Curiosity

Everybody seems to agree that 'learning is good', especially when it can be induced in children. However, despite the obviously critical importance of education, outcomes are typically far from what could be described as optimal. In the UK, 49% of adults have numeracy skills no better than the level expected of an 11-year-old; for literacy, the same statistic is 15%¹. There are many reasons for this, surrounded by much debate and uncertainty. Ultimately, budgets are tight, teachers are scarce, classes are overflowing and behaviour and cultural factors have a big effect. So it's no surprise all this is difficult.

I'd like to focus here on one specific element of education which I think is often overlooked, but which might hold one of the biggest keys to unlocking educational attainment: curiosity.

In his book On Education, Bertrand Russell has the following to say about curiosity:

The instinctive foundation of the intellectual life is curiosity.

Curiosity [...] is inspired by a genuine love of knowledge. You may see this impulse in a moderately pure form, at work in a cat which has been brought to a strange room, and proceeds to smell every corner and every piece of furniture. You will see it also in children, who are passionately interested when a drawer or cupboard, usually closed, is open for their inspection. Animals, machines, thunderstorms, and all forms of manual work, arouse the curiosity of children, whose thirst for knowledge puts the most intelligent adults to shame.

It's easy to forget that almost all humans start out wanting – needing – to learn about the world around them. Babies and toddlers are infinitely curious, as Russell points out. But as they grow older, we typically proceed to beat away this innate curiosity, herding children into specialised holding pens for 13 years where they can be made to trudge through the prescribed materials often against their will. Russell continues:

This impulse grows weaker with advancing years, until at last what is unfamiliar inspires only disgust, with no desire for a closer acquaintance. This is the stage at which people pronounce that the country is going to the dogs, and that 'things are not what they were in my young days'. The thing which is not the same as it was in that far-off time is the speaker's curiosity. And with the death of curiosity we may reckon that active intelligence, also, has died.

Curiosity is the name we give to the emotion or impulse which drives us to actually want to find out new knowledge. It's therefore wholly unsurprising that curiosity has been positively associated with learning and memory in studies².

In schools, however, pupils' curiosity (at least, as outwardly expressed) appears to drop off a cliff. This fascinating essay⁴ by Susan Engel, a leading researcher on curiosity in children, and author of The Hungry Mind surveys much of the literature and details her own careers' research and experiments, seeking (among other things) to understand how and why curiosity so often diminishes as children grow older. She and other researchers have discovered that question-asking drops from dozens or even hundreds of questions per hour for toddlers with an encouraging and nurturing home setting to "on average, less than once per two hour period" by fifth grade.

As well as formal experiments, Engel relates a variety of entertaining (if somewhat demoralising) anecdotes from her time spent observing school classrooms. In one such story, she witnesses a science lesson. The children are around ten years old and split into groups, each taking a variety of simple materials like a wooden board, some wooden dowels and a force meter; the intent was for the children to discover that it is easier to pull the wooden board with the dowels acting as wheels. Some time into the activity:

I noticed that one group seemed to have forgotten the worksheet and was instead intrigued by the equipment. The children were trying to figure out different ways to use the bar with the spring scale attached- yanking, pulling, and even at one point holding the strip up high so that the bar was swinging in the air, hanging from the device. Then they stood the dowels up like columns and tried to balance the bar on the dowels. Finally, they tried surfing the bar along the surface of the dowels, which they had laid down to create something like a conveyor belt. At this point, Mrs. Parker also noticed what they were doing. She called out to the group, over the heads of her students, in a loud clear voice for all to hear, "Ok, kids. Enough of that. I'll give you time to experiment at recess. This is time for science."

Many educators promote hands-on activities of this sort, but I have a feeling there's a misplaced belief that it's the hands-on activity in it's own right which is responsible for improved learning and understanding. I think what is really going on is that the child is free to pursue its curiosity freely, to explore the world and find things out. This won't necessarily be replicated if you simply collect a group of children and make them adhere rigidly to a lesson plan that involves stepping through a series of prescribed instructions. Worst of all, it gives a wholly unrealistic understanding of the motivations and methodologies of real scientists trying to discover new insights, or real engineers trying to solve real problems.

Engel says she found it rare for teachers to pursue a topic if raised as an aside from the main thrust of a lesson. Exchanges like the following, from a fifth-grade classroom, were common:

Child: I've been a little curious this class. What is that [pointing to some words on the board]? I can't understand it.

Teacher: Umm, that was for another class [returns attention to the material she has been focusing on].

Schools are under a lot of pressure to wade through a highly prescriptive curriculum in preparation for standardised tests. But I think we lose far too much by failing to nurture and fan the flame of innate curiosity that could give children the genuine desire to learn more. Consider the child's perspective. Each time an internal spark of interest flares up, it is batted away, or left dangling with a promise to return at recess or some future lesson. So the interesting parts of learning about the world seem like they can't be part of "real learning", and the message is clear. Stay focussed, don't think about other things, learn the periodic table in time for next Wednesday. Engel summarises:

Teachers feel compelled to make sure children learn what is included on standardized tests. Many of them feel that there isn’t time enough in the day to allow children to get off task; following their interest or probing a tangent is a luxury they cannot afford.

We need to decide how much we value the standardised tests, rote learning, syllabuses and preset academic goals. Could time be better spent letting teachers and students explore areas of interest free from the shackles of this rigid system? I don't propose that this should be done in a totally haphazard fashion, but the sense teachers have of not being able to afford to deviate from the lesson plan seems thoroughly unhelpful.

A less revolutionary step than abandoning all standardised tests would be to place a greater emphasis on developing the motivation for studying certain topics before tackling the material itself, perhaps not even bothering to proceed to the material if adequate motivation can't first be established. In such a scenario, it might be deemed more fruitful to move elsewhere and return to the present topic another day. Once motivation exists, students could be guided towards asking the interesting questions themselves - out of a genuine desire to know more - rather than merely being told the answer to questions they never asked. Proceeding to the material without the requisite motivation might be so inefficacious as to not be worth the time. Indeed, it's the norm rather than the exception to come across people who studied hard for tests at school, but readily admit to having forgotten most of the material within days or weeks of the exam. If we are willing to spend years teaching syllabuses which quickly get forgetten anyway, why not focus more time on developing the underlying curiosity of students and not worry so much if we can't chop through every item on the syllabus in lesson time?

In mathematics classes, the problem of unclear motivation is very common and pronounced. I recall countless instances of fellow pupils raising their hands to ask, often with a hint of mischief: "when am I ever going to need this? What's the point?"

Although I don't expect every child to have the inherent fascination with mathematics of someone who eventually decided to study the subject at university, I do think serious improvements could be made to the average school experience. To answer this question, most teachers and parents reach for the obvious answer: mathematics has utility in solving problems of a numerical or engineering bent. Whilst perfectly true, this is at best an incomplete and pretty unsatisfying answer. It makes it sound like some people put up with its dullness for the sake of accomplishing some useful engineering. This is typically not true of people who actually develop a penchant for the subject (including engineers), but worse, it cements the notion that all school study is being done merely to prepare for mundane practical matters later on. As I've argued, this is a poor foundational belief to build the rest of an education around.

At its core, mathematics is beautiful and deeply satisfying. Most of the important theorems and results have the quality of seeming somehow eternal or predestined in their elegance. It's as if these infinite and intricate patterns were always there, waiting, and would have been just as perfectly true even if humans had never evolved the cognitive machinery to appreciate them. To solving a problem to search for an ingenious insight which, once found, will seem like it had been hiding in plain sight. For those who develop an interest in the subject, these reasons alone are enough to warrant diving into the mysteries. And if the engineers can use the results somehow, so much the better...⁵

This might all sound cute and poetic. But if the subject was taught in such a way as to present children with a sense that there are wonders on offer (which I don't think would be especially difficult, by the way - there are plenty of marvellous and ingenious results that could be readily appreciated by a ten year old) in addition to the drab, but necessary, recipes and formulations like long division and completing the square, more students might begin to appreciate the problem-solving and deductive logic for its own sake. Those who still didn't catch the bug would nevertheless be more keenly aware of why others do. A general sense that studying can happen in an exploratory way, out of pure interest, would be the most valuable lesson of all.

Fast-forward to adulthood and intellectual curiosity remains just as critically important. Undoubtedly, scientific advancements come from curious minds driven to find answers. Einstein once said, "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious"⁶. In more mortal settings, I've found intellectual curiosity especially to be one of the most reliable positive indicators when deciding who to work with, who to trust and who to befriend. Of course there's something of a truism in this (who wouldn't want a more curious individual, all other things equal?) but it seems intellectual curiosity is well correlated with a whole catalogue of desirable qualities.

Paul Graham, the computer scientist, essayist and entrepreneur who cofounded the wildly succesful accelerator program YCombinator writes in his essay How to Think for Yourself about the qualities which foster what he describes as independent-mindedness. "There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers", he says. "To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet." He points out that the same observations hold for investors and entrepreneurs.

Graham points to three qualities which engender the kind of independent-mindedness which lead to the creative insights necessary to be a successful scientist, investor, entrepreneur: "fastidiousness about truth, resistance to being told what to think, and curiosity".

Curious people tend to be proactive, driven merely by a strong desire to just know. "When you're obssesively interested in something, you don't need as much determination: you don't need to push yourself as hard when curiosity is pulling you"⁷, says Graham. He discusses how curiosity, taken to the extreme, can become obsessive interest. Those who do great work - geniuses - typically display natural ability and determination, but almost always obsessiveness, too.

Curious people tend to be very fast learners, for obvious reasons. In my experience, if you are hiring for a role (including many technical ones), especially at a junior level where network and years experience are not among the primary desiderata, I would strongly advise hiring an intellectually curious candidate with no experience at all in the given domain, over someone with two or even more years who shows no such signs. The former candidate is probably only there because it seemed interesting, is very likely to learn the ropes rapidly and is much more likely to start contributing valuable new ideas soon after. That curiosity will be a natural impulse driving the employee to read and research widely, outside the confines of the core role - a recipe for idea and insight generation.

The intellectually curious are also more likely to just be right. Philip Tetlock spent decades researching superforecasters, people who are consistently more accurate at predicting future events than the general public or experts. Tetlock writes⁸ that "superforecasters score high in need-for-cognition tests" (need for cognition is the psychological term for having a strong desire to engage in effortful cognitive activites, like solving puzzles or learning technical material). Need for cognition is closely associated with epistemic curiosity and openness to experience. Having met dozens of superforecasters in his reasearches, Tetlock says this quality is "unmistakeable in many". By way of example, he mentions that "most people who are not from Ghana would find a question like 'Who will win the presidential election in Ghana?' pointless. They wouldn't know where to start, or why to bother. But when I put that hypothetical question to Doug Lorch [a superforcaster] and asked for his reaction, he simply said, 'Well, here's an opportunity to learn something about Ghana'".

To close, although I strongly believe that nurturing curiosity in children could be one of the most valuable practical improvements we could make to education, and I also believe that intellectual curiosity is one of the most powerful indicators for a whole range of desirable characteristics throughout life, curiosity has one final thing going for it: it makes life fulfilling. Perhaps my best answer to the deepest questions like: "What's the point?", "Why are we all here?", "What's the meaning of life?" is to simply acknowledge that the world around us is very likely nothing more than an absolutely jaw-dropping wonder, created by no-one in particular, for no reason in particular, with no motivation in particular. But since we're here, and there are so many fascinating and wonderful things on offer, we might as well explore - just for the sake of it.

Einstein's other famous quote about curiosity is this: “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvellous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries to comprehend only a little of this mystery every day.”