Compare and contrast – Don’t ask questions

Postman & Weingartner (1968, p. 23) noted:

Knowledge is produced in response to questions. And new knowledge results from the asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old questions. Here is the point: Once you have learned how to ask questions – relevant and appropriate and substantial questions – you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know. . . . The most important intellectual ability man has yet developed -?? the art and science of asking questions -?? is not taught in school! Moreover it is not “??taught” in the most devastating way possible: by arranging the environment so that significant question asking is not valued.

In the news this week, a teacher may get fired because his students thought and acted independently?

More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx – virtually the entire eighth grade – refused to take last Wednesday’s three-hour practice exam for next month’s statewide social studies test. Instead, the students handed in blank exams. Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education. . . . School administrators blamed the boycott on a 30-year-old probationary social studies teacher, Douglas Avella. . . . A few days later, in a reprimand letter, Lopez accused Avella of initiating the boycott and taking “actions [that] caused a riot at the school.” . . . “They’re saying Mr. Avella made us do this,” said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. “They don’t think we have brains of our own, like we’re robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests.”