The Curious Case Of The Missing Curiosity
Why is it that despite all the wealth of information available at our fingertips, most of us seem content to be knowledge-lite?
I have to admit I was an odd child. I learned to read and write early on, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst of it was that I watched adults and they seemed clueless to me. I listen to them talking and for a while I wondered if they were hiding things from me, pretending to act dumb while I (and presumably other children) were around and only engaging in serious matters when we little ones were absent or asleep in our beds.
But this seemed an unlikely hypothesis, and it certainly wouldn’t account for the huge number of cigarettes they were smoking and the excessive amount of hard liquor they were drinking. Nor would it account for those atrocious horn-rimmed spectacles that even as a child I knew to be a major crime against aesthetics.
I was an annoying little boy, always asking “why?”
Growing up in a pre-Internet age, in foreign countries often lacking even reliable electricity and water supplies, no local library was available to me so I devoured whatever came to hand. When I was five my parents bought a series of books designed to satisfy children aged six through twelve. I finished them in less than a week, unhappy with their simplicity and restricted vocabulary.
I was no prodigy; merely insatiably curious.
Turns out, though, that being curious is very much a minority taste.
In fact, most people hate curious children. There’s even a folk-phrase to dissuade us from asking “why?” and we all know it: curiosity killed the cat. Turns out, society prefers us not to ask questions but simply to accept what we’re told and leave it at that.
Teachers often loath curious children, especially when they acquire knowledge far beyond the boundaries of what’s supposed to be “age appropriate.” When I was nine years old, the class I was in was given an assignment: prepare a talk on something that interests you.
One boy gave a talk about his dog. A girl gave a talk about a trip she took to Cape Town. Another boy talked repetitively about how to make a really good catapult and kill birds with it.
