Scientifically Speaking | Our schools are destroying children’s curiosity

There is a mismatch between school and children’s minds. Inquisitiveness is stifled and learning becomes an act of parroting facts. And I’ve found that the queries of small children are an antidote to the apathy of adult life.

Even before infants can talk, they have the tools to navigate the world. Children are “scientists in the crib”. And by the time they enter primary school, they are attuned to asking “how” and “why” hundreds of times a day. Schools should be actively equipping children with critical thinking skills and fostering their innate curiosity. Sadly, what happens next is as relatable as it is disappointing.

Instead of treating children as inferior versions of adults that need to be shaped to fit our narrow mindsets, let’s learn from them how to rekindle our own curiosity.  (Representative Image)

Psychologist Margaret Donaldson writes in Children’s Minds that there is a mismatch between school and children’s minds. Inquisitiveness is stifled and learning becomes an act of parroting facts. Children become fearful of failing, of being mocked, and of giving wrong answers.

In our school system, the entire worth of a child is reduced to how well he or she does on exams. This focus on reducing people to scores persists into adulthood in the pecking order that society has created. Your board and entrance exam results hang around your neck like an albatross. Even in social gatherings, you introduce yourself with your professional title, and people size you up based on educational institutions attended, perceived salary, and credentials.

In my own life, my own sense of curiosity and wonder were beaten out of me by an unforgiving school system. We were told to place value not on actual learning but on “cracking” tests. It was in this system that I learned that what I needed to do was to “commit and vomit” (according to the well-known adage in West Bengal). Or in other words, I needed to uncritically commit to memory facts presented in textbooks (which had often not been updated in decades) and vomit these facts from my brain on to sheets of paper on exam day. I survived the system. But what happened to my sense of curiosity?

In my case, it was not until later when I joined a PhD program and nearly failed in an open-ended experiment that required me to think out of the box, did I realize how poorly I had been served by exam hacking tricks of my schooling. I had shiny degrees but lacked creativity when it mattered. I could hardly ask probing questions or think for myself. Fortunately, curiosity and creativity can be revived with effort. It may atrophy over time, but it can also be nourished at any age.

Frank Keil is a professor of psychology and the director of the Cognition and Development Lab at Yale University. For nearly 50 years he’s researched how people understand the world. Keil has included his insights in his new book, Wonder: Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science. “Wonder is an exuberant, joyous embrace of puzzles that we encounter in our everyday lives. These puzzles launch cycles of question-asking, exploration, and discovery,” he writes. He laments that very few adults retain a sense of wonder from early childhood.

Keil gives as an example the differences in books that children enjoy that are filled with probing questions that ask “how” and “why” and books that make bestsellers lists for grown-ups. There are rarely popular-science books that reveal the nature of the world in lists of top-selling nonfiction books for adults. And among those listed in science categories are often books that aren’t science at all but rather promotions of fad diets, conspiratorial theories, and antiaging elixirs.

“When wonder is stifled and demotivated, it can lead to cognitive decay that makes us all more susceptible to misleading cognitive biases, misinformation, and the blind following of consensus. Ultimately, a life without wonder can lead to disengagement, disillusionment, and even distrust of science,” writes Keil. We are seeing this all around us with anti-science narratives that hamper our ability to navigate a chaotic world full of microbes, unpredictable weather, rising pollution, and diminishing forests.

Some psychologists hypothesise that the reason most adults do not foster the curiosity of childhood is that we spend most of our time on very specific goals like financing a house or finding a better-paying job. Asking expansive questions does not become a priority and so there’s no time or mental bandwidth allotted for it. A second reason is that while our mental toolbox grows, we become less receptive to new ideas. Devoid of the bright-eyed wonder of childhood, we begin to take the world around us for granted.

So, what’s the cure? I’ve found that the queries of small children are an antidote to the apathy and incuriousness of adult life. We tend to see things as they are, as the way they’ve always been, and as they should be. They ask why the universe is the way it is and not in a myriad of other possible ways. Spend an hour with a small child and you’ll realize how much we’ve come to take the world for granted and how little we actually know about it.

The cutting-edge of science is imbued with the imagination and curiosity of childhood. It is a playground where inventive minds ask why the moon exists, why certain viruses infect some people and not others, why life exists on one planet and not on another, and why leaves change colours. As machines take over routine jobs, creativity and curiosity which are human attributes will become more highly valued in the workplace too.

So, here’s a thought. Instead of treating children as inferior versions of adults that need to be shaped to fit our narrow mindsets, let’s learn from them how to rekindle our own curiosity.

Anirban Mahapatra is a scientist by training and the author of a book on COVID-19. He’s writing a second popular-science book.

The views expressed are personal