Look After Your Mind – Wow!
I see from an online search that ‘wow’ comes not from English but from Scots. In a 1513 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, translator Gavin Douglas wrote the lines, ‘Out on thir wanderand spiritis, wow!’ – not that this leaves me any the wiser. We tend to say wow when we’re surprised, impressed or astonished: it’s embedded in the language and has become a kind of verbal reflex.
In my years working with children I’ve come to think of it as ‘world of wonder’. Children are born curious and, especially in their younger years, experience the world with ‘firstness’, as the educationist Margaret Meek calls it; with a sense of freshness and fascination.
How children ask questions
Such curiosity naturally generates questioning. According to the parenting website firstcry, toddlers first begin to ask ‘what’s that?’ questions at around 15-18 months. What follows is ‘where’, ‘why’ and ‘what’ questions in their third year. The journalist and innovator Warren Berger in his book ‘A More Beautiful Question’ quotes Harvard child psychologist Paul Harris who cites research showing that a child asks about 40,000 questions between the ages of two and five.
However, there is a shift in the kinds of questions being asked. From simple factual ones (what’s that?) to the first requests for explanations by 30 months. By the age of four children are generally asking for explanations and not just facts.
Sadly, as children get older many of them ask fewer and fewer questions. They become the passive recipients of the facts they are obliged to learn within the school curriculum. John Abbott and Terry Tyan criticise such ‘coverage’ of facts in ‘The Unfinished Revolution’, with the authors arguing that ‘the curriculum is an inch deep and half a mile wide’. This mirrors the view of the psychologist Howard Gardner who asserts that ‘coverage is the enemy of understanding’.
A way forward
And yet we can address the issue easily. When I work with primary school children I show them some fossils and lumps of quartz I collected when I was a child, (from the slag heap near the coal mining village in Wales where I was born). The children are invariably delighted to see and handle these and spontaneously ask all kinds of questions about them.
As adults we can cultivate this behaviour by asking questions ourselves. They can be mundane such as, how many people live in our town? Or deeper scientific or philosophical questions like – Why is the sky blue? Why is water so important for living things? How did the universe begin? What does it mean to be a person?
By asking questions ourselves, we’re sending out the message that questioning is not a show of ignorance, but an intelligent behaviour reflecting the desire to find out more.
Encouraging questioning as a habit turns it into a journey towards becoming more broadly and more deeply educated. It’s no coincidence that the words question and quest are linked, both coming from Latin meaning ‘to ask’ and ‘to seek’.
Steve Bowkett
Leicestershire Wildlife Hospital – May ’25
