This assignment presents you with a set of questioning tools for thinking and analysis.
Only Do the 4 exercises that are bold, in order to answer those 4 exercises read from the beginning
Questioning
Effective thinking, both critical and creative thinking, involves asking questions. The kinds of questions we ask are important, as are the ways that our initial questions lead to others. Good questions direct our thinking, encourage exploration, and open our minds to varied possibilities.
In their book The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, Edward Burger and Michael Starbird suggest that questions can be an "inspiring guide to insight and understanding." Creating useful and productive questioning enlivens our curiosity, provokes our thinking, and excites our imaginations.
But what are the characteristics of good questions? First, good questions are open ended; they admit of more than a single answer. Second, good questions generate other questions; they lead beyond themselves. Third, good questions produce rich and varied answers; we can judge a question by the kinds of answers it evokes. Fourth, good questions jumpstart our thinking-they stimulate, engage, and provoke.
Neil Postman, in The End of Education, puts it like this: "The value of a question is determined by the specificity and richness of the answers it produces and by the quantity and quality of the new questions it provokes."
Some examples of questions that meet these criteria are these:
• What do we mean by a fact? Is a biological fact different from a historical fact or a mathematical fact? Can facts change? Can something once considered a fact be dethroned and shown to be a fact no longer?
• What is the relationship between fact and truth? How would we begin to answer that question?
• How should science be taught in the high school and university curriculum? How many sciences? In what order? To what extent should the teaching and learning of the sciences be integrated with one another. To what extent should science be integrated with technology? With other subjects? Which ones? Why?
• Is history a science? Is dance a language? What is a saint? What counts as an experiment? How would you go about answering these questions?
• How do we know what we know? How can we compensate for the limitations of reason, the inaccuracies of perception, the reliability of what we read and hear?
In Microtrends, Mark J. Penn examines the small forces behind big changes. He analyzes data, looking for changing patterns in religion and politics, social and family life. Penn argues that a number of forces are converging-the Internet, the global economy, the fragmentation of communication-to create a new sense of individualism that is transforming society.
America (and the world) is splitting into thousands of small niches, readily evident by the proliferation of hundreds of cable TV channels. What are the effects on society of these proliferating interest groups? What kinds of opportunities and threats do they pose? Here is a sampling of Penn's questions:
• Though more people are retiring, more retirees are returning to work. What is the explanation for this trend-and what are its consequences?
• Why are there more women than men in colleges and universities? Why are there more African-American women than African-American men in higher education, and what consequences result from these facts?
• What are the implications for a Western world that is graying and in a declining population spiral? To what extent will power shift from the West to other parts of the world-and from Europe and the United States to China, India, and Latin America? What factors other than the size and ages of populations in different parts of the world need to be examined to answer that question about a power shift?
Learning to ask useful questions is a skill, even, perhaps an art. The better our questions, the better chance we have to develop our capacity for critical and creative thinking, because questioning is a key element in all thinking.
In What?, a book of twenty short chapters constructed entirely of questions, Mark Kurlansky asks "What was the first question" in human history? He doesn't answer it, really, but he does offer a couple of possibilities, including "Where is the food?" a practical question linked with survival.
Kurlansky suggests that it is questions that matter rather than answers, that we are still trying to answer most of the really interesting and important questions about ourselves, and that many, if not all the really significant questions, will never be fully answered.
Kurlanksy focuses on "what" questions, on "how" and "why" questions. "What," he asks "is at the heart of intellectual pursuit?
Is it ‘what'"? Or, as he suggests, is it "why" rather than "what"? "Why," Kurlansky suggests is the key question of science and "what" the central question of history. But in the process of saying that, he wonders whether that is not an oversimplification. And then there are the questions of "when" and "how," which are important to both history and science, respectively. And yet Kurlansky asks, "Why is the question ‘What' so fundamental" to knowledge and understanding? "How," he asks, "do we know anything for certain? Aren't even our beliefs, our opinions, subject to change?"
Exercise 1
Which two of Postman's questions interest you most? Why? How would you begin to answer them?
Exercise2
Choose one of Penn's questions and begin to answer it. Identify three or four additional questions that his questions and your preliminary answers generate as you go.
Exercise3
What other basic questions would you add to Kurlansky's "what," "why," "when," and "how"? Why would you add each of them?