Vignette : Reinquire

When do we stop asking why? And perhaps more importantly, why do we stop asking why and how?

All children are naturally curious, but over the course of mass produced education, we learn answers to questions we aren't interested in, and the questions about what we are interested in are silenced. Slowly, students come to understand that curiousity is counterproductive to results. Our own hobbies become idle pursuits that detract from time that could be spent on academic practice. Not many emerge from the smog with the flame of curiousity still burning. Relentless standardisation erodes the innate desire to understand. Curricula deem certain knowledge essential and other interests as superfluous.

A teacher should teach how to learn rather than what to learn. If a teacher has no spark of childlike curiousity within, how can they possibly foster that essential pursuit of understanding? Part of learning is imitation; so teachers should demonstrate the process of learning and inquiry in the way that they teach.

A teacher fails when all a student learns is factual. A teacher should strive to kindle the flame, to strengthen a spirit of learning. But they cannot do so freely, constrained as they are by bullet points that earn ticks on a page. We are boxed in, teacher and student, to look at answer keys and be blind to all else that moves. Instead of asking questions, we can only answer them.

So if you truly wish to break free from the tyranny of the academic system, ask, relentlessly, until all the imposed boundaries of what to know and what not to know dissolve to reveal the vast and varied world of knowledge that exists around us. Retreating into a shell of neither asking nor answering questions is to lose to the system, to have it drain the life out of us. Reach out, past the constructed barriers and walls, pursue the intriguing unknowns on the horizon, and take the initiative in the dance that we have with our education.