Asking Knowledgeable Questions

From the Stuff I’m Thinking About category: what’s the relationship between asking questions and having knowledge? Is one more important than the other? While I would say that the skill of asking questions is more difficult to build, and more useful, than simply having domain knowledge, it also seems to be true that it is impossible to ask good questions without sufficient domain knowledge. Consequently, that seems to imply some dialectical process between asking questions and answering those questions – whereby answering questions builds domain knowledge, and enables one to ask new (and better) questions.

Education seems to emphasize the latter – domain knowledge – while actually supressing the former – asking questions. The universal questions tend to be “Will this be on the test?” as opposed to “What questions do knowing this allow us to ask?”

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