Is curiosity really as valuable as we think?
A teacher, and my own students, show me that curiosity isn't a good in and of itself.
On Wednesday, I discussed Chapter 5 of Shelley's Frankenstein with my 8th graders. Some of the class Zoomed in from their homes, a January shift to hybridity that changed the tone of the class but, I was pleased to find, not its tenor. Eight graders can be awful, to others and themselves. In one way, though, they're more fun to teach than any other age of children or adults I've taught: they're profoundly curious about the adult world. This means that, as long as the challenge before them unlocks some new, secret knowledge about life, or love, or a faraway land, they're pretty game.
Chapter 5 of Frankenstein boasts some pretty stark Orientalist language, the kind that shows up in most 19th century British novels. My students have some historical context about Romanticism, British Imperialism, and global exploration; it matters, to me, that they can read Frankenstein both as a flawed scientist (who fails to consider the implications of his pursuit of power) and as a flawed reader of his own world. I didn't start by saying all of this. I began by asking them: "What does a person sound like who is is curious about something, but also ignorant about it?"
The kids had great ideas. One mentioned that a curious and open-minded person asks lots of questions; another mentioned that a curious person who's too confident in their little knowledge is often too quick to hold fast to his beliefs. My students recognized that the way a person talks about his curiosity tells you plenty about him, and those insights cast a more complex and compelling vision of who he is. Once they considered how Frankenstein pursued his curiosity, they could translate a curious, intelligent person across time and recognize him as ignorant, a little naive, and a lot like themselves.
Curiosity matters. I'm starting to think, though, that how a person is curious might be more important than the fact that they're curious.
This week, Angela Duckworth published an opinion about the importance of fostering curiosity in school-aged students. In the opinion, Duckworth articulates the value of both “curious questions” and the opportunity to pursue their answers. “Teenagers,” she writes, “are smarter when they’re tackling topics whose questions and answers fill them with wonder.” What I loved about Duckworth’s (admittedly too-brief) essay was its emphasis on childrens’ innate humor, and the encouragement within it to understand their decisions to “[break] a few rules in the pursuit of an answer they urgently need to discover themselves.” Encouraging curiosity matters, I think, because the more cynical (older) we become, our curiosity tends to damper, too. In the zeitgeist, “childlike wonder” is the purview of the five-year-old, but as Duckworth points out, it needn’t be. My challenge to this assumption begins with teenagers, who are often improperly stereotyped as no longer curious. Teenagers are the most curious people I meet – they’re just rarely curious about what the adults around them want to be. This is where a good teacher comes in.
The other way that I would question conversations about curiosity, not only in education but also in the aforementioned zeitgeist, is by questioning the idea that curiosity is, innately and simply, a good thing. Curiosity without understanding of context, assumption of personal responsibility, and humility can be, as my 8th graders discovered this week, unproductive or even destructive.
You need curiosity, we decided, to have a good idea. The way you pursue and express that curiosity, though, matters. And, finally, not all curiosities ultimately lead to good ideas.
In the upper-crust, almost entirely white town in which I grew up, curiosity was gold, and every parent sought to foster it in their children. Certain questions, of course, might be shushed and dismissed as impolite: “what is that man so fat?” or “why doesn’t he have any hair?” Other questions, though, weren’t off limits: “what language is that woman speaking?” or “why is her hair like that?” were more likely met by a parent’s confusion, an embarrassed attempt at competent knowledge of people “other” than themselves. It’s easy to explain to a child what curiosity is or isn’t contextually appropriate when one understands the answer to their question; adults tend to lean into stereotypes or very limited information when they don’t possess that competence, not only signaling to children that many contextually inappropriate questions are unproblematic, but also reiterating the idea that one should be sensitive of the needs of people like us and treat people not like us as objects for our study. The curiosity that adults foster tells us about the adults fostering the curiosity. In order to make more curious kids, we need to have a better understanding of what curiosity can and should look like.
Because curiosity is the gold standard, many people and communities center it in ways that subordinate other critical prosocial ends. In any moment when I am curious about an issue, the satisfaction of my desire to know is not the only event in that moment. Considering another person’s comfort, frustration, or general annoyance when I ask “what language are you speaking?” or “what train would I take to get to Flushing?” is, I would argue, actually more important than my curiosity. Curiosity isn’t the most important virtue; it’s one virtue in a constellation of human competencies.
Researching one's curiosities first (what Frankenstein needed to do before he spouted Eurocentric visions of Persian and East Asian culture) might help those around us – our children, our peers – to avoid conceiving of simplistic conceptions of other places, people, or times that create and unnecessary distance from and hierarchy between them (a hierarchy that often places "us" or "me" or "my approach" at the top). Those hierarchies can justify bloody imperialisms, hopeless foreign conflicts, and racist violence. Researching those curiosities might also help us to avoid the embarrassment of ignorance. Curiosity is a spectacular gift, but, as my 8th graders taught me, it can also be dangerous if not pursued with care. Unconsidered curiosity, without prosocial habits and practices, carries interpersonal consequences but also echoes across centuries in culture, literature, and politics.
The social context of our curiosity – perhaps the source of our inspiration (when a child sees an unfamiliar-seeming person) or perhaps the context for it (when a student reads about an unfamiliar concept in a class) – should inspire us to pursue its understanding using the larger-than-ever stores of knowledge available to us (Google). That research, too, should pull us back into the social context, in which we share the fruits of our curiosity and humbly seek more knowledge, not congratulations or admiration for our willingness to pursue the curiosity that is, after all, something we all have or have access to. Curiosity’s societal value depends upon its interactions with the rest of our habits.
Last spring, I spoke with a veteran teacher named Julia Maxey. Though Julia is a veteran teacher, I found her radical, not in the 1970s-feminist way, but in a 2021-education-radical way. Like most educators right now, Julia was questioning what the goal of an education really was. That goal, in her mind, "is to make good, conscientious, thinking people," but "maybe we aren't doing that as much as we should be."
"Maybe we’re so focused on our disciplines that we’re forgetting the whole end product element – because where they end isn’t just the end of your term or class — the end product is who you are in the world. Did what you did in high school contribute to that in some way? I learned all sorts of things in high school, but I don’t know that much of it made me who I am as an adult. It was the discussions I had about the books, not the books themselves, that shaped me."
Julia's reflections on her own school experience struck me, because I feel the same way all the time. I really never nailed down direct objects or subject-verb agreement until I taught it a few years in a row; similarly, I didn't have the first five amendments of the Constitution ready at will until I taught an interdisciplinary American Studies course. This is what teachers don't admit to their students: that they themselves don't think of primary and secondary education as the source of a great deal of knowledge (for the record, they also don't think of it as a daycare service, though many media leaders seem to think that’s what education is for). We learn "all sorts of things" in school, but it's the way that we learn about them, the way that we join with others in response to those inputs, that shapes "who you are in the world."
Julia's vision of knowledge acquisition situates it socially and suggests that it's how we pursue knowledge in the world that shapes us into actors, thinkers, and constructive members of society. As an avid reader with, since childhood, an overactive internal life, part of me wants to rebel against this assessment: sometimes, my own best company is myself. I instinctively pursue my understanding individually, but I often forget to re-contextualize or apply the knowledge I gain in response to curiosity to see how it works and grows in conversation. That’s also an issue: that's what starts Victor Frankenstein's trouble with his scientific experiments. Frankenstein decides that he wants to discover the source of human life and breathe it into some dead body parts, but he doesn't tell any of his buddies. Henry Clerval certainly would've asked him some hard questions along the way, and those may have slowed his unbridled curiosity down just enough to help him view the whole project more broadly, more critically, more patiently. Maybe a bit of reading can give us knowledge, and often the pursuit of that knowledge individually is an important step to get us up to speed and not waste others’ time, weigh on their sanity, or reinforce stereotypes. But that knowledge must become useful, too. If we can pursue curiosity in a prosocial way that fosters togetherness, not separation or reinforcement of hierarchies -- well, that's the pursuit of knowledge that makes us the "good, conscientious, thinking people" Julia told me about. This is what I'm striving to create in my classroom, but it's also, frankly, what I'm striving to be.
"The end product" of school, and really of the learning we do across our lives, is "who you are in the world." In addition to their boundless curiosity, 8th graders possess a singular talent for aggressive criticism of adults: as much as they want to know everything about adult life, they also see all of the ways in which adults around them can be stupid or embarrassing. The Chapter Five lesson gave me a perfect chance to build on both of these natural gifts -- because it allowed me to see that, though my students can admire Frankenstein's drive to pursue his curiosity, they also wish that he were better in the way that he viewed both his scientific work and the world around him. And they also make me wish that I were better in the way that I viewed my work and the world around me. They make me wonder how often I look at the parts of the world I strive to know merely as bits and pieces to be naturalized to my existing understanding, or if I am, like the open-minded person that one student referenced, in a position of "asking questions and really listening," of speaking only from what I know and letting go of my own mistaken assumptions.
In short, I ask myself: Do I carry my curiosity with responsibility?
Why do we let so many people speak about what they don't know about, accept their limited expertise instead of demanding that they reinforce their knowledge first? Why do we ourselves so often believe ourselves entitled to opinions about things that we don't know much about? Why do we ask so many ignorant questions of people who desperately want to ask us to do a Google search? With each of these questions, Americans often reply: well, because that person isn’t curious, she’s just self-centered. The way we talk about our curiosities or unknowns tells people more about us than the limited knowledge we possess. We need to teach, and teach ourselves, to be constructively curious.
I also want to live in a world that's ready not just to try to create curious kids, but to sustain mindfully curious adults. Doing so requires looking, first, at myself, and then, asking all of us – adults, readers of this newsletter – to do the same.