Why do kids stop asking questions?

The average first grader asks about 300 questions a day while the average high schooler asks less than three. Why?

Developmentally, little kids are wired for one thing: learning. Asking questions is the quickest way to get there. They’re not jaded like a high schooler might be.

Little kids are also too young to have developed self-awareness and don’t have A fear of being made fun of for asking questions. Or judged.

But, older kids are developmentally self-aware. They have an imaginary audience criticizing their every move in their head. Fear of standing out and wanting to be accepted rule most actions.

So, while a teenager’s mind might be teeming with big questions they’re reluctant to ask them aloud.

Lastly, as you transition from being a little kid to a young adult your body’s prime directive shifts from learning mode to procreation mode and you don’t need all those extra neural pathways anymore anyway. The brain starts cutting off excess snyapsis and you literally begin to lose your mind — or at least part of it metaphorically.

Now, that’s all biological. You can’t do much about that. But what about what we can control — school?

What does school incentivize behaviorally that might lead to young people asking next to no questions in their secondary studies?

The answer is easy: schools are artifacts of the industrial model of education where compliance was the goal of schooling.

Early industrialists had a problem: how can we get more workers off the farm and into the factory to make more stuff?

Easy — you create compulsory schooling laws requiring those workers to drop their kids off in schools.

Early schools suddenly swamped with millions of kids looked to the nearest model of how to get a lot of people to behave, and listen compliantly to you: factories.

Like old mills schools had desks all facing one way, strict behavior codes, and require permission around most meaningful activities one can take: asking a question, when to get up, when to go to the bathroom, how to walk in hallways, and so on.

Now, some order is needed. You can’t have chaos. But the net result of all this seems to be a school model that rewards compliance over creativity.

Compliance wasn’t a bad thing until the digital age hit: you could be a darn good blue collar worker on a Ford line and make upper middle class money, buy a nice house and send four kids to college.

But, with the digital age arriving the only thing economically that seems to be rewarded is one’s ability to be creative: think of the creative juices it takes to code, retool yourself by going back to school in your 30s, or develop programs or streaming services like Netflix or Spotify.

With the internet reducing barrier entries into business to zero it is only those capable of asking the big questions and creatively finding solutions to them that will stand out and be rewarded.

A stellar transcript with a 4.0 GPA is impressive but if you don’t have the ability to critically challenge the world around you we have set you up for failure in a ever more rapidly changing economy.

Creation > Compliance.