There are books that whisper. Books that shout. Books that lecture you like your least favorite uncle after two scotches. The Art of Questioning by Joshua G. Fitch is the third kind. At once charming and irritating, enlightening and exasperating, it’s the Victorian pamphlet equivalent of being told how to breathe—by a man in a top hat who believes he invented lungs. Yes, it’s earnest. Yes, it’s occasionally insightful. But does it need to exist in a world where Socrates already made questioning a career? That’s up for, well… questioning.
Written in 1879, when chalkboards were considered cutting-edge tech and teachers still beat insight into children with willow branches, The Art of Questioning emerged from a lecture Fitch gave to Sunday school teachers. Yes—Sunday school teachers. The intended audience, you see, wasn’t Oxford dons or philosophical juggernauts. It was Aunt Mildred from the parish, trying to get eight sugar-fueled toddlers to care about Corinthians.
What began as a well-meaning, mildly condescending speech to the educational volunteers of Victorian Britain somehow found legs. Perhaps it was the novelty of someone suggesting that questions—not punishments—were central to learning. Or perhaps it was just that people were bored in the 19th century and the bar for “insightful” was lower than the hem of Queen Victoria’s dress.
Joshua G. Fitch—Sir Joshua if you’re being proper—was a British educationalist who made a career out of inspecting schools and writing about how others should teach. Imagine your nosiest neighbor turning that nosiness into a full-blown pedagogical philosophy, and you’re on the right track. Fitch was obsessed with clarity, structure, and the divine rhythm of a well-placed question. And to his credit, he did believe teachers should be kind, thoughtful, and inquisitive—not just disciplinarians with a ruler fetish.
The actual content of the book? Think “lecture notes crossed with a Victorian TED Talk.” There are good nuggets—don’t ask questions with obvious answers; tailor your inquiries to your students’ level; and for heaven’s sake, don’t humiliate the kids—but these insights are buried under layers of long-winded sermonizing. It’s like receiving a fortune cookie that makes you read War and Peace before you get the message.
To say this book set the world ablaze would be, let’s say, charitable. It didn’t revolutionize teaching, nor did it become required reading outside the dusty back rooms of 19th-century education societies. But it hung around. Like that one teacher in high school who never retired, it survived through sheer stubbornness and a certain quaint British charm.
In recent decades, it’s been rediscovered by a niche crowd—education theorists, history of education buffs, and perhaps those who enjoy being lightly scolded by people long dead. Some praise it for being ahead of its time. Others think it’s more of a relic: a fossilized reminder that even well-intentioned ideas can age into pedantry.
The Art of Questioning is not a bad book. It’s just a very British, very buttoned-up, very 1879 kind of book. It has its place—somewhere between a teacher-training time capsule and a curio for those who like their wisdom delivered in florid, paragraph-long sentences. It’s informative in spurts, but in the end, the best question it inspires is: Why am I still reading this?
⭐️⭐️⭐️ (3/5)
#AskMeIfICare #VictorianVibes #PedagogyWithAPipe #TeachLikeIts1879 #QuestionThis #FitchPlease #ClassicNotTimeless
No comments:
Post a Comment