Bruner is quoted in A Logical Theory of Teaching: Erotetics and Intentionality by C.J.B. Macmillan, James W. Garrison as hypothesizing:
[quote]
Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child of any stage of development.
So I've been reading On What We Know We Don't Know: Explanation, Theory, Linguistics, and How Questions Shape Them by Sylvain Bromberger. Why? Because I've been thinking about how the questions we ask shape the answers we get (think "When did you stop beating your wife?") and how both the New Atheists and the Presuppositional apologists use the range of questions that can be asked to their advantage.
Bromberger makes an interesting distinction in the explanations we ask for:
- In questions such as "what is the height of Mt. Kilimanjaro", I know enough to ask the questions and recognize potentially correct answers. Clearly not answers: "12 feet", "Hans Meyer", "Kibo". Potential answers: "5,895 meters", "19,341 feet", "look it up in Wikipedia"
- In questions such as "Why do tea kettles emit a humming noise just before the water begins to boil?" where I don't have the same ability to distinguish correct answers and sometimes don't even have the ability to ask the question.
So why does that matter in Bible study? As a teacher one wants to teach students to ask the first kind of question AND to find the answer for themselves. In fact, one can even teach students to use Logos/Verbum to find the answers.
More interesting to consider, is how to address questions in the second category. Here the teacher needs to answer the questions that the student ought to ask given what they know of the subject. And the student has to be comfortable stating "I do not understand". However, the student also needs to be able to:
- reject teacher's "what you should ask" questions that contain implications the student is unwilling to accept
- reject the teacher's explanation based on erotectic logic - the logic of questions
- reject the teacher's explanation based on any applicable logic - term, proposiional, predicate ...
