University telling me that the correct measure of the best class-room teaching is the skill to use the question technique. How many teachers use the technique for any other purpose than for killing time ruthlessly? Good questioning is mutual inspiring. While the teachers' questions, in the ideal set-up, result in both learning and internalisation of knowledge, the students' questions, whatever they are, result in improved teaching. Questioning is not the prerogative of the teacher. Unfortunately, in the Western pedagogical tradition, questioning is indicated mostly as a weapon in the hands of the teacher. Questioning, in its technical Connotation, means mostly the questioning by the teacher. There is very little said about student-questioning. No doubt, in recent times, especially after Dewey codified the scattered bits of the democratic philosophy of education and made it the basis of a number of practicable class-room techniques, American teachers have realised the educational value of student-questioning. But it was only in India that the true value of questioning as an educational technique was developed. The concepts of vina and prasna are at least as old as the earliest books in Tamil and Sanskrit literatures extant. Much in the heritage of Tamil literature has been the inspiration of student-questioning. There is the convention of many books being in the question-answer form ; and one would suspect that the convention itself developed from a real practice. Parvati is the questioning student par excellence, and Iswara is the answering teacher par excellence, be it Astrology, Astronomy, Medicine, Physics or Metaphysics. The author has done very well by giving this technique the pride of place in oral work.
