Blessed are the curious, for they shall have adventures – Lovelle Drachman.
How many times does a teacher prepare and ask a question in the hopes that no child will ask “Why?” or “What if …?” or say “Ya, but…” In the explanation of 15th explorers when asked what lay beyond the undrawn borders on maps of the day, they would say “There be dragons!” I know teachers who consider open-ended questions as doorways into the land of their dragons. What is a teacher to do if she does not know the answer or cannot make an informed and understandable explanation? Hello, curiosity!
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. – Arthur Ward
In an educational industry held accountable with high stakes achievement tests, right answers are gold and a teacher who packs children with facts is a high-quality tradesman. However, in a child-based environment a teacher who inspires children to learn is a magician. It is magical to watch a child see the power of inquiry and questioning to learn something new or to change what they know into more powerful knowledge. Inspiration that lights the imagination for learning is magical. Once inspired, curious children are free to roam the world.
A society that wants right answers shutters curiosity.
We are a society wanting correct answers. We also believe that a person who knows the correct answers is a winner, not just on Jeopardy, but in the game of life. For millennia, knowledge was power and clerics and priests guarded access to knowledge. An ability to read opened minds to questions so literacy was afforded only to the chosen few. Gutenberg’s press ended that darkness and created common access to documents leading to greater literacy. People wanted to know. Today we are a literate nation. We have access to so much information that reading everything is impractical. Instead, we do not read to answer questions; we ask Siri, or Google the question, or make inquiries in AI. Answers to everything is a keystroke away.
If correct answers appear instantly on our screen, how far down on the screen do we need to read? Students tell me “Only the first sentences. Siri and Google begin each response with a statement that answers the question. I do not need to read any more than that.” The same students add “That satisfies my teachers.”
Our ingenuity in creating databases is that we can readily access and processing tools that allow us to re-assemble information to stand for what we know is becoming an academic dilemma. Secondary and collegiate teachers spend more time detecting plagiarism in documents students submit than ascertaining the insights the student has learned. Heck, they also use AI to read and grade student submissions.
The Big Duh! Ask for possibilities and probabilities.
Soon there will be little daylight between a person who knows the answer and a person who can digitally obtain the answer. The speed of response will be indistinguishable. The answers will be the same or virtually the same – what is the difference? Every student will be Siri’s echo.
With a political poke: when we are told that facts are not true and that lies are alternative facts, the knowledge of correct answers is dubious.
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. – Oscar Wilde
Where does schooling enter this story? Students have told me that “I do not need to attend class to learn (fill in the name of the course). I can pass the test with what I learn online. YouTube teaches everything!” Traditional schooling for known knowledge and known skills may soon be archaic. But schooling for the unknown will not.
Today and yesterday, we ask the wrong questions when we ask for facts. Facts are pedestrian in a fast-changing world. The Big Duh for educators is to ask children to use the facts they acquire to inquire into new possibilities and probabilities. Be curious and pursue your curiosity.
Curiosity will revise an Occam’s Razor that the next generation will use to answer important national and global questions. Where Occam said that “the simplest explanation is often the best explanation,” the revised Occam Rule will be “the best explanation will be one of possibilities that synergize into an informed probability.” Curiosity will lead us to possibility thinking, possibility evaluation, and synergy will lead to new knowledge and ways to use new knowledge. “Best” will be the most effective proposal and evaluation of possibilities not the simplicity of conclusions reached. The journey will be more valuable than the destination.
Why is this so?
Curiosity is an innate human characteristic. We are like kittens that cannot resist pushing a ball. The result of each push opens the possibility of where the next push will lead. I am not suggesting that a kitten conceives of results, kittens only see the opportunity. Human ingenuity and creativity are what we play with after we first push the ball and see where it has rolled and consider “why and what if.”
Humans respond to two types of curiosity – perceptual and epistemic. Perceptual is the need to resolve the dissonance in unexpected or contradictory things. The ball bounced back off the wall or, by starting a push with a pull, the ball rolls forward and then reverses backward. Curiosity looks to know “why this is so” and “what if I …” Perceptual curiosity is episodic and usually is connected to externality. We encounter contradictions, we resolve contradiction, we are satisfied with a new status quo.
Epistemic is internal and constant; it is our happiness motivator, and every human responds to it. A thirst to know or to do something that is new and novel, that intrinsic drive, is answered by a rush of dopamine. Curiosity that leads to dopamine happiness can lead to more curiosity to get more dopamine. For the epistemic curious there always is another hill to climb to see what is on the other side. Epistemic curiosity ignites our body to create dopamine and humans like a surge of dopamine.
Understanding the power of curiosity is a tremendous tool for teachers. We can create episodes of dissonance. We can suspend reality of real-world problem-solving simulations for students. We can use reverse engineering causing students explore “What would life in North America be like today if Britain had defeated the colonists in the 1770s?” Or “How would our world have responded if Neil Armstrong found life forms under the dust and gravel on the moon?” There is a universe of “what if” propositions that require students to use what they know to explore what they do not. The answers are not facts but examples of possibilities and the reasons they are possibilities.
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. – Zora Neale Hurston
At the same time, teachers can excite dopamine generation with challenges that push children to achieve more than they considered physically, intellectually, artistically, and socio-emotionally possible. A truth about American education is that we do not push our students to their potentialities. We are hesitant about backlash. Consequently, too many students are bored with school. Children are kittens at heart and want to push the ball to see where it will go. Unlike kittens, we can challenge children to push more complex problems than where a ball will roll and mutually be excited with how each child responds to the challenge.
Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Education that does not evoke curiosity is telling the same stories over again in a daycare center to children who daydream with their eyes and ears closed.
The Big Duh!
Curiosity does not kill cats; it makes a cat a cat. The curiosity of possibilities and probabilities is the next frontier in an educational world that has made facts mundane,
Remember that things are not always as they appear to be… Curiosity creates possibilities and opportunities. – Roy Bennett