The Question

There is a teacher of mine, who periodically asks his colleagues, "do you teach your students reason?", to which they would answer, "yes". Then he would ask, "what is reason?" Their next answer was not as quickly nor as clearly given; in fact, often it was an obfuscation. The point, if it is not obvious, is that one cannot teach what one does not know.

To teach another is, in part, to teach this other how to come to know without a teacher, i.e., how to discover for himself. It is like that old saying: "give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach him how to fish, and he eats for the rest of his life". This may seem cliche and hackneyed, but the reason for this is, is that these old sayings are true. A false statement never becomes cliche and hackneyed, no matter how long someone holds onto the belief of it.

The first thing a student must have to want to learn is wonder. The first thing a student must have in order to learn is to be able to ask a question.

If a teacher is going to teach students how to ask questions, the right ones in the right order, then the teacher must know what a question is; at least in some way he must know what a question is.

So my question is this: what is a question?

As I have stated before there are three arts of language (grammar, logic, rhetoric). Of these three, all can concern themselves with what a question is. None of them, however, concern themselves with what a question is the same way.

So my question goes further: what is a question with respect to the three arts?

I hope this is a good beginning. I hope someone will help me through this.