| CURIOUS The Desire to Know and Why your Future Depends on it Ian Leslie, Jr. New York: Basic Books, June 2014 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-465-05694-1 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-465-05694-2 | 216pp. | HC | $26.99 | |
Curiosity is young.
Of course everyone knows it is strongest in young children. But I mean that it is relatively young as a respected attribute of our species. The ancients had curiosity, of course, and indulged it; Aristotle is perhaps the prime example. But Aristotle's inquiries were purely cerebral; he frowned on utilitarian investigations. This purist conception of curiosity persisted through the Roman era. By the Middle Ages, Christian scholars led by Augustine condemned curiosity as "an arrogant usurpation of divine authority."1 The Catholic Church preserved ancient knowledge, but it did not disseminate it, nor foster the development of new knowledge.
Fortunately, the Renaissance put an end to this institutional restriction on knowledge, and the Enlightenment subsequently sparked an era of scientific investigation that continues to this day. Science, both applied and theoretical, has improved the condition of the world immensely. True, it has not been purely beneficial; but then, neither has religion.
The important thing is that, as Ian Leslie convincingly demonstrates, curiosity is essential to humankind's continued advancement. He divides it into three aspects: diversive, epistemic, and empathic curiosity. These can be thought of as curiosity of the hand, head, and heart. The infant begins with diversive curiosity, employing hand (and mouth, and all the senses) to discover the nature of the new world it has entered. With language comes the epistemic phase of curiosity, along with a barrage of questions. It is significant to understand that a child's nascent epistemic inquiry can be stifled at this point. Leslie cites a number of studies to show that parents can shut it down by persistently refusing to answer that flood of questions.
A corollary of this is that middle-class parents, with incomes that permit them plenty of time to answer those questions, and to provide a knowledge-rich environment (books, music, educational games and the like), tend to raise children with higher levels of epistemic curiosity. In short, their children learn how to ask questions. This ability is key to full success in life. It is not that working-class people are always unsuccessful at life. Indeed, they often lead more fulfilling lives than their wealthier counterparts. Nor are they invariably unable to question. Yet the class distinction is a critical one, for intellectual inquiry is predominantly the prerogative of those in the middle class and above. I am saddened to know that large numbers of people never acquired this ability to question.2
"Rather than a great dumbing down, it's likely that we are at the beginning of a cognitive polarization—a division into the curious and the incurious. People who are more inclined to set off on intellectual adventures will have more opportunities to do so than ever in human history; people who merely seek quick answers to someone else's questions will fall out of the habit of asking their own, or never acquire it in the first place. In the blunt formation of writer Kevin Drum, "The Internet is making smart people smarter and dumb people dumber." "As this cognitive divide develops, it will feed into and exacerbate existing socioeconomic equality, through the educational system. Parental discipline and good teachers will help get pupils through high school and into college, but their progress will be supercharged by an intrinsic desire to learn. Our educational system appears to be failing to inculcate this desire, particularly at the higher level. In the United States, the Wabash National Study tracks the progress of twenty-two hundred students during their four years in college. The students complete an array of surveys and tests at three points—when they first arrive on campus, at the end of their first year, and at the end of their fourth year. The survey's most striking finding is that academic motivation declines steeply over the first year at college— and never recovers." – Page 86 |
"We're so used to the idea of being able to ask questions that we've forgotten what an amazing skill, or set of skills, it is. First, you have to know that you don't know—to conceive of your own ignorance. Second, you have to be able to imagine different, competing possibilities; when a child asks whether ghosts are real or made-up, she is already imagining alternative explanations. Third, you have to understand that you can learn from other people. None of these abilities is shared by other primates, and neither is their development in human children simple or inevitable; under different conditions, they can flourish or atrophy." – Pages 29-30 (Emphasis added.) |
Indeed, the habit of exercising your imagination, of looking for alternatives rather than settling on the most obvious possibility, is something I consider a survival skill. And it seems to me there is a song that gets this across in a very engaging way. Ah, yes: Colors of the Wind — "How can there be so much that you don't know, you don't know?"
The anti-intellectual tradition in American life is well known, and commented on by writers such as Richard Hofstader.3 We see its effects today in the denial or misunderstanding of subjects from climate change to the Constitution. I submit that as life grows more and more bound to science and technology, the danger such widespread misunderstanding poses to democracy, even to survival, grows in proportion. It behooves us, therefore, to reverse the trend.
That is why books like this are so important. They not only show us why a love of learning is important, but they also remind us that we are failing a large percentage of our population by robbing them of that vital ability to inquire. So-called progressive education actually reinforces this division of our population into an upper class of cognoscenti and a lower class of ignorami:4 the latter knowledge-poor, but well equipped for grunt work such as cleaning or guarding office buildings at night.5 One key to this class division is the denigration of direct instruction — imparting facts — as "rote learning". Progressives claim it stunts students' interest in learning. In truth, facts are the essential bricks on which students will build their lives — whatever life path they choose.
"Teachers aren't there only to provide direct instruction on what and how to learn, of course, but this is the core of what they should do. Researcher John Hattie synthesized more than eight hundred meta-analyses (he ran a meta meta-analysis) of the success of different teaching approaches. The three most powerful teacher factors— those most likely to lead to student success—were feedback, quality of instruction, and direct instruction. In other words, traditional teaching—the transmission of information from adults to children—is highly effective when skillfully executed. This ought to be obvious. But Hattie says that when he shows teacher trainees the results of his research, they are stunned, because they have usually been told that direct instruction is a bad thing." – Page 113 |
Only someone with a bone-deep and wide-ranging curiosity of his own could write a book like this. It does contain some statements I disagree with (detailed as usual in my Errata page.) Nevertheless, I consider it a must-read and a definite keeper. It merits my top rating.
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