Knowing nothing

At roughly three feet, 47 pounds, and four years of age, my little sister can ask an average of ten questions a minute. Her questions range from “Can I watch Frozen tonight, Ate?” (To which I’d usually answer yes) to “When will it snow?” (When Olaf comes), all asked in the impossibly high pitch of a child’s voice, with a slight Disney Junior twang and traces of the Visayan accent of our household.

Kaela is by far the youngest in the family, with my younger brother being 15 years her senior. She is a tiny human in a house full of adults, the first preschooler I’ve ever had a major hand in raising. I remember looking at her back when she was an even tinier human – a squalling thing, all soft limbs and drool and big eyes – and deciding that I wanted to raise her right. That was easier said than done though, especially when thinking about what right even meant, but the decision has made me more conscious about what we teach her everyday.

For one thing, I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve asked her to keep quiet, especially when she goes on one of her question-marathons. I had always been bothered by how casually my family and I shush her questions so often, but I had never given it much thought.

It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, when I found myself sitting through a marketing seminar, that I realized why. The professor had just finished his presentation and proceeded to ask the class if we had any questions. An all-too familiar embarrassed silence filled the room, and a quick glance at my fellow attendees showed that they were all, like me, avoiding the professor’s eyes. The silence that followed was agonizing, stretching on for what felt like years before the professor sighed and said, “Nevermind.”

They say that children are naturally curious and inquisitive, and if that’s true, I wonder at what point they stop and grow up to be the college kids who sit silent and ashamed, or otherwise distracted during open fora. I wonder at what point asking questions became such a bad thing.

I was a much quieter child than Kaela is, but I do remember the annoyance and impatience that adults showed when I asked a string of why questions, or the anger on their faces when they assumed that I was asking questions because of laziness, stupidity, or a conscious desire to annoy them. It’s enough to discourage anyone from asking, and I realize that I have unwittingly become one of those adults towards my baby sister.

What’s confusing for me is that by the time I got to college, adults suddenly started saying that intelligence is marked not by how well someone answers, but by how well they ask questions.

I asked some friends about why it’s so hard for us to think of questions during open fora, and a lot of them feared the same thing – looking stupid. It is the same feeling when asking questions during class or encountering an unfamiliar subject while talking to people. We tend to avoid asking questions and the accompanying embarrassment of having to admit our ignorance.

It turns out that there’s an intense social pressure to appear smart, and asking questions would destroy that image, like losing authority over knowledge. There is an unease over asking questions because it is a way of confessing ignorance, and we’ve been trained all our lives to know the right answers to all the questions asked us. The need to give the correct answer is so ingrained that when we are invited to ask our own questions, we scramble for a correct question to ask, the same way we throw out answers that we think teachers, parents, and other adults want to hear.

There is so much emphasis, I think, on what we should know instead of what we can know, and this overemphasis leads us to treat unknown and grey areas as problems instead of opportunities. We forget that not knowing everything is okay. We forget that saying I don’t know is the first step towards asking Why? and How can I know?, which means that knowing what you don’t know yet is the key to eventually knowing. But it takes a special kind of courage to take that step.

What’s sad in all of this is that so many of us go through our entire lives never admitting ignorance, believing that a lack of knowledge is equivalent to a lack of intelligence. It is terrifying to ask a question and be thought of as stupid, and this fear leads us to limit our questions to “Will this appear in the exam?” or “Will there be partial points?” But the thing is, what’s even scarier for me is pretending to know everything… and ending up never learning anything.

I was in the car with Kaela a few days after that marketing seminar, and it was one of those rare quiet moments with her. The question we just finished was “Why is the light red?” (It’s telling cars to stop), to be followed a few minutes later with “Who makes all the rules?” (Jesus, sometimes the Senate and the Congress).

I realized then that more than trying to be brave and accepting uncertainty as a part of growth in a world that demands black-and-white answers, it is important also for us to be kind to those who are trying to do the same. We should allow others the space to know what they do not know and let them ask their questions unscathed. By removing the shame from not knowing things and opening ourselves to the opportunity of learning more, maybe some day we might actually have an open forum full of college kids whose curiosity and inquisitiveness survived adolescence.