We're born curious.
Watch a baby in a crib, long before it learns to talk or
understand what people are talking about.
Give it a plastic toy and the baby will reveal its curiosity
through all of its senses. It
will look at the toy, rattle it, taste it, smell it and feel it.
Curiosity
grows as we learn to walk and talk. We take it to school with us.
For some of us, it gets nurtured as we grow older and make
important discoveries. For
others, it gets stifled and diminishes.
What comes so naturally at birth can get inhibited
by parents, suppressed by teachers, muzzled by brothers and sisters
and silenced by classmates. At
times it almost seems like a conspiracy to gag the curious.
Sometimes, especially with young children,
curiosity can actually be dangerous.
When a child's curiosity leads it to explore high voltage
electrical equipment, as one child did recently, the result can be a
terrible disaster.
Young children have been known to get into their
parents' storage cabinets and - finding tins with caps that come off -
couldn't resist the temptation to sample what's inside.
Of course the child doesn't know that cleaning fluids and other
liquids may be toxic.
Even adults have exposed themselves knowingly to
terrible
consequences as a result of their curiosity.
The stories of Pandora and Eve offer striking examples.
In the Greek myth about Pandora, she couldn't resist the
temptation to open a box that contained all of the world's evils,
moved by her curiosity at hearing voices coming from the box.
Eve ignored the warnings she received and ate the forbidden
fruit.
Children have been warned against expressing their
curiosity with sayings like "curiosity killed the cat." One veterinarian has even said that "cats often
die--from falls, eating ribbon, spinning in the dryer--and cat owners
are responsible for cat-proofing their homes and keeping their pets
out of harm's way."
English poet Alexander Pope warned of curiosity's
dangers when he wrote, "A person who is too nice an observer of
the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing
the labor of bees, will often be stung for his curiosity."
Once the dangers of curiosity have been recognized
they need to be provided for: protect children from perilous objects,
keep cats from hazardous places, and help adults to refrain from
prying into other peoples' business.
Not much appears on the Internet about the subject
of curiosity. One page
raises the question of the origins of the proverb about how
"curiosity killed the cat" and traces what's known about it.
Susan
Edelman of the California State University, looks at theories of
curiosity and exploration from an academic perspective.
At The
World of Quotes you’ll find a number of interesting quotes about
curiosity. One
author, Steven Wright, offered a humorous twist to the proverb about
the cat: "Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a
suspect."
Having provided for the dangers of curiosity, it
then becomes important to consider the importance of curiosity.
Anatole France said, "The whole art of teaching is only
the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the
purpose of satisfying it afterwards."
When Albert Einstein wrote, "It is a miracle
that curiosity survives formal education," he realized that much
teaching lacks the art about which Anatole France had written.
Einstein's comment even suggests that formal education tends to
suffocate curiosity.
Is
curiosity essential to our everyday lives? The Roman thinker Cicero referred to curiosity as a
"passion for learning," and Dr. Richard Taflinger, a modern
thinker and scientist added that "...investigating the unusual
creates new pathways in the brain..." increasing the potential of
the brain to learn.
20th century historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin
wrote, "Only barbarians are not curious about where they come
from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be
going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why
not.
Once we recognize the importance of curiosity to
our brains and to civilization, we can look at what often happens to
our natural curiosity. Parents
often repress it. Next to abuse, the worst thing parents can do to
their children is to stifle their curiosity.
Protecting children from dangers is one thing. Being too busy to answer questions is no excuse for killing a
youngster's desire to explore, to get answers, to learn and to know.
Uninformed answers don't help either.
A three-in-one volume by Arkady Leokum provides
wise and wonderful
answers to myriad questions that children ask -- questions like: Why
can't animals talk? Why
is a foot 12 inches long? What
are freckles? Why does
soap clean? What makes mirrors work?
Why do dogs bury bones? Why
is Friday the 13th unlucky? How
do spiders spin their webs? What
is quicksand? Why does the moon shine?
Why do we stop growing?
Arkady intended his book primarily for children
from 6 to 10. It's available at Barnes and Noble, and can be ordered
on the Web.
Teachers have also been known to muzzle curiosity
simply because they don't seem to have enough time to answer
questions, or they think the questions silly, or they don't want a
questioner to dominate the class time.
Yet questioning itself is crucial to growth. Too often people develop a fear of asking questions because
parents have failed to answer or gave silly answers, teachers have
chided questioners and peers have ridiculed them.
A great teacher once said to me "There's no
such thing as a stupid question; but there are a lot of stupid people
who never ask questions." For
those who fear asking, a wonderful Chinese proverb reads: "One
who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; one who does not ask a
question remains a fool forever.
Teachers often get the whole business reversed.
In school, if teachers ask the questions and students answer,
the teachers are learning from the students, when it should be the
other way around.
Why do we need to learn and practice asking
questions? From the
questions that arise out of our curiosity, we explore; and from our
explorations, we make discoveries.
When working on a project, whether it's a project
for school or a business plan, the final presentation will be the
result of the questions asked.
When solving a problem--from the need to clearly
understand the nature of the problem to the possible solutions as well
as their advantages and disadvantages--the final solution is based on
the questions we ask.
Every important event in our lives, from getting a
job, starting a business, making money, avoiding confusion, clarifying
misunderstandings and getting to know others to getting married begins
with questions.
Explorers inevitably start out with a question or
many questions: what does it feel like at the top of Mt. Everest?
Am I capable of scaling a mountain like that? What's it like to be weightless in space?
To walk on the moon? Is
the earth flat?
Lifetime learning (should learning ever stop?)
relies on the ability to continue to ask questions. If you have all
the answers, is there any reason to continue plodding along in an
unchanging routine.
What does all of this have to do with the World
Wide Web? Several years ago, a Web Watch article pointed to a number of websites
with a treasury of information about "How Things Work."
Wanting to know how stuff works derives from the curiosity that
everyone experiences at one time or another; and you’ll find 14
websites that offer detailed information about how just about anything
works here.
Apart from that, the entire Web is a virtual
"Curiosity Shoppe." The route to answers for most questions
involves learning to use the available search tools.
One of the finest and lasting commentators on the
matter of curiosity, Samuel Johnson, writing in The Rambler in
1751, concluded that "Curiosity is one of the most permanent and
certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect."
Who wants to be without that?
Eve
