Mainstream education which focuses on answers may be entirely misdirected. Given a collection of experiences, we believe that the ability to come up with appropriate questions is at least as important as the ability to reason answers and far more important than the ability to recite answers. The best scholars are those who have developed the ability to think through a problem and come up with the most useful questions. Answers may be easy to come by once the questions are clearly phrased.

Our students begin the course prepared to look for answers but not for questions. We seek to help students develop the ability to ask appropriate questions which is why we answer so many questions with other questions. As the year progresses, students who approach teachers with questions find, to their surprise, that the presence of the teacher stimulates questions of greater clarity and answers follow. As they ask questions, they often say, “Never mind, that’s a stupid question,” when actually, it was the clarity of the question which made any teacher’s response unnecessary! We may react by saying, “Sometimes you just have to stand next to a chemistry teacher and answers just jump into your head!” Actually, we believe that as the student approaches the teacher, better questions appear in the student’s head, and better answers tend to follow.

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