As a relatively new parent, I have been amazed at the insatiable curiosity of our son (19-months old). Like most parents, I think my son is special, but I see this curiosity in most children around his age. These young children want to investigate everything and will try anything. They make a lot of mistakes, but they are constantly learning and they seem to love learning.

Curiosity comes quite naturally. Obedience, however, needs to be taught. 

As a professor, I wish I could bottle my son’s curiosity and feed it to my students.

As a parent, I wish my young son obeyed as well as (most of) my students do. 

But I wonder, do we sometimes trade curiosity for obedience? Sir Ken Robinson has spoken about the problem of schools killing creativity. (Creativity and curiousity are related, I think). As a parent and as a professor, his talk is challenging.

If you are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original…we are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make. We are educating people out of their creative capacities…Picasso once said this, he said that “all children are born artists; the challenge is to remain an artist as we grow up”…we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather we get educated out of it.   

Sir Ken Robinson's talk is somewhat depressing, because much of it rings true. His talk has been watched over 29 million times. Unfortunately, I couldn’t clearly identify his proposed solution. Maybe I need to dig into his more detailed work.

How do we teach discipline (which may be a better goal than mere obedience) without killing curiosity and creativity? I do not think discipline and curiosity are mutually exclusive, but they seem to be in tension a fair bit. As a parent, I am already terrified that my son will lose his curiosity. As a professor, I want to help my students recapture theirs.   

Any thoughts would be appreciated.