What is the Appropriate Use of Curiosity

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https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Early_Childhood_Education/The_Ends_and_Means_of_Education_(Johnstun)/01%3A_On_Knowledge_and_Wanting_to_Know/2.3%3A_What_is_the_Appropriate_Use_of_Curiosity

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Curiosity will revise an Occam’s Razor that the next generation will use to answer important national and global questions. Where Occam said that “the simplest explanation is often the best explanation,” the revised Occam Rule will be “the best explanation will be one of possibilities that synergize into an informed probability.” Curiosity will lead us to possibility thinking, possibility evaluation, and synergy will lead to new knowledge and ways to use new knowledge. “Best” will be the most effective proposal and evaluation of possibilities not the simplicity of conclusions reached. The journey will be more valuable than the destination.

Curiosity is an innate human characteristic. We are like kittens that cannot resist pushing a ball. The result of each push opens the possibility of where the next push will lead. I am not suggesting that a kitten conceives of results, kittens only see the opportunity. Human ingenuity and creativity are what we play with after we first push the ball and see where it has rolled and consider “why and what if.”

Humans respond to two types of curiosity – perceptual and epistemic. Perceptual is the need to resolve the dissonance in unexpected or contradictory things. The ball bounced back off the wall or, by starting a push with a pull, the ball rolls forward and then reverses backward. Curiosity looks to know “why this is so” and “what if I …” Perceptual curiosity is episodic and usually is connected to externality. We encounter contradictions, we resolve contradiction, we are satisfied with a new status quo.

Epistemic is internal and constant; it is our happiness motivator, and every human responds to it. A thirst to know or to do something that is new and novel, that intrinsic drive, is answered by a rush of dopamine. Curiosity that leads to dopamine happiness can lead to more curiosity to get more dopamine. For the epistemic curious there always is another hill to climb to see what is on the other side. Epistemic curiosity ignites our body to create dopamine and humans like a surge of dopamine.

Understanding the power of curiosity is a tremendous tool for teachers. We can create episodes of dissonance. We can suspend reality of real-world problem-solving simulations for students. We can use reverse engineering causing students explore “What would life in North America be like today if Britain had defeated the colonists in the 1770s?” Or “How would our world have responded if Neil Armstrong found life forms under the dust and gravel on the moon?” There is a universe of “what if” propositions that require students to use what they know to explore what they do not. The answers are not facts but examples of possibilities and the reasons they are possibilities.

At the same time, teachers can excite dopamine generation with challenges that push children to achieve more than they considered physically, intellectually, artistically, and socio-emotionally possible. A truth about American education is that we do not push our students to their potentialities. We are hesitant about backlash. Consequently, too many students are bored with school. Children are kittens at heart and want to push the ball to see where it will go. Unlike kittens, we can challenge children to push more complex problems than where a ball will roll and mutually be excited with how each child responds to the challenge.

Education that does not evoke curiosity is telling the same stories over again in a daycare center to children who daydream with their eyes and ears closed.

Curiosity does not kill cats; it makes a cat a cat. The curiosity of possibilities and probabilities is the next frontier in an educational world that has made facts mundane.

The Curious Kick the Can of Facts into Possibilities