Just because some ideas assert themselves and garner lots of attention doesn't mean their the best ideas around. It's not just my innate scepticism of markets that leads me to this conclusion. Ideas, concepts, and notions need to be understood, and some are simply a bit more difficult to grasp. This increased difficulty is, I'm sure, a contributor to their losing out in the race to the marketplace ... if that is in fact where everything is determined.
One such idea/concept/notion is erotetics.
No, please look again: there's an additional "et" shoved in there; we're not dealing with anything risque at all, but that doesn't mean it isn't an exciting concept. OK, exciting may be too strong a word, but interesting and meaningful still apply.
Stated most simply, erotetics is the science of questions. Some see it as branch of logic, namely the logic of questions and questioning, and as such was of interest in general to philosophers and in practice to lawyers. For others, it was a short-lived, and, in my estimation, too long overlooked branch of educational theory.
It's not that I think there is only one way to think about education, a term I use to encompass both teaching and learning. There is still a lot of debate about what teaching is, and the emphasis these days is certainly on the learner, though I'm not sure the teaching-learning dichotomy isn't a false one any way, but that's a topic for another time. I do believe, however, that the very notion of questions and questioning can be an excellent starting point for a number of things that matter. To me, questions and questioning - erotetics - is the hub of the wheel of consciousness, with language, perception, philosophy, education, science, politics, and a host of other "disciplines" acting as spokes. But, if it's as important as I think it is, then why has it been and is it so neglected?
One of the issues involved is certainly that we don't have as strong a grip on the notion of questioning as we think we do. Having taken a closer look at the subject (see "A Question of Questions"), I'm much more aware of what a complex, yet extremely powerful, factor questions are. Even risking being over-simplistic, questioning is a unique - if not defining - human capability. The problem is, we don't understand just how they work and how they can be best employed, especially in education. Sure, we've all heard of the Socratic method, and we're all aware that questions play a significant role in teaching, but too many classroom questions deal with procedural, not learning, issues, and too many classroom questions that are related to learning activities are simply poor questions that don't live up to their potential.
As a result, I'm making a call for the resurrection of an idea whose time never really came, namely erotetics. It's time to start questioning questions again.
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