The challenges facing human society in the next few decades will require a great deal of creativity be exercised by those who work to remove pandemic threats, provide security for basic needs of food and shelter, mitigate effects of the climate crisis, and reduce the systemic racism and tribal conflict in our organizations.
Lacking curiosity, students and workers can become susceptible to simple solutions and disinformation. https://t.co/I76ndWRXBU pic.twitter.com/BZmdeK3ISG
— Harold Jarche (@hjarche) January 11, 2021
Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, scientific director of the Imagination Institute, and co-author of Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind writes, in The Atlantic, that curiosity is underemphasized in the classroom, but research shows that it is one of the strongest markers of academic success.
The power of curiosity to contribute not only to high achievement, but also to a fulfilling existence, cannot be emphasized enough. Curiosity can be defined as “the recognition, pursuit, and intense desire to explore, novel, challenging, and uncertain events.” In recent years, curiosity has been linked to happiness, creativity, satisfying intimate relationships, increased personal growth after traumatic experiences, and increased meaning in life. In the school context, conceptualized as a “character strength,” curiosity has also received heightened research attention. Having a “hungry mind” has been shown to be a core determinant of academic achievement, rivaling the prediction power of IQ.1
Harold Jarche suggests that curiosity is a connection that needs more emphasis in our education system.
Why do students often ask — will this be on the test? It’s because they have figured out the game called education. They are told what to study, what is important, and for how long. Each school year they play the game anew. Why are some — a significant percentage — employees not motivated to work? They too have figured out the game. Venkatesh Rao, in The Gervais Principle describes this large base of most companies — the losers.2
John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University and author of From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, looks, in the Guardian, at the history of science and the work of Thomas Kuhn. He was a man who changed the way the world looked at science.
Kuhn's central claim is that a careful study of the history of science reveals that development in any scientific field happens via a series of phases. The first he christened "normal science" – business as usual, if you like. In this phase, a community of researchers who share a common intellectual framework – called a paradigm or a "disciplinary matrix" – engage in solving puzzles thrown up by discrepancies (anomalies) between what the paradigm predicts and what is revealed by observation or experiment. Most of the time, the anomalies are resolved either by incremental changes to the paradigm or by uncovering observational or experimental error. As philosopher Ian Hacking puts it in his terrific preface to the new edition of Structure: "Normal science does not aim at novelty but at clearing up the status quo. It tends to discover what it expects to discover." The trouble is that over longer periods unresolved anomalies accumulate and eventually get to the point where some scientists begin to question the paradigm itself. At this point, the discipline enters a period of crisis characterised by, in Kuhn's words, "a proliferation of compelling articulations, the willingness to try anything, the expression of explicit discontent, the recourse to philosophy and to debate over fundamentals". In the end, the crisis is resolved by a revolutionary change in world-view in which the now-deficient paradigm is replaced by a newer one. This is the paradigm shift of modern parlance and after it has happened the scientific field returns to normal science, based on the new framework. And so it goes on.3
Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, cites Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that popularized the term “paradigm shift.” The shift in thinking which might have felt threatening at one time now appears as the only way forward and as a real lifeline. Brian McLaren, a former English teacher, uses the language of a “framing story” to describe the same phenomenon Kuhn observed.
Brian says a framing story “gives people direction, values, vision, and inspiration by providing a framework for their lives. It tells them who they are, where they come from, where they are, what’s going on, where things are going, and what they should do.” [2] While we all have stories that answer those questions on a personal level, a “framing story” dictates the general beliefs of a culture, nation, religion, and even humanity as a whole.4
Developing curiosity as a pathway to creative learning is a necessary strategy to transition to the paradigm change in which the existential threats of the near future will be addressed.
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