Curiosity

 “It’s easy to underestimate how difficult it is for someone to become curious. For seven, ten, or even fifteen years of school, you are required not to be curious. Over and over and over again, the curious are punished.”  Seth Godin

I believe this to be a hard and undeserved criticism of most schools- or at least the schools I attended, and I attended schools in several states. There are three important things to consider here:

1) Parents have 5-8 years in which to prepare the soil for curiosity- those are critical years. So if a child enters school already discouraged from being curious, the work for the teacher is tripled. Couple that with the task of disciplining children who have received none at home, and the fact that some parents are always breathing down their necks about what they might be teaching, and the teacher starts out with a daunting task.

2) A lot depends on the school you attend. I’ve known public schools that produced great minds and private schools that produced absolute buffoons. I think even if a school- especially public school- doesn’t reach high, it’s important to remember that school is just there to lay a foundation for learning, and the bricks and mortar have to be supplied by parents and other adults who ideally would be active in the school and active in showing their children how important education is. When I worked for a school district, I was always shocked to find so few books in so many homes, and was discouraged by how many parents were uninterested in coming to parent nights, school events or anything else.

3) Parents have to help schools by supporting good curriculums. Some schools are able to expand to teach critical reasoning, logic, expanded history, civics, they offer unusual opportunities to explore cultures, they take children to events and museums, they have well-supported science, debate, arts clubs; some even get into political science, and of course, basics like geography, literature, English (and offer other language classes, too), and so much more… and then, there are the schools that don’t- because there are too few parents who will fight for their children to have a good education and experience or because funding for schools is so unequal in distribution or because agenda-driven persons have gotten themselves elected to school boards in order to stop children learning due to the religious beliefs or political ideology of their parents. .

Parents must prepare the children to know why they are going to school and even get them ready, teaching them how to read or reading to them before they get to school. Parents need to volunteer and support schools taking children on field trips and having special events- as a child, I remember trips to weather stations after months of studying climate, visits to a farm to see firsthand what food production entailed; going to a forestry event after studying about native flora, mock primaries and political conventions so students could understand the political process, even an in-school “store” where students learned business skills by buying, inventorying and selling school supplies; there were audio-visual classes and extracurricular work (that also included helping other students improve their own work) in order to be eligible to attend. There were also opportunities to join a folk dance club which included cultural learning, gymnastics classes, science classes, and art classes (including pottery, painting, sand art, theatre and choral groups and more) that were part of the daily curriculum, not after school but during…there were history clubs, and of course, students could get involved in the school newsletter. A lot depends on what parents will support.

If parents properly set the foundation for curiosity in the home, the child will continue to self-educate and self-explore…  even if the schools are limited by funding, access to development of an expanded curriculum or political forces trying to limit what the school can offer.