The art of posing the right questions
© Wikipedia
As we are progressively getting out of the COVID-19 crisis, we realize that education remains more than ever the art of posing the right questions. All those interested in the educational dimension of the pandemic would have read with great delight the open letter written to his students by Domenico Squillace, principal of Liceo Scientifico Alessandro Volta, a secondary school in Milan. Squillace urges his students to preserve the most precious asset we possess: our social fabric, our humanity.
This takes us back to the very meaning of education: “E-ducere” which in words of the French geneticist and humanist Albert Jacquard means “to awaken the appetite, to create needs, to raise questions”. “Education must be lived as a commitment in the collective game where men and women – (Jacquard called them“lucid men”) – build themselves mutually.”
Education is all about the art of posing the right questions. It requires a lot of factual knowledge and the ability to think critically: what Martha Nussbaum calls “global citizenship”. For her, the global problems we need to solve question our capacity to come together and cooperate in ways we have not before. Back in the fourth century Saint Augustine already defined education as “a process of posing problems and seeking answers through conversation.”
Having the ability to pose the right questions is fascinating. Listening to Stephen Hawking helps understand how the need to explore and settle on new planets is linked to fundamental questions about the origin of the universe and the future of the human race. Asking the right questions is also what economist and Nobel Prize Esther Duflo recommends to fight poverty, insisting on the need to come up with accessible solutions to concrete questions and problems.
Education is a dialogue, an innovative form of communication that must favor the creative and constructive appropriation by ALL the inhabitants of the planet and above all by the younger generations of ALL the themes vital to our future.
This vision of education takes us far away from the classroom where it usually stays and brings new perspectives to innovators in education.
