Wonder-Based Questioning - Part 1
Welcome to the Wonder-Based Questioning Series, where we explore inquiry-driven education by empowering students with our Wonder Question Technique (WQT).
Look It Up in the Phone… Book
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day.” - Albert Einstein
There is a famous story about Einstein.
One of his colleagues asks him for his phone number.
So, Einstein pulls out a phone book.
The colleague, somewhat confused how one of history’s brightest minds couldn’t recite a series of numbers most children could spit out, asked him:
“You don’t remember your own phone number?”
Einstein glances back at him and says:
“Why should I memorize something I can so easily get from a book?”
Calculus is Dead
For centuries, education has been built on the assumption that students must amass a fixed body of knowledge into their memories to succeed in life.
Schools drilled facts, formulas, and dates into young minds, preparing them for a world where access to information was scarce. It needed to be retained.
But that world no longer exists.
Today, students carry devices that can answer any question in seconds. Our average student today has access to unending knowledge right in their pockets, and they use it. They teach themselves to fix cars on YouTube and code by downloading free apps at the touch of a finger.
The reality that information is freely accessible and consumable in greater quantities, variations, and dissemination methods than ever before is finally starting to hit home.
So, why are we still teaching them to memorize information they can look up instantly? They’re plugged into the latest knowledge, updated daily, live on the web. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but we no longer need “smart” students in the traditional sense. With tools like ChatGPT and AI, why do we need to be the most knowledgeable person in the room anymore?
Even harder to say is that, with how the education system is currently structured, students no longer need teachers to learn, because the content is right there. Kids don’t need us to spoon-feed it to them anymore. Educators are no longer the vessels of facts and information.
The smartphone is.
(Of course, educators are more than needed, just in a different way than ever before! But we’ll get to that later. Stick with us.)
The Times They Are a-Changin’
Young people are always ahead of the curve, while older generations are often left to adapt much later. We’re slowly catching up to what kids have been doing for years: asking the internet to teach us.
Our kids have tried to show us this; we just weren’t paying attention.
While older generations cling to fixed mindsets — “this is how it’s always been done” — young people have been experimenting fearlessly. They were doing this long before adults caught up.
Thus, like Einstein, we ask the question, “Why should we memorize things we can so easily get from phones?”
If you took a picture of a classroom today, you’d likely see a room where every student is sitting at a desk, head down, hunched over, trying to memorize the same formulas, read the same books, and chase the same test scores as their classmates and peers around the country. This is the factory model of education, built for an era when the knowledge you held in your head was king.
Just like technology has freed us of the burden of carrying around flint and steel every time we want to make food or get warm, it has also freed us of the need to value rote retention, especially around material we no longer need for daily life.
Consider calculus, often heralded as a pinnacle of academic rigor.
For some, it’s a passion — a gateway to becoming rocket scientists or engineers.
Kids who love calculus should absolutely pursue it; their tight-knit communities often spark joy and connection, lighting up the window of the soul. They should run with it, free to explore that passion deeply.
But for most students, calculus is a hurdle, not a calling. Forcing it on everyone doesn’t create mathematicians — it creates frustration. More than that, demanding every kid master calculus or memorize historical dates doesn’t prepare them for the future; it buries their potential.
What young Keplers or Einsteins might we be suppressing by weighing down their minds with subjects they’ll never use?
Why are we still asking kids to memorize information that’s outdated by graduation or instantly accessible online?
This isn’t about abandoning rigor but about relevance.
We aren’t trying to lower standards, but instead focus on raising the right ones.
Today, knowledge isn’t the bottleneck. Most of our education evaluations involve asking kids questions that are simply looking for predetermined answers.
This rigid approach, where questions are tested and answers are pre-set, stifles the natural curiosity, interest, wonder, questioning ability, and collaborative spirit that children thrive on when learning.
Kids Are Natural Questioners
In today’s fast-paced world, increasingly saturated and overloaded with information, news, and entertainment (both factual and fake), perhaps no greater skill must be learned than the ability to ask good questions.
The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates famously declared that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” This is a timeless call to embrace curiosity and reflection as the cornerstones of a meaningful existence.
Yet, the imperative to question often fades into the background, particularly as we transition from childhood to adulthood. We know this is true, as many of us, especially young people, struggle with meaning and significance today more than ever.
So, how can asking more questions and fostering more autonomy, competence, and relatedness — the foundations of becoming a valued member of society — help build an identity of meaning and purpose in our lives?
Asking questions and developing meaning or significance may seem unrelated, but when people ask questions with genuine interest, it must be meaningful to their lives. Otherwise, why would they be asking about it? Just because a question may seem irrelevant to one person’s perspective doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to everyone.
For instance, most people will likely never ask how a car runs, and thus, questions surrounding the vehicle’s mechanical operation may be meaningless to these individuals. However, this question is meaningful to others because they are interested in cars, as it is part of their significance in life.
As Warren Berger highlights in his profound book, A More Beautiful Question, children are nature’s natural scientists and researchers. They are relentless questioners who, according to Harvard psychologist Paul Harris, pose approximately 40,000 questions between the ages of two and five.
Preschoolers ask their parents an average of 100 questions a day, driven by an insatiable hunger to understand the world. Research from the University of Michiganexplains how these young minds seek knowledge with purpose, persistently probing “why?” when answers fall short.
Unfortunately, their inquisitiveness often wanes as they enter formal education.
After age 5, questioning drops dramatically, and by middle school, it is stifled by a system prioritizing rote answers over inquiry. As children age, we inadvertently kill their curiosity.
Adults hold the vast knowledge and experience children crave, yet we often fail to engage their interest. Teachers are stuck force-feeding their students’ answers to questions that no one is asking and are routinely forced to dismiss any inquiries if it isn’t on the subject.
Young children want to learn from older, wiser mammals who are interested in the things they want to learn about. We naturally gravitate towards these individuals who possess the knowledge and skills we desire.
So, why do our students appear to be less and less interested in what educators, parents, and other adults have to say as they grow into adolescents?
Perhaps we’ve stopped letting them ask the questions to which they want to know the answers. Perhaps we’re stifling the wonder of what learning should be.
The Original Education Model
The natural course of education for most of human history has been simple: a child’s development drives them to spend most of their time with other children in self-directed, self-controlled play away from adults.
As Dr. Peter Gray, scientist, author, and researcher, notes, “They pay attention to other children, try to fit in with them, and strive to do what the others do and know what they know. Throughout most of human history, that drive has played a huge role in children’s education.” (See Article).
This was the primary means of socialization and education.
The most important part of this learning process is the formation of age-mixed groups. In environments where children aren’t separated by age, they naturally gravitate toward peers across a wide age range. This begins as a blanket search as we are first introduced to our peers, but eventually morphs into individuals grouping up with others with the same interests and aspirations.
This is how intergroups naturally form, and it is driven by the questions we have as children that interest us the most. These questions drive us to seek out the individuals who can provide the answers, the ones who possess the meaning or significance we’re craving.
Younger kids pick up skills and more complex thought patterns within these mixed-age groups by engaging with older children. Older ones hone their leadership and caregiving abilities by guiding their younger counterparts. Both sides are learning lessons that cannot otherwise be learned when in the presence of adults.
Authentic communication is one of the most profound lessons and skills children learn through age-mixed play, which plays a pivotal role in young people asking questions they genuinely want to know the answer to. In organic settings, kids play with ideas, negotiating, experimenting, and building on each other’s thoughts.
This process sounds strikingly similar to how the best businesses flourish. Innovative companies thrive when teams brainstorm freely, challenge assumptions, and co-create solutions without fear of giving the “wrong” answer.
Yet, our schools rarely prepare students for this reality.
In many Western schools today, adults often talk down to students or use insincere communication. When children are young, we ask them questions for which we know the answers, like what the color of a toy is, or we praise their scribbles on paper as masterpiece art, when they clearly lack sophistication.
Children do not do this with one another. They do not give false praise to each other.
As children age, interactions drift further from genuine questions or compliments in the classroom. We ask students questions that we already know the answers to, suggesting one of us (adult or child) is naive. We are only asking to teach or control rather than discuss ideas genuinely.
Thus, the question is not a question.
It’s a test.
Instead of fostering spaced repetitive practice in authentic collaboration and question-asking, we drill them for tests and seek memorized information, most of which vanishes once they enter the workforce.
Today, young adults join new teams for the first time only to realize they lack the human skills to manage themselves or others, hurting their ability to relate. Worse, they don’t know how to ask the right questions to grow competent in their role and develop autonomy.
Taking Action to Change the System
Arthur Schopenhauer once said, “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”
When the internet was in its infancy, people laughed at it.
It would never replace our informational storage systems.
It would never change the way we teach in the classroom.
Then, as the youth adapted, learning from YouTube or taking notes digitally, it was further ridiculed and vehemently kept away from the old school paper and pencil methods. This two-dimensional world must be stopped.
Now, it almost seems silly to think we ever questioned the internet’s ability to be integrated into the classroom.
Today, it is becoming self-evident that the education system needs to change.
If you find yourself believing this to be a silly concept or even one that must be forcefully opposed, perhaps it’s time to look in the mirror.
However, nothing truly changes without action.
At Sweethearts & Heroes, this is our philosophy.
To make real change, we must always identify the problem and share a similar perspective if we want to take collective action. This comes with some hard truths and self-reflective questions.
Why do we cling to a system that treats tests as the pinnacle of learning?
Why don’t we reclaim curiosity as the driving force behind education?
What if we saw questioning not just as a young child’s strength but as a lifelong tool for autonomy, competence, and connection with others as we age into adolescence and eventually young adulthood?
What if we could bridge the generational divide that often seems to be the source of so much conflict?
We want to raise a generation that practices these skills, through age-mixed and hierarchically diverse interactions, so they emerge equipped for the real world.
By shifting toward education that mirrors the fluid, hierarchical, and creative interactions of mixed-age play, we’d empower young people to step into adulthood not just prepared but poised to innovate and lead with confidence.
Kids would learn which questions spark progress, how to lead or support others, and how to adapt their human skills to any situation. This training would be invaluable in the workplace, where tests are irrelevant and collaboration is king.
For years, we have sat in Circles and asked opinion-based questions that students (and adults) get to answer the way they want to answer.
They develop autonomy, competence, and relatedness by getting together with one another in a secure environment where they are allowed to share (or not to share) their perspectives on the world.
We aim to foster a culture where kids and adults alike commune around powerful questions, dismantling the barriers between generations and empowering each to live a more examined, vibrant life.