Little kids are pretty great. Some of them have attitudes like tornadoes; these unstoppable forces of nature that wreck everything. Some of them are as gentle and as sweet as butterflies. Others are just fun to make faces at. But the one constant is the number of questions they ask.
I watched a video the other day called “How does life live?”
Just a three-and-a-half-minute video of all the thought-provoking questions an eight-year-old might ask on a given day. Each question was unique and random and items we would normally take for granted. This mindset of curiosity and exploration is unique to children because they are piecing together the world they see.
According to Jonothan Plucker, an expert psychologist from Johns Hopkins University, grade school and into middle school is when kids lose this curiosity, and there are two leading reasons why; pressure from schools and pressure from peers.
In our schools, many teachers are full of passion and are an inspiration to our youth, but they are overwhelmed with curricular standards. The result is the curiosity of children being extinguished before they even get the chance to use it. And in that school environment young students begin to believe that they need to have the right answer and as a result don’t ask questions because they fear being the outcast.
In school, young students are being taught there is only one right answer, and spend so much time looking for it that they forget to ask their own questions. This is one of the largest problems facing our schools today and its side effects bleed over into our society.
So…for the sake of our upcoming generation, and ourselves, we need to remember to stay curious and not forget to ask questions.
(Here’s the link to the video I mentioned in case you are interested: www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000004976604/how-does-life-live.html.)
