Students lack curiosity in classrooms

JAKARTA (JP): As a university lecturer, one quality I absolutely want to see in my students is a healthy dose of curiosity. Unfortunately, this is real life we're talking about, where you don't always get what you want.

As much as I want to see curiosity, it's not there sometimes. The students come to class like empty vessels waiting to be filled.

In some cases they are vessels with holes in the bottom, so that no matter how much you pour in, by the next week you'll find only a scant trace left. I would very much prefer my students to be sponges instead of vessels.

By sponges I mean that they should be ready to absorb all the knowledge available out there and hold that knowledge in the small pores of the sponge.

Somehow, without us knowing it, curiosity died.

This is very sad because without curiosity how is it possible to learn? Without curiosity, how is it possible for new inventions to be conceived? Without curiosity, how is possible to be creative?

Remember back to your childhood when you would question just about everything: Why do stars shine? Where do butterflies come from? Why does it rain? And, perhaps, even the question which gave your parents headaches in explaining: Where do babies come from? All of these questions are signs of curiosity.

Now remember how creative you were as a child, taking a bed sheet and turning it into a castle, or taking a stick and transforming it into a mighty sword.

Curiosity and creativity are definitely related. Children are very curious and as a result they are very creative as well. They invent things to fill up their magical, make-believe world.

However, something happened in the growing up years. Children lost the curiosity they had. It's almost as if being a grown up meant that you should no longer ask questions. This can clearly be seen in the classroom.

Every time the teacher asks: "Any questions?", there is dead silence. Suddenly students find that the dirt on the sole of their shoe is more interesting.

It's even worse when the teacher asks a question. The students' eyes dart this way and that, looking at everything except the lecturer, as though eye contact would mean the lecturer would expect them to answer the question.

Students are both afraid of asking questions and answering questions. The reason for their fear varies. Some students don't ask questions fearing friends might laugh at them. Some students don't ask questions fearing that the teacher would bite their heads off for not understanding something that had already been explained.

Other students don't say a word in class because either they think that "silence is golden" or they have their minds somewhere else so they wouldn't even be able to come up with a relevant question.

It's difficult to change the students' attitude toward the habit of asking questions. The students have been accustomed to staying silent in class for 12 years.

Teachers should really encourage their students to ask questions. Questions are signs of curiosity. If they are asking questions that means that they want to broaden their knowledge.

Jordan Ayan, author of Aha! 10 Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit and Find Your Great Ideas, uses a funnel to describe the relationship between curiosity and knowledge. The flow from the neck of the funnel represents what you have learned over a life time, that is "what you know".

Contained in the large part of the funnel is all the knowledge that you know is out there, but which you have not yet had the time to learn. This is "what you know you don't know".

Above the funnel is a vast open area which is the amount of knowledge out there without you being aware of its existence. This is "what you don't know you don't know".

In being curious, you are trying to get more of the "what you don't know you don't know" area to the "what you know you don't know" area so that later on it could flow through the neck of the funnel to the "what you know" area.

There is so much knowledge out there above the funnel and so little time to make it flow through the funnel. It is time to encourage questions in children instead of telling them that they're asking too many questions.

If we encourage this in children from a tender age, we might save ourselves the trouble of sending kids to extra classes after school because they would already have the curiosity to learn more about the new things they encounter in the classroom.

Let's do what we can to bring curiosity back to life again. There may be a flat line on the EKG (Elektrokardiogramm) but maybe we can jump-start it back to life.

-- Laila Faisal