My co-blogger Haskell Murray had an interesting post last month on curiosity and obedience. He wrote about the natural curiosity of children: “As a professor, I wish I could bottle my son’s curiosity and feed it to my students.” But what exactly is curiosity and how exactly do we encourage it in law students?

I recently read an excellent book on curiosity: Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It, by Ian Leslie. The book has a lot of interesting things to say about education, parenting, life-long learning, creativity, and innovation. I couldn’t possibly do it justice here. But, if you’re interested in learning and education, legal or otherwise, I strongly recommend it.
 
Leslie makes a distinction between diversive curiosity and epistemic curiosity. Diversive curiosity is shallow—wanting to know a particular piece of information. When I check on IMDb for the name of the actress in the movie I’m watching, that’s diversive curiosity. Epistemic curiosity, what we really want to encourage in our kids and our students, is the quest for knowledge and understanding, the desire to address the mysteries that don’t have readily ascertainable answers.

Google is mostly about diversive curiosity, finding answers. Google is great at that, but not so good at promoting epistemic curiosity. In fact, Leslie believes that Google inhibits our epistemic curiosity, and thus stifles deep learning.

Why remember information, or teach students information, that we can easily look up on Google? The answer, according to Leslie, is that having those “mere facts” in our long-term memories promotes innovation and creativity. Creativity results from those various facts serendipitously bouncing into each other inside our heads. Instead of deadening curiosity, as many people argue, learning those facts actually promotes epistemic curiosity. The more we know, the more easily we can understand how it all fits together and (the essence of innovation) try to fit it together in different ways. Leslie argues that deep thinking is becoming a lost art as more and more people rely on their machines for information.

I'm still working through what all this means for my teaching, but the book is definitely worth reading.