When we subject young people to 13 years of ‘just tell me what to do’ schooling that emphasizes giving teachers ‘the right answer’ instead of exploration and risk-taking, we shouldn’t be surprised that their ‘curiosity in learning’ has been extinguished.
Extinguishing students’ curiosity in learning
Curiosity in learning is best encouraged by exposing students to interesting and inspiring facts, concepts, and ideas within a wide variety of disciplines. Pleading with them to improve standardized test scores for no reason that makes sense to them, in just two subject areas,
while offering highly constrained curricula, is what really extinguishes their curiosity in learning.