When Susan Engel, a developmental psychologist at Williams College, decided to spend a few months observing suburban elementary schools, she had a specific goal in mind: to study variations in rates of children鈥檚 curiosity. Which kids asked lots of questions? Which classrooms tended to encourage that? But Engel discovered that it was almost impossible to make valid comparisons because 鈥渢here was such an astonishingly low rate of curiosity in any of the classrooms we visited.鈥�
What she kept encountering鈥攄uring that project and since鈥攚ere children who had learned not to bother wondering. If a classmate did volunteer a fascinated observation (鈥淎 bird flew right into my house!鈥�) or a question (鈥淲hy would it do that?鈥�), it was soon obvious that the teacher would probably offer a perfunctory response and then direct the child back to the planned lesson. In one classroom, Engel heard the teacher say, 鈥淚 can鈥檛 answer questions right now. Now, it鈥檚 time for learning.鈥�
For more than half a century, researchers have studied our desire to explore just for the sake of exploring, our itch to make sense of the unexpected. The eminent educator Seymour Sarason argued that education should be dedicated to stimulating the 鈥渋ntellectual curiosity, awe, and wonder that a child possesses when he or she begins schooling.鈥� Or at least try to avoid killing it.
Curiosity is valuable in its own right鈥攁nd not just for children. It鈥檚 a passport to a richer, more fulfilling life. But it also contributes to academic achievement and, more important, to intellectual flourishing. Conservative commentators like to emphasize the capacity to pay attention and delay gratification, but a found that pure curiosity promoted more effective learning regardless of the child鈥檚 level of 鈥渆ffortful control.鈥�
In fact, not only was curiosity 鈥渁ssociated with higher academic achievement in all children,鈥� but the researchers discovered to their surprise that its benefits were greatest for kids from low-income families. (Sadly, such students appear disproportionately likely to face a regimented form of instruction in which compliance is prized over discovery.)
Left to their own devices, children will often seek answers to the questions that bubble up in them. But adults can help鈥攍ess by providing answers than by reframing and building on those questions. They can call attention to connections between what different kids are asking. They can assist a community of learners in finding resources and thinking more deeply as they explore.
The researchers discovered to their surprise that [the] benefits [of curiosity] were greatest for kids from low-income families.
How, specifically, should teachers nurture curiosity, taking advantage of what the late psychologist Jerome Bruner once called the 鈥渆nergizing lure of uncertainty鈥�?
- Not just by welcoming students鈥� questions when they diverge from the curriculum but by rethinking the curriculum itself, constructing it with students, not just for them, to address the topics that intrigue them. That includes questions to which the teacher doesn鈥檛 know the answer鈥攁nd, indeed, questions that don鈥檛 have a single right answer.
- By offering readings that cover complex and controversial topics in genuinely interesting ways. (That鈥檚 very different from depending on cutesy games or apps to tart up unengaging tasks.)
- By 鈥減riming the pump鈥� when necessary: suggesting questions or offering information that piques students鈥� curiosity about things they haven鈥檛 yet considered.
- By being curious themselves. confirmed that 鈥渢he teacher鈥檚 own behavior has a powerful effect on a child鈥檚 disposition to explore.鈥� Perhaps curiosity belongs on an administrator鈥檚 list of qualities to look for in job applicants.
- By being keen to learn how each student鈥檚 mind works. Outstanding teachers tend to do more listening than talking, in part because, as Harvard educator Eleanor Duckworth argued, the more intensely interested a teacher is in a kid鈥檚 thinking, the more interested the kid becomes in her own thinking.
- By providing students with what psychological theorists call 鈥渁utonomy support"鈥攅ncouraging a sense of self-determination鈥攚hich has been shown to heighten both intrinsic motivation (a concept that鈥檚 similar to curiosity) and the quality of learning.
Alas, these recommendations for teachers often run smack into structural constraints: an inflexible schedule that doesn鈥檛 leave time for exploration; a principal who insists on quiet, orderly classrooms; a central office that imposes a standardized curriculum; a school board that cares more about test scores than about meaningful learning.
Other traditional practices have a similar effect. Among the most reliable extinguishers of the flame of curiosity are mandatory homework (making students work a second shift after school), grades and (which signal that success matters more than learning), a preoccupation with rigor (which often elicits anxiety, smothering curiosity), and the use of additional rewards or punishments to enforce this regimen.
Much of the problem comes from construing learning as a list of facts to be memorized or discrete skills to be practiced. This premise tends to promote teacher-centered direct instruction, which is often scripted or otherwise tightly controlled.
A group of University of California, Berkeley researchers found that when young children were shown exactly how to do something, they subsequently engaged in less exploration on their own than those who had received no explicit direction. Likewise, enthusiasm about reading鈥攁 key predictor of proficiency鈥攖ends to be lower when children are subjected to systematic phonics-based instruction rather than a literature-based approach, as Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking explain in their new book . Math teacher and research mathematician Paul Lockhart, meanwhile, wryly described the conventional curriculum in his field as 鈥渁 proven cure for curiosity"鈥攁lso an apt epithet for worksheets.
What Susan Engel discovered to her dismay in the early grades鈥攁 diminished desire to find out鈥攐nly gets worse as kids make their way through traditional schools. Often, we don鈥檛 notice鈥攅ither because, as Engel warns, we assume it鈥檚 enough for a teacher to be a nice, caring person or because we鈥檙e falsely reassured by high-achieving (albeit joyless) students. As education professor Lillian Weber once put it, too many kids start out as exclamation points and question marks, but leave school as plain periods.
Sure, everyone says curiosity is a lovely thing. But are we willing to oppose the traditional practices and policies that fail to nurture and even actively discourage it?
