For the Love of Learning

Curiosity and Autonomy Drive Learning

Kids tend to be naturally curious. Adults less so. The question then is do schools kill this natural curiosity (as some claim) or does growing up kill this natural curiosity. Or is natural curiosity, and love of learning, a personality trait and therefore more strongly present in some people than others?

A well-quoted piece of research that I have come across many times is that of ratings of “genius” and how western schools are responsible for killing this genius streak that is present in all children. It is the sort of thing that audiences at conferences get fed and seems to strike an intuitive nerve – yes, those dastardly schools are killing creativity – and I would have been a genius if it weren’t for the school I went to.

The problem is this is not true. If that were the case preindustrial societies would be jam-packed with creative geniuses. They are not – sure they have amazing abilities that we may admire, but they also become entrenched in their ways and have an inability to see the world beyond the frame in which they live.

The problem is not school killing creativity, it is that growing up kills creativity!

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I review creativity and children in adults in my book paragraph on The Creative Brain:

Handbook of Your Brain in Business: Table of Contents

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That may be harsh but also to add is that many people we consider geniuses have also had some very traditional and old-fashioned education – think Einstein. So, though it would be good for schools to promote different forms of thinking it is not necessarily schools that are to blame.

Let’s go back to the question of what that oft-quoted study measures.

It measures something called divergent thinking and is considered a measure of creativity. An example of a divergent thinking exercise would be write as many uses as you can think of for a brick. The more uses you can think of, the higher your creativity, but also the more divergent the ideas you list show you are more creative. And it is this that kids excel at – they may say something like a really, really big brick could be used to park the planets. Yes, that wild.

You see these young kids are not as constrained by everyday laws and rules of physics – they see no reason why a brick can’t be bigger than a planet, for example. But this is not really genius, this is a vivid unconstrained imagination. As we grow up, we understand the laws of the natural world, and physics, and so our imagination becomes more constrained – this is experience, and this gives us practical intelligence: thinking of things that are actually likely to work in the real world.