The second third of the volume deals with improving our use of questioning as an effective classroom technique for stimulating learning. The premise for this section is simple yet powerful: "the cutting edge of knowledge is not the known, not in knowing but in questioning" (Ralph Thompson, "Learning to Question," 61). If questioning is the essence of the business of learning, if inquiry is the route to knowledge, then why is it, Thompson asks, that so many college graduates are seriously deficient in their ability to formulate and ask good questions. One thinks of those graduate students who are unable to come up with stimulating topics (questions to investigate) for their theses or seminar papers, indeed, of undergraduates who lack the ability do posit fruitful queries for term papers. The answer, Thompson suggests, lies with the too heavy emphasis on the didactic and deductive approaches to instruction and too little "upon the hypothetical and inductive . . .too much attention to answers and too little . . . to questions" (61). Thompson argues that professors ask very few questions that require students to think. While helping students understand "the modes of questioning appropriate to a field of study," the creative teacher will go far beyond the merely appropriate questions to penetrate "the core of disciplined thought and [dislocate] some of the core elements, [to be] disruptive [and] . . . disinclined to hold steady and remain respectable" (62). In fact, as Thompson points out, the "questioner must know a great deal about a field of study to ask sophisticated questions" yet must not wait until he or she has "mastered the field" to begin the questioning. In fact, the ability (and the courage) to pose significant questions should be in evidence at every level of study. Nonetheless, instructors rarely evaluate this ability, evaluating instead the ability of the student to answer the question that they pose and thus creating a behavioral prison by what the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire famously termed "the banking concept of education," from which the student and teacher alike find escape difficult. The challenge for the teacher then is to foster in the classroom the freedom to question, the challenge to question, the leading into questioning through analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. (I note here that William Fawcett Hill's Learning Thru Discussion, mentioned earlier attempts this very thing.)

In summary, the essays in this volume challenge teachers to reconsider the nature and consequences of their "control" of the classroom and show clearly how to harness the power of effective classroom communication. Learning and teaching, teaching and learning—a "risky" business at times but surely one of the best and most exciting careers around.