Confucius said “Choose a job you
love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” In a similar way,
you can say “Teach a student to ask questions and you wouldn’t need an exam.” With
individualist lifestyles inspired from Western countries, ego as an emotion has
started to have an overwhelming affect on individuals.
If you ask questions, they seem
to offend people. Questioning authority is a strict no-no. We were taught in
school to ask questions and those who did were considered to have a scientific
temper. Our knowledge is superficial these days. Conceptual understanding is
not done. And therefore we are afraid of people asking questions. Thus, we
muscle the thinking ability of people which makes them mute followers without a
scientific temper.
Beliefs, faith and religion are
the only aspects which cannot be explained with a proof. All other things have
a reason for their existence. Armed forces are the only places where we need a
line of authority without questioning the decisions. Everything else needs to
be questioned.
The most important aspect of a
teacher is not to feed information but make the subject interesting enough for
the student to be inquisitive about its contents. Then the teacher need not
worry if the student will study or not. Leaders or bosses, too, need to
encourage questioning because only then will the fundamental understanding of their
subordinate improve. Questioning will make an individual look at the future. And
try to understand what impact will a decision have in the future. This will
make companies to make a second line of leadership ready who can fill in shoes
in case of a retirement or attrition.
Sad though that inspite of all
literature on team-building and working in teams, no one touches upon the idea
of encouraging different view-points although it says to accepts different
view-points. But if scientific temper isn’t improved upon, there will be no
contrary view-points.
When arguing on a point and you
know that you are right, keep on asking leading questions and over period of
the argument, your opponent will understand the fallacy of his argument.
Employees with a knack of asking
questions are worried about their superiors getting offended with questions. They
have to learn to ask questions in a round-about way and be apologetic of asking
questions. The world these days is ruled by bottom-line and money-mindedness. If
this continues, majority of the followers will lose their thinking-acumen and
will be mere robots with power to a few. And as they say “Power corrupts.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
So, if you encourage at least one
individual to start getting to the depth of any aspect, you got a winner on
your hands. There can be no better ability than to ask questions. The target should
be to catch them young. Youngsters at impressionable age can be moulded like
clay. Any questions?
