they are satisfied with all of the details given to them. If you shut down a child’s questions or blow them off as being unworthy of consideration they are less likely to ask questions when they reach school age and will often lose self-confidence.
As someone who plans to teach I encourage my students to ask me anything and everything because I recognize that sometimes they just want to know an adult who cares is listening them to. The questions I get asked by my middle school students on a daily basis vary from wanting to understand the curriculum, to wanting to know about my personal life, and sometimes the really difficult and deeper things about life. I encourage these questions and praise them for having the courage to ask me because by the time many of them get to high school the bravery to ask leaves. They lose this curiosity, not because of age or maturity but, because someone somewhere down the line, unfortunately usually a teacher, has told them that a question they’ve posed was stupid. We influence kids’ perspectives on themselves and their ability to think every time we act like a question posed is either inconvenient for us to answer or we say that they should already know, this often leads to a resentment towards education and school in general that many of them carry into adulthood.
Curiosity and wonder are as human to us as breathing or blinking and yet we punish it simply because sometimes to us the questions being asked have “obvious” answers in our world. It is important, though, to understand that the context we bring is always unique to someone else’s, we all live such different and varied lives that what may be obvious to us has never occurred to someone who has lived an opposite life to our own. There is no fairness in telling anyone, child or adult, that they have posed a stupid question or an obvious question because we all think and see the world differently. We need to move away as a society from the idea that to insult someone’s intelligence is a way to increase our own because if this trend moves forward no one will be brave enough to be curious, no one will be brave enough to wonder, and no one will be brave enough to discover anymore. There are no such things as stupid questions just questions that are never asked.
