A good question is just as special as a good answer

Last week a torch died in our house. Not from flat batteries — from a screwdriver. I walked into the kitchen to find it in about eleven pieces across the table: the little spring, the bulb, the thin silver strip that carries the current, all laid out like a tiny crime scene. My son was bent over it, a screwdriver in one hand that I didn't know we owned. "It's broken," I said, in the flat voice every parent has. He didn't look up. "I know. I wanted to see where the light comes out."

I added the torch to my mental list of Things I Will Fix Later and moved on. It took me a few days to notice I'd walked straight past the most important thing on that table.

Here's what we do, almost without meaning to. We praise the answer. The hand up first. The fact recalled, the sum finished, the spelling right. We call that child "clever" — and we're not wrong — but we've quietly taught them that the prize is the answer, and getting there fast is the point.

We almost never praise the question.

Which is strange, because the question is the rarer thing. An answer closes a door: done, next. A good question opens one — often a whole corridor of them. You can hand a child an answer; they can borrow it, memorise it, repeat it on Friday and forget it by Monday. But a question is something they had to build. It isn't proof they were told something. It's proof they were thinking.

And thinking — real, question-asking, independent thinking — is the whole game. It's what stands between a young person and every slick advert, every confident lie, every "but everyone knows that" they'll meet for the rest of their lives. The critical thinker isn't the one with the most answers. It's the one who asks the next question: How do you know? Who says? Compared to what? What are they not telling me? Those aren't answers. They're questions — and they're a kind of armour.

The trouble is that questions are inconvenient. They slow the lesson down. They arrive at bath time, in the taxi, in the supermarket queue — always when you're busy. So, gently, without ever deciding to, we train children out of them. We answer just to make the asking stop. And one day — this is the part that should worry us — they stop asking. Not because they've run out of questions, but because they've learned that questions are interruptions, and answers are what earn the smile.

So try the opposite, just sometimes. Let "that's a brilliant question" fall out of your mouth as easily as "that's the right answer." Answer a question with a question and watch what happens. Let them sit in "I don't know yet" without rushing to rescue them — because sitting inside a question is where thinking actually lives.

Which brings me back to the torch.

I've since fixed it, and I've stopped thinking of that evening as the time my son broke a torch. Because he didn't break anything. Those eleven pieces on the table weren't a broken torch. They were a question — where does the light come out? — asked in the only language a curious six-year-old had. He couldn't put it in a sentence I'd approve of, so he put it in a screwdriver.

A good answer would have been to tell him about the bulb and the circuit. A good question was the pile of parts on the table. And I'm honestly no longer sure which of those two I'd rather my son had.

So next time you find the torch in pieces — or the "but why?" comes for the ninth time, or there's a question mark scrawled in the margin where an answer should be — notice what's actually happening before you reach for "why did you do that."

They asked. And a good question, it turns out, is just as special as a good answer.