Learning About Learning:

Less And Less Curious

The trend of decreasing curiosity among our young people is deeply troubling, says American education critic Alfie Kohn.

When Susan Engel, a developmental psychologist and teacher-educator 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’s curiosity.

Which kids asked lots of questions? Which classrooms tended to encourage that? But Engel discovered that it was almost impossible to make meaningful comparisons because “there was such an astonishingly low rate of curiosity in any of the classrooms we visited.”

What she kept encountering — during that project and since — were children who had learned not to bother wondering. If a classmate did volunteer a fascinated observation (“A bird flew right into my house!”) or a question (“Why would it do that?”), 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, “I can’t answer questions right now. Now it’s time for learning.”

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, above all else, to stimulating the “intellectual curiosity, awe, and wonder that a child possesses when he or she begins schooling.” Or at least avoid killing it.

Curiosity is valuable in its own right — a passport to a richer, more fulfilling life — and not just for children. But it also contributes to academic achievement and, more importantly, to intellectual flourishing. Conservative commentators like to emphasise the importance of having students learn to pay attention and delay gratification, but a 2018 study in Pediatric Research found that pure curiosity promoted more effective learning regardless of the child’s level of “effortful control.”

In fact, not only was curiosity “associated with higher academic achievement in all children,” but the researchers discovered, to their surprise, that its benefits were greatest for kids from low-income families. (Sadly, such students are 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— less by providing those answers than by eliciting, reframing, and building on their 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.

How, specifically, should teachers nurture curiosity, taking advantage of what Jerome Bruner once called the “energizing lure of uncertainty”?

Not just by welcoming students’ questions when they diverge from the curriculum but by rethinking the curriculum itself and constructing it with students, not just for them, to address their questions about the world. That includes questions to which the teacher doesn’t know the answer — and, indeed, questions that don’t have a single right answer.
By offering readings that cover complex and controversial topics in genuinely interesting ways. (That’s very different from depending on cutesy games or apps to tart up unengaging tasks.)
By “priming the pump” when necessary: suggesting questions or offering information that piques students’ curiosity about things they haven’t yet considered.
By being curious themselves. A study co-authored by Engel confirmed that “the teacher’s own behaviour has a powerful effect on a child’s disposition to explore.” Perhaps curiosity belongs on an administrator’s list of qualities to look for in job applicants.
By being keen to learn how each student’s 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’s thinking, the more interested the kid becomes in her own thinking.
By providing students with what psychological theorists call “autonomy support” — encouraging a sense of self-determination — which has been shown to heighten both intrinsic motivation (a concept very similar to curiosity) and the quality of learning.

Alas, these recommendations for teachers often run smack into structural constraints: an inflexible schedule that doesn’t 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 less about learning than about test scores.

Other traditional practices, too — unhelpful but rarely questioned — have a similar effect. Among the most reliable extinguishers of the flame of curiosity are mandatory homework (making students work a second shift after a full day in school), grades and rubrics (which signal that success matters more than learning), a preoccupation with rigour (which often elicits anxiety, smothering curiosity), and the use of rewards or punishments to enforce this regimen.

Then, there is the harm caused by teacher-centred direct instruction, particularly when it’s scripted or otherwise tightly controlled. Much of the problem comes from construing learning as a list of facts to be memorised or discrete skills to be practised. The loss of curiosity is a paradigmatic example of how a focus on those short-term goals can result in deleterious side effects.

Elizabeth Bonawitz at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues 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 — a key predictor of proficiency — tends to be lower when children are subjected to only a systematic phonics-based instruction rather than combined with a more authentic, literature-based approach, as Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking explain in their new book The Balancing Act. Math teacher Paul Lockhart, meanwhile, described the conventional curriculum in his field as “a proven cure for curiosity” — which is also an apt epithet for worksheets.

What Susan Engel discovered, to her dismay, in the early grades — a diminished desire to find out — only gets worse as kids make their way through traditional schools. Often, we don’t notice — either because, as Engel warns, we think it’s sufficient that a teacher is a nice, caring person or because we’re falsely reassured by high-achieving (albeit joyless) students. As early-childhood educator Lillian Weber 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 able to identify — and willing to oppose — the traditional practices and policies that fail to nurture and even actively discourage it?