Celebrate children with the courage to ask questions

“Mister, why is the moon sometimes visible during the day, if you say she only appears after sunset?” my now husband, who was then seven years old, and his friends once dared to ask their strict Egyptian teacher in Arabic. An authoritative figure whose frown alone could instil fear, the teacher’s response to this normal question was punishment rather than explanation.
This took place in the Oman of the mid-seventies, when classrooms still reflected a dominant teacher’s voice as the nation itself was just beginning to transform.
After all, it had been only around seven years since late His Majesty Sultan Qaboos had acceded to the throne and famously said, “Let there be learning, even under the shade of the trees,” establishing the Ministry of Education and initiating a plan to build schools throughout the country.
At the time of his accession, the nation had only three schools and no higher education institutions, so creating a national education system from scratch was a monumental task.
Today’s rapidly developing educational landscape in Oman stands in stark contrast to those early days. However, change of this magnitude inevitably took time, and during my husband’s post-basic education, classrooms still bore traces of traditional teaching habits, while he even spent his early childhood being taught in a tent.
“That the learning took place in a tent does not really matter; it depends on how good the teaching was,” remarked a European intellectual and education expert visiting Oman recently after I shared this story with him to show how much the country has developed in a relatively short period under the vision of His Majesty Sultan Qaboos and his successor, His Majesty Sultan Haitham bin Tarik.
Curious and persistent, our European visitor asked me question after question about Oman, sometimes even fact-checking my answers with ChatGPT, and making me want to read more books and revisit the National Museum and Oman Across Ages Museum to learn more history.
We should love questions, even if we do not always know the answers or if our answers are being challenged by first-time visitors or younger minds. A question and answer session is not about being victorious in a debate or asserting knowledge or wisdom authority. It is about discovering new opinions, learning new facts, and sometimes questioning received wisdom. Genuine questioning is about dialogue, inspired by Socrates, that deepens understanding and can even open our minds to different perspectives.
Recently, a younger member of our family respectfully asked an educator why she had claimed that one of the child’s peers might have attention deficit disorder (ADD), questioning the assumptions behind the statement, which were based solely on behaviour, such as not always being fully focused.
Although there is nothing wrong with being diagnosed with ADD, and it can even become a superpower, an educator cannot casually label a student. Yet the adult interpreted this questioning as rudeness and tried to win the conversation through ‘superior’ arguments.
Respecting teachers and their knowledge authority is important, but so is sometimes speaking up through constructive, thoughtful questioning. Students flourish when they can express their deepest concerns and thoughts to someone who listens honestly and responds sincerely. It is precisely through such constructive questioning that students learn to engage thoughtfully and develop confidence.
Let us think and talk together.