Are Why Questions Bad?
Are Why Questions Bad?
A typical discussion in education circles is that a good pedagogy would present the students with multiple explanations of why certain choices are good. A good pedagogy would show the student why given the limited amount of time a student has in the school day, learning math should be the school’s priority. But as a professor in educational leadership in my graduate school days in the early 1970s, I experienced the opposite. I remember a discussion with a team of faculty from a prominent university teaching the civil rights era civil rights movement. They were discussing what was appropriate to do with the students in their classes. I argued for such a discussion. One of the professors said to me that he disagreed that the civil rights era was an example of the power of positive motivation. I could not argue with that. Yet a moment later he said to me, in effect, that it was pointless to discuss why civil rights workers would have worked without earning money. That was his reason for not discussing the facts and reasons. I was puzzled. So I asked the professor, “Didn’t some civil rights workers receive money in order to complete their assignments?” He replied, “Of course, but not all of them worked on behalf of the civil rights movement for that money. If they did, the students would question them and doubt the positive motivation. They would learn that a good civil rights movement requires money and not necessarily positive motivation.” I was shocked. He did not want to explain his understanding of why a civil rights movement would be immoral and not helpful to students. I had never seen such a discussion in a university education program.