Curiosity (4/18/2025)
It took me a long time before the idea of having a smartphone was strong enough for me to get one. I was very resistant. Now it is indispensable.
Having a smartphone can be an extremely useful tool. Aside from the usual phone calls, photo/videos, note taking, and calling a ride service, I use the phone to satisfy my curiosity!
It is a great source of information. One can ask a question like "What is the recipe for a great vegan dessert?", "How heavy is a Steinway grand piano?" or "How do you make home-made paper out of an old pair of jeans?" This last one was an art project for our August Music and Arts camp many years ago.
As educators and parents, we want to cultivate curiosity in our children. We expose our children to science projects and classes, explore new places, or visit museums and zoos. These are external stimuli to encourage open-mindedness to learn new things. I learned from this article about curiosity by Emily Boudreau that curiosity is an innate instinct similar to hunger and thirst. Children and human beings have curiosity.
In this article, Boudreau quotes researcher Dr. Elizabeth Bonawitz who indicates three truths about curiosity that can be contradictory to common belief: 1) "There is no scientific evidence that you can "foster" curiosity", 2)"Most of the ways we measure and assess curiosity don't actually measure curiosity itself," 3) "We may not always want students to exercise their curiosity."
The first two truths are looking at the internal state of the person. If curiosity is an innate characteristic, external stimuli that are static do not serve in promoting curiosity. Setting up questions and interrogating what one sees or hears and predicting what will happen are better in order to solicit curious responses. Does the student understand what one sees and what are the causes? Did the prediction come true? Externally, we can stimulate an internal response. Likewise, we cannot measure the internal state of the person. Therefore, only measuring visible behaviors is not truly measuring curiosity. Some students may be curious but feel inhibited to ask questions or show visible signs of interest. What one can do is provide time and space for allowing curiosity. Setting up a classroom or home environment where curiosity may be expressed and answers sought out allows for curiosity to grow.
I found the third statement to be extremely interesting. Parents know that there is the toddler stage where every few seconds, the children says "why?" In this period of development the awareness of the new situations is engulfing the toddler. The child seeks ways to express their curiosity since it may be too difficult to act upon their curiosity just yet. How often do we find ourselves so impatient that we try to turn off their questioning? As Dr. Bonawitz points out in her article, it is necessary for adults to teach children executive function skills that allow for evaluating when new information is necessary and when it is appropriate to go with what they know for now. As a person who loves new information, I found this idea of teaching how to evaluate how much information is necessary at a given moment to be fascinating.
As parents and educators, we want to create an environment where curiosity is prevalent. Much of early childhood curricula are "inquiry-based." This goes back to Dr. Suzuki's saying that
"Man is a son of his environment." Likewise, children learn through an environment that will welcome their innate "curiosity" and allow time and space for interrogation, prediction and experimentation. In many ways, our "learning by ear" technique is exactly that: What note shall I play to match the pitches that I hear? Can I figure out the notes by myself? Can I experiment on my instrument and find the notes to my piece? It is this internal state that helps drive us to learn. Dr. Suzuki was able to tap into this by espousing his "learning by doing" and "learning through the senses" approach. Children are naturally curious. It is our job to create the stimuli and the environment that will welcome it.
For more reading:
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/usable-knowledge/20/11/curious-mind