What would your school look like?
12 Good Questions to Ask Every Kid
Many teachers like myself ponder what they would change if they could make their school. If they got to make every decision. What would you do differently?
Would students have the same subjects? In some schools, students choose from thematic electives rather than traditional subjects (i.e., World War I or Marixsm and World History vs History). Other schools try to create cross-disciplinary programs. What would you do?
The following questions come from a very exciting book. I once tried to start a class by asking students these questions. I think that it was utterly bizarre to them—they had just never been asked what the purpose of schooling was.
“What do you worry about most?
What are the causes of your worries?
Can any of your worries be eliminated? How?
How would you decide which of these worries to address first?
Are there other people who share the same worries?
What bothers you most about adults? Why?
What, if anything, seems to you to be worth dying for?
What seems worth living for?
How can you tell the good guys from the bad guys?
What would you like to be doing five, ten years from now? How can you get there?
What do you think are some of man’s most important ideas? Where did they come from?
What is progress?”
I wanted to share the introduction to a class I once taught.
This class is meant to help you ask questions. Everything you have hitherto learned in school was knowledge produced in response to a question. New knowledge often results from new questions. Often, these new questions are questions about old questions.
In most of my other classes, like teachers all over the world, I ask questions to help students think or to lead them to an answer. Often, learning requires memorizing other people’s answers to other people’s questions. These answers provide valuable content, heuristics, and methods by which questions have been answered.
Many of the differences in how you perceive the world and how people in the past have perceived their worlds are because their questions (as well as assumptions) were different. Consequently, their answers were different, too. Different questions imply different answers. However, even the same questions can be tackled through different methods and yield different answers.
In this class, you will be asking and answering your own questions. Therefore, you must think about what you think is worth learning about. Likewise, why is learning about this question valuable to others? You will be asking and answering questions. These are questions that perhaps no one has answered before. Questions that may never have been asked. The course provides an introduction to research design and approaches that will contribute to your ability to understand, interpret, and explain theories and data.
In answering your questions, you will be asked to produce an innovative and original investigative essay. The important point is that “once you have learned how to ask questions — relevant and appropriate substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know”.
I'd be happy to go into detail about this course and what and how we intend to do it. A post-lecture could work if there is interest (a series of 5-12 posts over the next year).