?
Still, we must appreciate that questions are not a blank check. There is such a thing as a stupid question. I’ve heard plenty of them over the years. Stupid questions reveal willful ignorance, laziness, or a painful lack of preparation. There are also hurtful questions that humiliate or open old wounds. Gratuitously hostile questions—meant to embarrass or pick a fight—can poison a conversation. Inappropriately personal queries can get you in trouble. Self-serving questions, where someone asks a question just to show off how much he or she really knows, turn off everyone else.
Cultural sensitivities vary widely; one person’s question may be another’s insult. Some cultures defer to age and authority or view public questioning as inappropriate or disrespectful.
A few years ago, while teaching a university class in China, I employed what I thought was some good, provocative Socratic questioning about what the United States and China were up to in the world and how the students perceived the competition. I challenged the students to share their opinions, define their terms, and support their views. A Chinese student leaned over to one of the Americans in the room and asked, “What is he doing, trying to get us to fight?” This was unfamiliar, uncomfortable territory for these students and my questions landed with a thud.
In some societies, questions are viewed as an outright threat. Repressive regimes know they cannot stand up to scrutiny or challenge. Thought dictatorships reject accountability and suppress curiosity.
A “Letter from Pyongyang” in the Washington Post caught my eye. Entitled “Virtual Reality Inside North Korea,” the article by Anna Fifield told the story of her tour of a North Korean hospital with a group of reporters. A secretive, brutally repressive state, North Korea wanted to show off healthcare in the communist paradise. The tour was surreal. Fifield saw “decades-old” incubators in the maternity ward and a lab stocked with “a museum exhibit of scientific instruments.” She asked one of the doctors who was assigned to the group whether international sanctions “limited your ability to get the technology you need to do your work.”
Sanctions had caused suffering, came the answer, but “Great Leader Marshal Kim Jong-un taught us to learn about technology and science so we have the ability to develop by ourselves.”
Later in the tour, Fifield asked if the doctor had access to the internet. He went to a nearby building to go online three or four times a week, he replied. Had he been online this past week? “No, no times this week.”
As they passed a CT scanner, Fifield asked if they could turn it on so she could see it work. The response: “Why? Do you have a serious health problem?” she was asked.
“You ask too many questions,” Fifield’s government minder told her. “It’s a little hard to work with you.”
In North Korea, there’s no point and little future in asking.
In vibrant societies, however, we want our next generation of questioners to be better than the last. Indeed, the people I spoke with for this book know that the ability to ask is directly connected to our ability to invent and innovate, to push boundaries and pose the big questions that confront us as a society. Some have dedicated themselves to teaching young people and helping future generations understand the power and poetry of questions. Three such individuals stood out for their commitment to the future.
The Justice of Citizenship
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor asked some of the biggest questions confronting America during her twenty-five years on the United States Supreme Court. Though she had been retired for several years, she still kept an office deep inside the massive neoclassical building. Justice O’Connor was in her eighties. A cane leaned against her desk. But her voice was strong and clear as she rose without effort to greet me.
We weren’t there to discuss her opinions in some of the most significant cases in American history—not Bush v. Gore, when the Court (with her crucial vote) picked a president; nor Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when she sided with the liberal justices upholding Roe v. Wade. “I don’t look back,” she told me definitively. “That’s for a historian or a book writer. I did the best I could and that’s that.”
We were there to talk instead about her initiative to teach young people about the important questions of government and citizenship. Sitting in her cavernous office, wrapped with shelves heavy with books on law and government, it was impossible not to feel the weight of history and the great debates that had defined America. The American experience, Justice O’Connor explained, was built on defining questions.
Are we going to be a nation?
If so, what form of government are we going to choose?
And how will the people be part of resolving it?
On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted to declare independence from Great Britain and its tyrannical king. The next day John Adams, in one of his famous letters to his wife, Abigail, wrote, “Yesterday, the greatest question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men.” From there, a nation of ideas evolved.
Some 240 years later, O’Connor was worried. We were losing our sense of history, civics, and our understanding of these big questions, she feared. Our schools were failing us. As a parent, years earlier, she had been struck by how little time her children and their friends spent studying how government worked. It had only gotten worse. She felt young people urgently needed to learn what “citizens have to do and decide” if they were to participate in the world around them.
The words hit me hard in this place, especially as I considered the polarizing, paralyzing debate that passed for political discourse outside. Benjamin Franklin had said, “It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.” But citizens need to know whom to question and how, if they are to do it effectively.
Motivated by the conviction that citizens must understand the basics of government if they are to question and change it, O’Connor started iCivics, an online teaching tool that uses games and interactive exercises to help young people learn how government works and how they can be part of the process. At the time we spoke, more than 100,000 teachers and 3 million students had visited iCivics, playing its educational video games more than 10 million times.
O’Connor wanted future generations to understand and to engage America’s foundational questions:
What is the role of government?
How do we balance individual liberty with social responsibility?
What does responsible citizenship entail?
Justice O’Connor seemed as proud of her iCivics initiative as her years on the bench. Hers was an astonishing career. She broke virtually every barrier that got in her way. She made history in her own right as the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. But helping young people appreciate the American experiment and what it asks of them as citizens was a mission that lit her up.
“I think we’ve achieved something,” she told me modestly.
Ask to Lead
Debbie Bial is passionate in her belief that young people who ask the next generation’s questions will be its leaders. Debbie founded and runs The Posse Foundation, an organization that identifies extraordinary high school students based on their talents and leadership potential. Mostly from inner cities, the “Posse scholars” are paired with colleges and universities that provide full tuition. The groups of students that go to these schools are known as Posses. They are the most engaged, motivated, and diverse kids you could ever meet. When they get to campus, many take on leadership roles or start new student organizations. Most are the first in their families to go to college. I have worked with Posse scholars for years and served on the Posse Board. I’m a true believer.