Let me expand on that just a little.
Let me make the distinction here between a question and a quiz –
because it's very important.
Now, if I'm walking, as I do, on the streets of Boston --
(I don't own a car.)
– and a car comes up along side, and somebody sticks his head
out the window and says, "Hey, Mister," or whatever,
"can you tell us how to get to Newbury Street?"
or "Copley Square," or wherever it happens to be,
that's a question. They don't know.
They want to know. They think I know.
So they ask me a question, hoping to get from me the right answer --
which they don't have.
Now that's a legitimate question. That's a search for information.
A quiz is something very different.
It sounds like a question – It uses the same words.
But the intention is altogether different.
I would be asking you a quiz if, believing that I had the answer to something,
I asked you a question to make sure that you had it.
In other words, this is a way of testing your knowledge --
of making sure that your knowledge agrees with mine.
Now little children understand very clearly the difference between quizzes and questions.
Some of you will have had the experience of asking
your little three year old or four year old a quiz-type question.
And you may get the answer, "I don't know" --
which is just a child's way of refusing to answer what he/she knows is not a real question,
not a serious question, not an honest question.
Or you may get some silly answer. That's another way of disposing of it.
One mother tells me that when she occasionally loses her common sense for a second,
and asks her child a kind of quiz type question, the child turns right around and asks her one.
Little children understand that this is a quiz, not a question.
And they further understand that all that all quiz-type questions
are a statement of lack of confidence.
This is a vote of no confidence.
Children resist being asked quiz-type questions for the same type of reason they resist
being taught things when they haven't asked for them --
because they realize that this is you stating:
"I don't really think you know this."
This is a statement of lack of trust and confidence.
And so they tend to react to it with a lot of anger and resistance --
which I think is altogether proper.
And I'd hope when we get these signals, we would pay attention to them.