Why?

Children have a need to make sense of the world.

They see things they don’t understand, and they ask, why?

Why is the sky blue? Why does a plane fly? Why is it Tuesday? They need to understand the assumptions people are making for themselves. There must be a reason behind the things that people are doing.

Children want to understand the world, and they believe that understanding the world is something that everyone must be doing. These big people must know all the things that are going on here.

It is an amazing quality that children have; to want to make sense of the world. It is a quality that most people unlearn along the way into adulthood.

We unlearn it in a grocery store, when a stressed out parent sternly tells answers a why with a “because I say so”. It ends in a living room, when a parent zoned out and watching TV answers a why with, “don’t ask stupid questions”. It ends in classroom room when a teacher answers a why with “can you be quiet, you’re disrupting the class.”

Kids learn that making sense out of the world runs in conflict to making their parents and teacher happy. Their why’s make their parents angry, and from a child’s perspective, an angry parent is a threat to survival.

After enough, “because I said so’s” kids stop asking why. Parents believe that they have to have all the answers. They want to look perfect in their child’s eyes, so they destroy their child’s curiosity to maintain a positive image of themselves.

Kids proceed into a schooling system based on the same idea. There is one person, in a position of authority with all the answers, and there are the students with none.

We are all born into the world with an instinct to make sense out of it. The appearance of reasoning seems almost instinctual for children. The need to understand not only how something is, but why something is. Why is it the way it is?

As we grow up, our desire to understand does not disappear, it is hammered out of us. Slowly, but surely by people in positions of authority. Parents and Teachers. The people who are supposed to be “educating” us end up killing our curiosity and desire to learn on our own.

Parents and teachers who are too afraid to admit that they are not all knowing, so they appeal to their authority instead of logic. The child’s desire for knowledge runs into a conflict with the child’s for safety. They kill their curiosity to survive.