Young Children's Interests as Shown by Their Questions

Learning starts through "asking". There is no true learning without any questions and curiosity. Nowadays, the questions asked by the young are decreasing. It may be caused by the teaching method which mainly give knowledges and the way of life with its use of the computer. As a result, the young are losing their spontaneity and autonomy. The situation is very serious in education. How is the actual state of the questions by the young children in the important stage? The history of education tells us that many educationists since the ancient Greek thought much of "asking" and "dialogue" in the teaching process. For example, there are Socrates, Plato, Comenius, Pestalozzi, Owen, Dewey and the Japanese Souzou Kurahashi. The Christian Catechism and the Montessori Materials are also examples. There are some researches about the questions by the young children. Among them Sadao Murayama's in 1964, Tatsuya Matsubara's two researchs in 1974 and 1979, and Tsuyoshi Yoshioka's in 1989 are useful for a comparative study. We made two types of questionaire in 1992; the one was to ask the kindergarten teachers and nursery nurses about the questions by the children in the settlements during 8 months since April, and the other was to ask the parents about their child's questions at home during 3 days in November. The former was a check-list composed of 442 key-words supposed in advance, and the letter was a sheet for parents to write on about the contents of questions. We got many questions by 3727 children through 308 teachers and nurses, and by 1670 children through their parents, which we could classify into the groups of 7 interrogations and "yes or no". We investigated the kinds, numbers and tendency of the questions, and the differences among 6 phases (nature, humanbeing, culture, society etc.), ages, and the two sexes