It's maybe a bit too contemporary, not sure. I would opine however, that quite often, we do not as a society educate people in the asking of questions. I suppose someone somewhere might think that's dumb. Everyone can ask questions. At the same time, anyone who asks questions for a living quickly learns that even if we were to grant that there is no such thing as a stupid questions, there is such a thing as an unproductive question.

To use an example where I did the exact thing you're talking about, someone asked this question:

What caused Christianity to go from a peaceful religion to a religion that waged war in the 11th century.

This is not a bad question, though it might be called such. It is a badly phrased question. In my very answer I tried to explain that it is in fact one of the most contentious questions in Western History. We're still debating it.

I did however point out, in a lot of words, that this is a badly worded question. It has two fundamentally flawed assumptions; that Christianity changed into a religion that waged war, and that Christianity before that point was a peaceful religion. Both of these propositions are very incorrect and are incorrect in ways that make correcting them answers in themselves. Even after identifying that the fundamental question being asked is "Why did the Crusades happen?" It still felt important to explain why this question was poorly asked because it would be difficult for the actual answer to make any sense if the underlying problems in the question were not addressed.

On the one hand, part of why this question is poor is probably that general education doesn't really cover the Crusades. At least, it doesn't in my country. The Crusades are something you're more likely to hear about in non-educational contexts first. Unless you seek out information on the Crusades, what you know about them probably amounts to a hodgepodge of hearsay and cultural presumptions accumulated over the course of life. Questions can be deceptively complicated, not just in their answers but in addressing the lack of knowledge in the questioner themselves.

That's probably the first reason layman can be so uninformed: they were never educated on the topic in the first place.

As a point of somewhat sad fact, no. In fact you are often not being educated by a historian, especially not in K-12 education. Many history classes in the US for example are not taught by professional historians. They're taught by general educators who are perfectly capable of being highly informed of course, but are rarely subject matter experts. That's why we have standardized text books.

Which is the next part of the problem.

Many standardized text books are not written by historians, or were last written by them years and years ago. They may have feedback and input from historians, but most textbooks used in general education are from big publishing houses like McGraw-Hill and approved by review boards that are themselves subject to many controversies. Some of the general text books currently in use are upwards of 50 years old, on their 30th edition, and so on. General text books can actually be shockingly resistant to updating their content which leaves many of them slow to catch up to present scholarship.

There's a reason some people go to college and find out everything they thought they knew was wrong.

Historians don't have any sort of direct control over what schools teach in K-12 education. Those decisions are a complicated maze of local, state, and federal priorities and standards and I'm vague on them so I won't go into details. Even if we did hand off the setting of curriculum to historians, are they really going to prioritize college and graduate level detail for general education? Should they? The answer to both is no, and that just compounds the issues. General education is not the place to be explaining complicated answers to deceptively complicated questions.

In the end, a lot of this is always going to come down to personal initiative. People have to ask questions to get answers because historians simply cannot account for every possible question from an education stand point. There's too much on the plate, and too many potential questions.

In this regard I guess people who come here have the right idea. They're asking questions in search of answers. And we don't educate students in the critical skill of formulating good questions. I don't think I started to learn how to formulate a good question until I was almost done with grad school honestly. It can be an archaic concept and so abstract.

It's honestly easier in many ways to simply do what you're talking about. Parse out the question being asked, and try to actually answer it. Sometimes, that necessitates dealing with the underlying problems of the question. Assumptions are probably the most common. History is a long arc. Sometimes a question becomes bad simply because you're underlying context for asking it is incorrect and the best anyone trying to answer it can do is explain that and answer the actual questions as best they can.

Formulating good questions can be surprisingly difficult. Even the FAQ offered by the board has its limits (this is not a critique of the FAQ), especially when we all know not everyone will read it before asking something. As hard as critique can be (I know I sometimes feel like an asshole doing it), I think people here are doing the only responsible thing they can.

They're providing an answer both to the question being asked and addressing the context of the question itself. One does not work without the other, especially if the question has problems of assumption or makes it evident the questioner has weak background knowledge.

There's a lot one can say about this — especially on the situation in the US, which is what I'm most familiar with — but I just want to point out that many of these "bad frameworks" that people have are not things they learned in history class, or at least not uniquely. They permeate our culture as narratives of convenience.

One example: we get a lot of questions here about the evils of the Church versus science. That's unlikely to have been learned about in even the worst history classes at the K-12 level. But you'll hear it in many other places in our present world, whether on television, YouTube, science classes, what have you. That isn't because it's historically true, but it's because it's a narrative that does historical work: it's basically a pro-science rallying cry, often offered in good faith (in that the people offering it don't know it's untrue). That particular historical narrative dates from the 19th century (the "Conflict Thesis" of Draper and White) and was used then for a similar purpose: to elevate the status of science. One can agree or disagree with that goal, but it misuses history towards its aim. Most people at the K-12 level get no real introduction to the real history of science, so it's not even really the fault of the history teachers to not have corrected this, in my mind, even if they knew it was wrong (and many would not).

Another example from my own work: we get a lot of questions about Truman's "decision to use the atomic bomb." Academic historians have agreed for decades that there was no singular "decision" and that Truman was rather peripheral to the whole thing. Textbooks still frequently have this narrative in it, though some have moved away from it (in my occasional experience looking at them; my wife teaches high school history, so I see these things a bit).

But even if all textbooks went away from it, practically anything you see about the atomic bomb anywhere else, unless it had a LOT of input and direction from academic historians, will repeat the old narrative. Why? One is because academic historians sadly do not have a lot of influence over these things (somewhere on here I've written at length about what it is like to be a historian expert on television series, like those on the History Channel... if I can't find it, I can write up some thoughts on this again, but the basic answer is that historians are usually used as just quote-givers and are generally not involved with the framing of the whole thing, which is done by producers who typically have a very minimal understanding of the subject matter).

The other is that these bad narratives again do a lot of "work": the "decision" narrative turns the use of the atomic bombs into a particular type of moral question (is action A, which kills X people, better than action B, which kills Y people?) that resonates very well with our popular (American) understanding of our country and war. It's a "we sometimes do bad things, but we do them to avoid even worst things" story about ourselves. That's a version of American history that (white, middle class) Americans like to hear. There are alternative narratives, one that that same group does not want to hear (often labeled as "revisionist"), and they often have their own problems with regards to accuracy. So sometimes you get those, too. What both of these approaches have in common is that they lack subtly and complexity; they tend to both be moral stories, either a "we've always been the good guys" or a "we've always been the bad guys." Real history tends to be more complicated than either of those, but translating that complexity into something digestible is difficult and frequently unpopular.

Anyway, I'm going on a bit more than I meant to, but what I'm trying to really get at here is that people's understanding of history is more than just what they learn in history class. The "wrong" frameworks are all deployed in a wide variety of contexts, and they have potency because they reinforce certain types of worldviews, ideologies, and political goals. Some of those we might agree are good or bad, but either way, they end up distorting the history itself quite a bit, and that becomes very evident if someone who is thinking about history from within one of these wrong frameworks encounters an expert who has had enough time and attention to see their way around the framework.

This is an interesting observation.

In the context of r/AskHistorians, this is a somewhat more exaggerated dimension of the local culture of this subreddit, or maybe of Reddit generally.

If you look at the questions asked here, many of them are not of the simple "Who was the 12th President of the United States" kind, which an expert (or really, anybody who knows how to search on Wikipedia or in general) can answer quickly and without correcting the questioner. It's good that most of the questions here aren't of this kind because it wouldn't be a great use of expertise.

Instead, many questions asked in the subreddit have embedded assumptions within them--sometimes even contentious arguments that I often feel the questioner is at least somewhat aware of. "Why was it so easy for European countries to conquer all of Africa? Was it more that Africans were backward or Europeans were advanced?" That sort of thing, where you can't answer the question in the way it's framed because the frame is already wrong factually and analytically. So you have to address the question first and then provide a meaningful answer to a better version of the thought behind the question. That often means in particular that you need to demonstrate to the questioner and to readers that even some of the basic terms in the question are more complicated than they seem. "Conquer", for example: does my imaginary questioner here mean literally "subdue by military invasion and rule through direct military authority"? I can immediately show the questioner that if this is what they meant, it's way more complicated than that. Do they mean instead "dominate or place under imperial authority"? Even that's more complicated than it seems, but it's a broader concept. "Backward" and "advanced" are similiarly complicated. And what's the time frame the questioner has in mind? After 1500? Strictly the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Century? etc.

In a more general sense, practicing historians, both amateur and professional, often find that the wider public has a general misconception of historical knowledge overall, often created by bad teaching or popular culture or general political ideology. I often sum this misconception up as follows: knowledge about history consists of reading evidence about what happened in the past, "subtracting bias", and then after that subtraction whatever is left is just a clean and straightforward description, nothing but "the facts". Historians know in contrast that what people think of as "bias" to be subtracted IS the facts, and that historical knowledge always requires interpretation and is never final. In a way, it's as if someone said that the job of literary criticism is to subtract the fiction from novels and the words that are left behind are the facts of a novel. (Or in another vein, this is like the perennial misconception that something which is a "theory" in science is something which is not yet true or has yet to be proven.) As a result, you sometimes get questions like, "Why do we say that Lincoln didn't intend to free the slaves? Thoughts aren't facts, so there's no way to prove this is true." In some sense, there's no way to prove anything in the past is true: we don't have time machines, we can't observe it directly (and even if we could, we could still disagree, Rashomon-style, about what we had seen), the past is not reproducible (even when it is our own past that we personally remember--memory is not the same thing as direct experience.) So to answer a question like that, we necessarily have to back up a bit and work with the questioner's assumptions about historical knowledge first and explain why historians have believed that Lincoln was only reluctantly persuaded that emancipation was necessary.

This question ties into one of the main goals of our subreddit: modeling productive historical inquiry.

Other users have already discussed the issue of content knowledge. This is of course the first obstacle. However, even with accurate information, users can still ask "bad" questions.

Consider the ever popular "Why didn't X do Y?" question. This user obviously knows a bit of US history in order to ask the question, and what they know is accurate. As explained in that comment, though, such a question can be immensely difficult to answer.

These questions usually rely on an unstated assumption of how things "normally" work and understand certain cases as exceptions. The recurrent "Why didn't Native Americans have the same tech as Europe?" takes the European experience as the default and defines a continent not by what it did, but by what it lacked. The question begs an answer that doesn't exist.

As I've discussed elsewhere, this particular question emerges from the manner in which world history narratives are presented.

World history classes in secondary education focus overwhelming on the development of Western Europe. Plenty has been written about the issues with the "Western Europe" part of that statement, but I'd argue that the "development" part is just as important. Curricula have been getting vaguely better at including non-European case studies, but they are still woefully short on non-European histories.

If you look at a typical high school world history vocabulary guide such as this, the Eurocentrism is indeed overwelming. Africa, India, and the Americas get just one lesson each to cover their entire pre-colonial existence; East Asia has to share a chapter on feudalism with Europe. Is this better than nothing? Well, I can't be disappointed that the Andean "quipu" and "ayllu" have been popping up in many recent textbook glossaries. At the same time, these "case studies" tend to be more ethnographic descriptions of the nature of the cultures, which sharply contrasts the historical development of Western society that the rest of the text focuses on. Europe gets wars and inventions and reformations and revolutions; the rest of the world gets exotic cultures. Similarly, Michigan 9-12 world history standards includes content on the way European colonization and industrailization affected the environment, but presents Native American societies as shaped by their environment. This gives the impression that Europe ca. 1500 was the result of centuries of historical processes, but the rest of the world simply was.

This is a small part of a problematic overemphasis on historical development in general. For instance, the history skills in the Illinois state standards are:

SS.H.1.9-12. Evaluate how historical developments were shaped by time and place as well as broader historical contexts.

SS.H.2.9-12. Analyze change and continuity within and across historical eras.

SS.H.3.9-12. Evaluate the methods utilized by people and institutions to promote change.

Though these comprise the section called "Continuity and Change," continuity gets barely half of one of three standards. Other sections emphasize "struggles," "conflicts," "cause and effect," and "reactions to challenges." In a more holistic curriculum that include anthropology, sociology, or geography, this would not be so much of an issue. Most students won't take any class like that until college, however, so their primary exposure to thinking about humans academically is exclusively through this lens of change and progress. Societies, they learn, go places.

The static, broadly ethnographic portrayal of indigenous societies thus begs the question "What's up with them?" They're no different, of course, and have their own historical trajectories. But to include only brief descriptions of their cultures in what is otherwise a fairly comprehensive survey of European history is to suggest those trajectories are non-existent or inconsequential.

TL;DR Misguided questions often come from misinformation or ignorance. Yet productive historical inquiry comes less from accurate information than from an accurate understanding of how the things you do know fit into a bigger picture. Are those facts representative, or are they anecdotal? Are they all that we know, or just a small portion?