The Importance of Asking Questions

The Importance of Asking Questions

By Drew Miller, ARC Consultant

 “I am the wisest man because I know one thing: that I know nothing.”   - Socrates

As I sat in my general education music class earlier this week, the professor began to talk in language I did not understand. The truth is, I did not really know what he meant by the term “melody.”  If you know me, that would not be a surprise to you. Indeed, I am the one who took piano for two years but never practiced enough to play well. I am the one who giggled with his friends during high school choir and hardly learned anything about reading music. This past week, I was the one sitting in a college music class, struggling to understand what the professor was saying.

My professor continued with his lecture, and besides thinking “Boy, I wished I’d pay more attention in when I was younger,” I also thought, “Sheesh, I want to ask a question but I’d look like an idiot.” So I kept my hand down.

The fear and shame I felt in not understanding something very basic is a common part of the classroom experience. Humans dislike admitting what they don’t know. But when we become so afraid that we are not able to ask questions, we also lose our capacity to learn. What do we have to learn if we do not try to grapple with the things we don’t already know? 

The classroom, however, is not the only place to ask questions. The classroom is a place to learn to ask the questions that we must learn to ask with our lives. Many of us have already asked the most difficult questions in life, but that does not mean we have actually understood what those questions were and are. As we grew up, life asked us: How will you treat this unpopular person? Why are you growing up in the family you are? Why have you had this challenge to overcome? Our lives will continue to ask difficult questions: How should I love my neighbor? How should I love my enemy? The classroom is where we can become conscious of these questions. If we are not conscious of our questions, we will never become conscious of the answers. 

Ranier Maria Rilke, an early 20^th century poet, writes in his book Letters to a Young Poet, “Do not now seek the answers that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.” We can begin to ask these questions in the classroom so that soon we will be able to live them.  

Perhaps my question about defining the “melody” did not have profound implications on the rest of my life. In fact, after I eventually garnered the courage to ask my no-way-this-guy-is-a- music-major question, I received response that was interesting and important, but not nearly inspiring. But without knowing musical or technical terms like “melody,” I’d have no way of identifying the emotional themes that the melody carries. It is the same with any other discipline; if you don’t know what a metaphor is, it’s hard to understand a novel with a central metaphor. We have to acquire technical and often mundane language to ask questions about greater meaning.

Being inspired is not the point of most questions. In fact, the question of loving our neighbor, which most questions are rooted in, is not very inspiring and beautiful when we learn how difficult it is. The value of a question does not come in its content, but in the courage it takes to ask it. We will never learn to live the question of how to love our neighbors if we cannot ask a simple question in music class. 

So, no matter the profundity of our questions, we must learn to have the courage to ask. And, if we learn to ask little questions and then the bigger ones, perhaps one day, as Rilke contends, we will learn to “love the questions themselves,” and “gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”