"Children, unless deeply traumatized, are innately curious. Curiosity is the engine of learning; and curiosity isn’t fuelled by answers, but by questions. Our current approach to education relentlessly directs a child’s attention to answers: to facts, dates, sums, names, and on and on. It does almost nothing to help children formulate questions. This leads to an adult population that has been trained to gravitate to answers, and tends to accept them with little curiosity or questioning. And that has laid the groundwork for our post-truth era, in which answers and solutions proposed by politicians and commercial interests are embraced simply because they have been tailored to ‘feel right’; and the curiosity to hold those answers to account by questioning them sleeps like an underdeveloped muscle.
In recent history it has become possible to find an answer to almost any question in mere seconds. “When was J.S. Bach born?” Type, click, and there it is. What no search engine can provide, though, is the pertinent question – the one you need in order to clarify your thinking, or to crack open a problem, or to take down an assumption that is limiting your freedom, or to reveal some door beckoning to be opened.
Picasso is quoted as saying, “Computers are useless – they can only give you answers.” A question moves you forward; an answer pretty much stops you – unless it begets another question. We have been trained to believe that a question finds its justification only when it leads to an answer – but some of the most fruitful questions will never be definitively answered: What is love? What is life? What is freedom? Such enduring questions empower engagement and curiosity and even passion and art. Occasionally a question appears of such resonance that it takes your life for a ride – like the one that spurred the writing of this book. Such questions arise from the whole of your being.
Fact, names, categories, sums, history – all of these will fall into place when a deep question is ignited, because it will lead to the explication of contexts, not to answers. And any context reaches eventually to include all contexts. The only limitation to your learning is your limited ability to feel and formulate the questions that really matter to you. And those questions can only bubble up from deep within your wholeness. When a child’s wholeness is nurtured, she will launch herself full-fledged into learning everything she needs to. If education were dedicated to supporting children in their wholeness – to support their ability to feel and question, and the flame of their curiosity, and the skill of grounding in the felt present – they would grow up to revolutionize what it means to be an adult."