Education has really failed to impress upon people the importance of asking questions. It’s amazing how much time is wasted on making people learn answers to questions they don’t even know how to ask.
The most valuable tool I ever got (as a tutor/teacher) was Socratic Questioning. Students not only benefit from its application but it also helps to impress upon them the value (and relative skill) to asking thoughtful questions.
I don’t mean to sound like a Mom for Liberty, but to my mind, the American public education system (probably others) is not about developing intelligence but rather preparing children for work and keeping them busy/safe while their parents work, and I’d argue it’s not very good at its primary function. The ones who escape with curiosity, capacity, and confidence intact are woefully rare if you care about power to the people and thankfully rare if you care about keeping people easy to control.
On top of that, it doesn’t even do a good job of preparing kids for work since the majority of jobs will be in a team based environment while schools focus on individual/isolated learning almost exclusively.
The modern school system was largely developed around the early 1900s with the intent of creating factory line workers: people who could remember and perform 2 or 3 repetitive tasks. This is further compounded by the rise of standardized testing, which provides a good base level for quality of subjects across the range of individual teacher’s skills but has become an administrative crutch that puts test scores above everything else, leading to a cycle where kids are taught only to remember stuff long enough to pass the next test and then dump it from memory for the next set of test subjects.
Schooling needs a major revision from the ground up for the modern age.
I don’t think that’s why questions aren’t asked. I find questions aren’t asked because of ego. Nobody wants to look like they don’t know things. Lots of people will judge others for asking questions. I’m a question guy and it always surprised me how other people just knew things and didn’t ask questions. But I soon started to realize that they don’t know as much as they want others to think. They just have a high value for more independent thinking.
