A child is a born questioner. He does not have to be trained to be a questioner; but he does need to be trained as a questioner. A child has been not inaptly called “an animated interrogation-point.” Before a child can speak his questions, he looks them; and when he can speak them out, his questions crowd one another for expression, until it would seem that, if a parent were to answer all of his child’s questions, that parent would have time to do nothing else. The temptation to a parent, in view of this state of things, is to repress a child as a questioner, rather than to train him as a questioner; and just here is where a parent may lose or undervalue a golden privilege as a parent.
 
The beginning of all knowledge is a question. All progress in knowledge is a result of continued questioning. Whence? What? Why? Wherefore? Whither? These are the starting-points of investigation and research to young and to old alike; and when any one of these questions has been answered in one sphere, it presents itself anew in another. Unless a child were a questioner at the beginning of his life, he could make no start in knowledge; and if a child were ever caused to stay his questionings, there would be at once an end to his progress in knowledge. Questioning is the expression of mental appetite. He who lacks the desire to question, is in danger of death from intellectual starvation.

Yet with all the importance that, on the face of it, attaches to a child’s impulse to ask questions, it is unmistakably true that far more pains are taken by parents generally to check children in their questionings, than to train them in their questioning. “Don’t be asking so many questions;” “Why will you be asking questions all the time?[Pg 121]” “You’ll worry my life out with your questions.” These are the parental comments on a child’s questions, rather than, “I’m glad to have you want to know about all these things;” or, “Never hesitate to ask me a question about anything that you want to know more of;” or, “The more questions you ask, the better, if only they are proper questions.”

Sooner or later the average child comes to feel that, the fewer questions he asks, the more of a man he will be; and so he represses his impulse to inquire into the nature and purpose and meaning of that which newly interests him; until, perhaps, he is no longer curious concerning that which he does not understand, or is hopeless of any satisfaction being given to him concerning the many problems which perplex his wondering mind. By the time he has reached young manhood, he who was full of questions in order that he might have knowledge, seems to be willing to live and die in ignorance, rather than to make a spectacle of himself by multiplying questions that may be an annoyance[Pg 122] to others, or that may be deemed a source of discredit to himself.

There are obvious reasons why the average parent is not inclined to encourage his child to ask all the questions he thinks of. In the first place, it takes a great deal of time to answer a child’s questions. It takes time to feed a child, and to wash it and dress it; but it takes still more time to supply food and clothing for a child’s mind. And when a parent finds that the answering of fifty questions in succession from a child only seems to prompt the child to ask five hundred questions more, it is hardly to be wondered at that the parent thinks there ought to be a stop put to this sort of thing somewhere. Then, again, a child’s questions are not always easy to be answered by the child’s parent. The average child can ask questions that the average parent cannot answer; and it is not pleasant for a parent to be compelled to confess ignorance on a subject in which his child has a living interest. It is so much easier, and so much more imposing, for a parent to talk to a child[Pg 123] on a subject which the parent does understand, and which the child does not, than it is for the parent to be questioned by the child on a subject which neither child nor parent understands, that the parent’s temptation is a strong one to discountenance a habit that has this dangerous tendency.

That there ought to be limitations to a child’s privilege of question-asking is evident; for every privilege, like every duty, has its limitations. But the limitations of this privilege ought to be as to the time when questions may be asked, and as to the persons of whom they may be asked, rather than as to the extent of the questioning. A child ought not to be free to ask his mother’s guest how old she is, or why she does not look as pleasant as his mother; nor yet to ask one of his poorer playmates why he has no better shoes, or how ............