Q & A

I read a very interesting line in a very interesting book yesterday: "Schools present learning backwards, emphasizing answers instead of questions." Huh. The book goes on, "answers are dead ends, even when they are correct. Questions open the galaxies." Uh.....wow. The book I'm quoting is The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewellyn. I have a lot to say about her and the book and why I'm reading it, but that will have to be a different post. This quote brought several things to mind. I thought of Beth Maze, my girls' chaplain when they attended the Cathedral School. She is also the foremost knowledge and trainer in our area for Catechesis of the Good Schepherd, that is more a theology than a simple Sunday School curriculum. If you ever get the opportunity to hear her speak about God and children, I would take it. The basic premise, from my uneducated perspective, is that children are born with an inherent knowledge of God, that it isn't our job to teach the children as much as to shepherd them through their own self discovery. The first thing Beth challenges is our way we speak with children about God. Rather than transferring information, she leads discussions with "I wonder....." and allows the children to take it from there. She asks questions that lead to more questions and coaxes the children to do the same. I had never been exposed to this kind of learning before. It sounds a little frightening, letting go of control and allowing the students so much freedom. Yet, so, so intriguing. I also thought about my little ones I've been working with all year. Up until school let out, I've been an assistant with the 4 year old class at a local Luthern early childhood program. Every day we gathered for "Jesus Time," a 15 minute lesson led by the school administrator for the 2,3 and 4 year olds. We would read stories, sing songs, and pray. We stay on the same topic for at least a week and at the beginning of each lesson, she would jog the kids memory to see if they were keeping up. It never failed, whether we were talking about Noah, Moses, Adam and Eve, or the Prodigal Son, she would ask a "who" question, and the smallest children would all shout out "JESUS!" On the surface it was cute and funny (partly because it annoyed the administrator so much), but it also deeply disturbed me. Two year olds were already learning to comply to "Sunday School answers", to shut off their brains and parrot back what they perceived would make us happy. And what really kept me up thinking, was Douglas Adams. In Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy, you discover that the meaning of life is a simple number: 42. That's the answer. The problem is, no one knows what the question is, for the answer to make sense. I read the Douglas Adam's work 15 years ago, but until yesterday I never realized just how profound it might be. We spend so much time fixated on knowing the answers, we diminish our education, our experience. We highlight the key points in the textbook. We have the audacity to ask, "Is this going to be on the test?" Knowledge is power. But where do we find knowledge? It is not in memorizing "facts." Those things just dupe us into a false confidence that we've got it all figured out. The answers are as useless as the number 42.