CTL’s New Series | Rethinking Education Through Different Perspectives
What shapes the way we think about education?
Education is not only about what we teach, but also about how we understand learning, growth, and development.To explore education from diverse perspectives, CTL is launching a new series, They Say | Conversations on Education.
In each issue, we turn to thinkers from fields including sociology, education, science, psychology, and philosophy, drawing on their research, writings, and practices to explore important questions in education.
Each issue begins with one key concept and brings together different perspectives that invite us to look at education in new ways.
ISSUE 01 | Curiosity
Don’t Rush to Give Children the Answers
Children are naturally curious about the world around them. They ask “why,” test ideas, and keep looking for explanations.Image from Inaaya Daycare
In this first issue of They Say | Conversations on Education, we explore how education can protect—and sometimes unintentionally limit—students’ desire to ask, explore, and discover.
Susan Engel: Does School Make Children Less Curious?
Psychologist Susan Engel has found that children’s curiosity is shaped by their classroom environments and social interactions. In her research on curiosity in schools, she draws attention to an important tension: classrooms may be full of questions without necessarily encouraging students to ask their own. Image from Williams College
Teachers may ask many questions, but students are often expected to work toward predetermined answers. Over time, this raises an important possibility: students may become more concerned with “What answer does my teacher want?” than with “What do I want to know?” (Engel, 2011)This leaves us with a question worth considering:
When children stop asking “why,” is it because they already know the answers—or because we have not left enough room for them to keep asking?
And that leads to another question: What happens when the answer a student gives is wrong?
Eleanor Duckworth: A “Wrong” Answer Can Lead to a Good Question
In her influential essay The Having of Wonderful Ideas, educator Eleanor Duckworth argues that children’s own ideas are not obstacles to learning; they may actually be where understanding begins. Consider a simple classroom example. A child says, “A boat floats because it is light.” A teacher could simply say, “That’s not quite right,” and explain the scientific principle. Or the teacher could ask, “Then why can a very heavy ship float?”Suddenly, an apparently incorrect explanation becomes the starting point for another question.
Image from Miami University WorldPress Sites
For Duckworth, learning is not simply about moving from wrong answers to right ones. More importantly, it is a process in which students begin with their own ideas, test them, revise them, and gradually develop a deeper understanding (Duckworth, 1972).Perhaps what teachers need to protect is not simply students’s ability to get the right answer, but their willingness to think:
“Maybe my explanation isn’t enough. I want to look again.”
If curiosity can begin with a question, could it also become part of what sustains learning over time?
Sophie von Stumm: Curiosity May Be More Than a Childhood Trait
Is academic success simply a matter of being smarter?In a 2011 study, psychologist Sophie von Stumm and her colleagues examined another factor that may matter for academic performance: intellectual curiosity. Their research considered intelligence, effort, and intellectual curiosity together and found that curiosity was meaningfully associated with academic performance alongside the other two
factors.
Image from Goldsmiths Image from the study
This does not mean that “the more curious you are, the higher your grades will be.” Rather, it invites us to rethink what learning involves: learning is not only about how much someone already knows, but also about whether they are willing to keep exploring what they do not yet know (von Stumm et al., 2011).
Image from Sage Journals
Some questions will never appear on an exam.Yet someone may still want to look them up, read more, or keep asking “why” long after the lesson has ended.
This is close to what the researchers call “a hungry mind”—a desire to remain intellectually engaged and keep exploring.
So, is curiosity simply about wanting to know?
Perhaps not.
Jacqueline Gottlieb: Curiosity Is More Than “Wanting to Know”
Neuroscientist Jacqueline Gottlieb has spent years studying attention, information seeking, and the mechanisms underlying curiosity. Recent collaborative research involving Gottlieb suggests that curiosity may take different forms, with different aspects of curiosity linked to different patterns of information seeking (Jach et al., 2024).Image from John Abbott for Columbia's Zuckerman Institute
From this perspective, curiosity is not only about the moment a question appears in our minds, but also about what we do next:Do I want to keep looking? Do I want to ask one more question? Am I willing to spend a little more time figuring this out?Perhaps curiosity can be understood as a short but meaningful journey:
Image created by AI
From this perspective, what education needs to protect may not simply be the feeling of curiosity, but the act of exploration that follows.They Say | Leave the Question Open
Taken together, these scholars approach curiosity from different perspectives:Susan Engel examines how schools shape children’s questions. Eleanor Duckworth explores how children develop understanding from their own ideas. Sophie von Stumm considers the role of intellectual curiosity in academic learning. Jacqueline Gottlieb examines how curiosity relates to information seeking.
Together, these perspectives invite us to consider a broader question:
Is education about helping students get to answers faster—or helping them remain willing to ask more questions?
The next time a student asks a question that was never part of the lesson plan, we can certainly give them the answer.
But perhaps, sometimes, we could ask first:“What do you think?”
Sometimes, leaving a question open is precisely what allows learning to continue.
They Say | Conversations on Education
They Say | Conversations on Education
One question. Different perspectives. More ways to think about education.
References
Duckworth, E. (1972). The having of wonderful ideas. Harvard Educational Review, 42(2), 210–224.Engel, S. (2011). Children’s need to know: Curiosity in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 625–645.
Jach, H. K., et al. (2024). Individual differences in information demand have a low dimensional structure predicted by some curiosity traits. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(45), e2415236121.
von Stumm, S., Hell, B., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2011). The hungry mind: Intellectual curiosity is the third pillar of academic performance. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6), 574–588.
Key Updates about CTL
Instructional Skills Workshop
We are pleased to announce the upcoming Instructional Skills Workshop (ISW) — a signature faculty development program designed to strengthen teaching practices through experiential learning.🗓️ Upcoming Sessions
- Session 26: Oct. 17, 2026 -Oct. 18, 2026 & Oct. 21, 2026- Nov. 1, 2026
Author: Yan (Tanya) Tang
Chief Editor: Yirui (Sandy) Jiang