Asking questions

Whenever something even mildly eventful occurs when I am babysitting, the four year old girl I watch continuously asks the question: Why? She keeps asking this question until I answer it, and then will continue to repeat the word “why” until my answers become less and less interesting.

While this can become very repetitive and vexatious fairly quickly — one can only explain why spoons are used to eat cereal so many times — the complexity of this recurring sequence struck me, and caused me to wonder why the trait of explicable questioning often disappears as we grow older.

This epidemic of apathy does not only pertain to the question “why”; the act of questioning for the sake of questioning is slowly beginning to disappear. In high school classrooms, for example, we shouldn’t only question things when questions are asked for, but should desire to simply know more.

We shouldn’t not question aspects of society just because the answers are seemingly inherently acknowledged. You should want to ask questions in order to form your own opinion regarding issues and become more educated.

Yes, it may seem extremely silly to ask questions with a difficulty level equivalent to that of a mind of a four year old, but I believe it is still interesting to simply want to know why. We should want to know and understand and consistently keep questioning the workings of the world, because well, why not?