“I think, at child’s birth, if a mother could
ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be
curiosity.”
~Eleanor Roosevelt
When we are born, we’re already blessed with that one most
useful gift. The gift that allows us to survive, to learn, to explore, and to grow
at every step of life. We learn to speak, and then to ask. As kids, we want to
know everything about everything. What color that is or which flower or which
is that bird flying in the sky or what thing we are eating… My two year old
nephew’s favorite phrase is ‘ye kya hai?’(what
is this?) He wants to know what everything is, what its color is, how we
operate it, when we use it and so on and so forth.
We grow up a little, and we’re sent to schools- to learn. Now
school is the place where we’re supposed to be given answers to our previous
questions and encouraged to ask more. Schools are supposed to quench our hunger
for knowledge, and increase our appetite. But that’s the job of an ideal
school. The bitter truth lies in the
following extract from one of my favorite books, The little red schoolbook:
“Instead of helping
you develop as an individual, schools have to teach you the things our economic
system needs you to know. They have to teach you to obey authority rather than
to question things, just as the exam system encourages you to conform, not to
be an individual.”
It’s not that schools are worthless. There are some teachers
who really understand the correct purpose of schooling, and try, on their
individual level, to meet it as much as they can, but even they are under pressure
to follow the norms, and there’s little they can do about it.
Albert Einstein said, “It
is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” He was probably a
little too positive about that. In most cases, our curiosity starts wearing out
in schools, when we’re asked to not question too much ‘out of syllabus’. And
the answer we get to most of our questions is that it won’t be asked in exams,
so we don’t need to know it. Sure Einstein wasn't wholly wrong. It is indeed a
miracle that curiosity survives formal education for some of us. And those are the people who really do something
worthwhile in their lives.
Then we grow up some
more, and curiosity fades away in most of us. Or let’s put it this way: We’re all plagued with routine. We grow
up and we realize we have to do stuff, become something, earn money, follow routine,
achieve targets, meet deadlines, and we suddenly feel so overburdened that
whatever new things we see, we don’t really care to know what they are or what
they mean and all. We just want to deal with things that concern our ‘business’, which we often confuse with ‘routine’. The point is: everything is our business. We have the right to
question ourselves and the world.
Experience teaches us
lessons, curiosity enables us to have those experiences. So there is one thing
I wish to remind all of us, including myself:
What we question is what we learn, the rest is just taught
to us. Isn’t it?
