A More Beautiful Question (11 page)

Can we teach ourselves to question?

If the question muscle has atrophied by junior high, imagine its condition by the time a student goes to college. Indeed, Rothstein’s downward-sloping question-asking chart continues to plummet right through the college years. University professors I interviewed confirmed a dearth of student questions, even among bright Ivy Leaguers.

“For twenty years I’ve been teaching at the Harvard Business School,” professor Clayton Christensen told me. “And I love this place, but the intuition to ask questions, the curiosity, is much less than twenty years ago.” As to the cause: “If all you do as you’re growing up is watch stuff on a screen—or go to school, where they give you the answers—then you don’t develop the instinct for asking questions,” Christensen said. “They don’t know how to ask because it’s never been asked of them.”

How might parents make their kids better questioners?
⁴⁰

In studying “master questioners,” Hal Gregersen inquired about their childhoods and found that most had “at least one adult in their lives who encouraged them to ask provocative questions.” The Nobel laureate scientist Isidor Isaac Rabi was one such child; when he came home from school, “while other mothers asked their kids ‘
Did you learn anything today?
’ [my mother ] would say,
‘Izzy, did you ask a good question today?’”
Clayton Christensen thinks parents can help their kids be more inquisitive by posing what if questions “that invite children to think deeply about the world around them.” But Christensen thinks it’s also important to encourage kids to solve problems in a hands-on way, via challenging household tasks and chores. That worked for IDEO cofounder David Kelley. His career as a problem-solving designer was forged in a childhood home where “if the washing machine broke, you went and tried to make a new part to fix it.”

William Deresiewicz, the acclaimed author
³⁸
and essayist who teaches at Yale University, cited another factor. “The college education that students are getting now, particularly at elite institutions, tends to be technocratic,” he said. “They’re trained to develop expertise in a particular area—trained to solve the problems that are particular to that area. It’s about jumping through hoops, and mastering what’s on the test. There’s no time where students are asked to step back and think about what they’re doing—and why they’re doing it. What I’m seeing is a failure among these students to ask big questions about values and meaning and purpose. What we really need is for these kids—our future leaders—to learn how to ask those kinds of questions and not just technocratic ones.”

Deresiewicz says the best professors can inspire that kind of inquiry, but they’re rare. He cites as an example a favorite professor and mentor of his own, about whom Deresiewicz has written elegantly (“He had a young person’s ability
³⁹
to see the world with fresh eyes. His white hair shot up off his forehead like a jolt of discovery”). I asked Deresiewicz what his professor did to spark inquiry.

“He had an ability to reframe things—to ask questions that got at something fundamental. Sometimes the questions almost seemed stupid; there’s the idea of ‘the holy fool’ who asks the questions no one else will, and that was part of what he was doing.” In doing this, Deresiewicz has written, his professor “was showing us that everything is open to question, especially the things we thought we already knew.”

Importantly, the professor was also “willing to ask questions without knowing the answer. Teachers and professors, we think our authority rests on having answers. But students find it really liberating to have a teacher say, ‘I don’t know the answer—so let’s figure this out together.’”

Is it possible the kind of Socratic teaching that Deresiewicz’s professor did could make a comeback in the online world? That’s what Sebastian Thrun is hoping. Thrun, known for developing Google’s self-driving car and other tech breakthroughs, says he was never comfortable asking disruptive questions in his native Germany but found a much more receptive environment in Silicon Valley. While working at Google he also taught at Stanford University; in 2011, an artificial intelligence course he co-taught was offered online, and Thrun was surprised to see that tens of thousands signed up for it. Soon after, he made the jump from self-directed cars to self-directed learning. The online university he launched, Udacity, is one of a growing number of such programs that have been attracting attention (and mixed reviews) in the past few years. But one of the interesting things Thrun is trying to do with Udacity is to bring the Socratic method to online teaching.

The Udacity courses are designed not just to broadcast lectures but to inject thoughtful questioning at critical junctures, to get students thinking about what they’re learning. As for encouraging students to ask their own questions, Thrun and one of his partners
⁴¹
in the start-up, a former Google designer named Irene Au, insist that questioning is actually easier online—because anonymity helps. You don’t have to be “that person” in the back of the huge lecture hall, trying to shout out a question at the end of class while others in the room are itching to exit. (One college professor recently observed
⁴²
that he’d never gotten as many student questions as when he began teaching online.)

Yale’s Deresiewicz is skeptical. He points out the big difference between typing a question into your computer and asking a real, live professor (he also thinks the online college revolution is the first step in dismantling universities to get rid of the overhead of actual classrooms and teachers). He sees no substitute for the collaborative and unpredictable give-and-take between an assembled group of students and a learned master: “You can’t improve on Socrates’s invention,” Deresiewicz concludes.

Whether or not online courses provide an answer in and of themselves, they are part of a larger phenomenon in which more people of all ages are beginning to direct their own learning, exercising their questioning muscles—and doing so outside the established institutions of learning.

Nikhil Goyal thinks this is where the future of learning-by-inquiry is going to happen—not in schools (“I have no hope that the schools, for the most part, will change,” he said), but in makeshift classrooms, often held in “maker” or “hacker” spaces where people come together to build and create.

John Seely Brown holds a similar view: “The kids who actually drop out of school or who view that the real learning happens after school, they’re becoming part of this massive network of maker movements that is forming.” The maker movement is mostly about building things (whether low-tech or high-tech), as well as creating art and music. But it’s driven by project-based, peer-to-peer learning, which tends to happen as novice “makers” in the group question the more experienced ones. This is going on in basements, playgrounds, museums (San Francisco’s Exploratorium recently established a maker space), and, perhaps most surprisingly, libraries. “Libraries are being remade as interesting maker spaces, with the librarian playing more of the role of the teacher of inquiry-based learning,” Brown says.

Brown believes that young people may be honing better new-economy skills outside the classroom than in it; they’re learning to create, experiment, build, question, and learn. So it may turn out that in a world of exponential change, “these are the kids who will have the skills to rise to the top.”

In a sense, we’re all “makers” now, or, at least, we would do well to think of ourselves that way. Whether or not we were ever properly taught how to question, we can develop the skill now, on our own, in our own spaces. One way to start is by looking at how other practiced questioners do it—focusing, in particular, on how they employ fundamental Why, What If, and How questions to solve problems and create change.

Chapter 3

The Why, What If, and How of Innovative Questioning

Why . . .

WHY do we have to wait for the picture?

WHY does stepping back help us move forward?

WHY did George Carlin see things the rest of us missed?

WHY should you be stuck without a bed if I’ve got an extra air mattress?

WHY must we “question the question”?

What if . . .

WHAT IF we could map the DNA of music?

WHAT IF your brain is a forest, thick with trees? (And what if the branches touch?)

WHAT IF you sleep with a question? (Will you wake with an answer?)

WHAT IF your ideas are wrong and your socks don’t match?

How . . .

HOW can we give form to our questions?

HOW do you build a tower that doesn’t collapse (even after you put the marshmallow on top)?

HOW can you learn to love a broken foot?

HOW might we create a symphony together?

Why
. . .

Why do we have to wait for the picture?

Edwin Land was a brilliant inventor,
¹
sometimes described today as the Steve Jobs of his time. He was capable of seeing new possibilities—at times coming to him as detailed, fully formed visions—that others could not begin to imagine. Yet even Land couldn’t see the life-changing opportunity he held in his own hands on a sunny winter’s day in 1943. Rather, a question from a precocious three-year-old suddenly brought the future into focus.

Land was on vacation with his family in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He had taken some photographs of his young daughter, Jennifer, using his favorite camera. In those days, film had to be taken to a darkroom or a processing lab for development; Land knew this, as did any adult. But young Jennifer had a different take. She asked her father why they couldn’t see the picture he had just taken without having to wait.

Land found he had no good answer for her. He took this as a challenge, a “puzzle she had set for me,” as he described it.

“Stimulated by the dangerously invigorating plateau air,” Land recalled in a speech years later, “I thought,
Why not? Why not design a picture that can be developed right away?
”

Land, then in his midthirties, was already used to tackling big questions. The two-time Harvard dropout had parlayed his fascination with light polarization into a modestly successful business. His technology, which allowed for filtering light and reducing glare, was used on sunglasses and photo filters. Land had bigger ambitions, hoping it could actually save lives:
What if we could reduce automobile accidents through polarized headlights and windshields?

This idea, which Land explored during the 1930s and early 1940s, was to use polarization so that headlights, while still fully lighting the road ahead, would no longer blind drivers coming the other way. But Land couldn’t get backing from the automakers, and by 1943 his company was slowing down and in need of a fresh innovation.

After Land spent a couple of hours thinking about Jennifer’s query, he began to build upon her initial Why with a series of What If questions of his own. The fundamental challenge he faced could be summed up as
What if you could somehow have a darkroom inside a camera?

According to Christopher Bonanos, author of
Instant: The Story of Polaroid
, Land knew that “it wouldn’t do to have a tank
²
of chemicals sloshing around inside a camera.” But what if those chemicals “could be contained in little pouches, and then spread over the negative somehow?” This was one of a series of questions Land worked through during a feverish couple of hours spent walking by himself. He wondered,
How would one print a positive? How would you configure both negative film and positive paper in the back of the camera?

Land wasted no time in giving form to the questions, and partial answers, swirling in his head. That very day he summoned a colleague and began to write out a detailed plan for an instant camera. He began creating prototypes so quickly that he produced the first instant test photo (a picture of himself) within a few months. But, facing hurdles and setbacks, too, Land’s team had to struggle to get the first black-and-white instant camera to market by a promised introduction date four years later.

Land’s own questions weren’t even fully answered by then. From the outset, he had envisioned something greater than what he was able to deliver in 1948 in a splashy introduction. Land grappled with questions like
How can we do this in color?
Why can’t the camera be easier to use?
Another thirty years would pass before he answered those questions with his masterpiece: the color, one-button, even faster-printing SX-70.

The journey to answer his daughter’s beautiful question may have been long and arduous at times, but Land was primed and ready for the trip. A year before Jennifer’s question and Land’s feverish walk, in December of 1942, he had said to Polaroid employees, “If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it . . . if you think of, detail by detail, what you have to do next, it is a wonderful dream even if the end is a long way off, for there are about five thousand steps to be taken before we realize it; and start making the first ten, and stay making twenty after, it is amazing how quickly you get through those five thousand steps.”