Why aren’t students being commended when they ask intelligent questions? Why isn’t thinking being encouraged in our classrooms?

As an education consultant, I often watch teachers teach. After many hours of classroom observation at many different schools across Tamil Nadu, I’ve been repeatedly struck by one particularly disturbing phenomenon: very few children in our schools are being asked to think.

A few months ago, I was watching a biology lesson on the excretory system. The teacher explained the information in the textbook to her attentive group of students and then asked them if they had any doubts. One bright spark raised his hand and asked, “Miss, is vomit also a waste product? It isn’t mentioned in the textbook.” As an observer, I found this really interesting. Here’s a student who is actually thinking!

I watched keenly to see how the teacher would react. Would she say, “Great question! Let’s talk about that some more?” Would she explore why vomit wasn’t mentioned in the textbook? Would she launch into a discussion on how we classify waste products? And if she wasn’t sure about how we classify vomit, would she embark on a shared exploration of the question. (“Great question… Let’s look it up together!”)

Unfortunately, I was disappointed. The teacher merely reiterated what was in the textbook — “There are three waste products produced by our bodies: feces, urine, and sweat,” and then she moved on. The young boy who had asked the question nodded wordlessly. Clearly he had been sent a strong message: school isn’t a place where you think and ask questions. The only thing that’s valued here is memorising a textbook.

Systemic failure

Our education system, which is designed around narrow and outdated exams, seems to be pushing teachers and students to forget about thinking and focus only on rote learning from a textbook. Well-meaning and hardworking teachers across the country spend countless hours “covering portions, preparing kids for exams, and teaching kids to score well.” And anxious children across the country spend a lot of time memorising information, hoping that they will be able to provide the answer that the examiner is looking for.

In most classes, teachers “deliver” material from a textbook, as this is what they have been taught to do, both through their own experiences as students as well as in their B.Ed courses. As they explain this material, they ask a few close-ended questions to make sure that students are listening and that they are getting the right answers. At the end of the lesson, teachers ask students if they have any “doubts that need clarifying.” This script seems to repeat itself across classrooms.

Rarely do I encounter a teacher who asks students open-ended questions that actually stimulate thinking. What about questions that start with “Why?” or even “What do you think?” Where are the questions that stimulate divergent thinking and push children to actually use their own minds?

And why aren’t students being praised and commended when they ask good questions in classes? Why isn’t thinking being valued and encouraged in our classrooms?

As American psychologist Robert Sternberg said, “children are natural question askers… but whether they continue to ask questions depends in large part on how adults respond to them.”

What’s more important: getting the right answer or asking the right question?

Thought leaders in various fields — from education to management to the sciences and the arts — agree that asking questions is a fundamental part of thinking, learning, inventing, and creating.

As Neil Postman, author and educator, said, “All the knowledge that we have is a result of our asking questions; indeed question-asking is the most significant intellectual tool that humans have.” And Peter Drucker, management consultant and author, reiterated this idea when he said, “The most common source of management mistakes is not the failure to find the right answers. It is the failure to ask the right questions.”

In Indian culture, we have a long history of asking questions. In The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen documents the many ways in which so many central Indian texts (like the Gita, for example) revolve around an argument that includes provocative, open-ended questions. Our philosophers have always known that questions are important; if we don’t ask questions, we don’t engage in any real, deep thinking.

It’s time we started teaching students to “think for themselves” and “ask the right questions.”

Start with teachers

And perhaps we need to start with our teachers. Perhaps we need to start by reforming our teacher-education system so that it values “thinking” and “questioning.”

Let’s get our teachers thinking about some fundamental questions: Why do we teach? What is the purpose of school? And what is it that we’re trying to do every day in our classrooms? What does a child in the 21st century need to learn? How do we make sure that our students are thinking and learning?

Let’s make sure that we do two central things. First, encourage our teachers to ask open-ended questions that stimulate thinking. And second, encourage our teachers to validate students who ask interesting questions. Then maybe we will begin to see some thinking in our classrooms.

The writer is an educator and author. She is the founder of TREE, a company that recruits and trains teachers.