It was refreshing to hear Goldstein talk; I often have worries that philosophy is at a standstill and can gain nothing from looking over the same texts from the ancient world but Goldstein strengthened my faith in philosophy and in curiosity to learn and know more about philosophy.
This ties in partly with what I'm thinking about for my paper which is the idea of curiosity as a pedagogical principle. I think it is arguably the most important principle of learning. If there were a way for a teacher to get all the students curious about learning things, even if irrelevant to the class, then I think learning would be a lot easier and actually fun. Curiosity for me has always made doing anything fun. The plight of students is that they feel they're being told information they already know or information that is difficult for them to understand. With the difficult-to-understand information, it is crucial for the students to be curious about how it works and intersects with itself and various other disciplines.
As much as I agree with the majority of ideas you stated, it's often extremely difficult for a teacher to get the necessary information that he/she has to teach within the school year having to follow all the state and local standards. Students should have curiosity to drive their own learning, but often when it's brought to a classroom and picked apart it makes the student less likely to want things they like in the classroom. I think you have a great idea, but it would be extremely difficult to implement in this fast growing educational system.
ReplyDeleteDoes curiosity follow confusion? We've discussed confusion rather a lot - maybe it's possible to outline the steps between confusion, curiosity, and finally learning.
ReplyDeleteI think Chris has a good point- and to achieve this, I do think the public school system would do well to remove the more rigid standards it places on teachers and students. The curiosity of students would be allowed to flow more freely, and the teacher's ability to adapt to their needs would improve as well.
ReplyDeleteI tremendously agree with Chris here. It seems that the structural problems that would make the fostering of curiosity a teaching tool are purely political and not pedagogical. Regardless of its political viability, curiosity is central to the educational experience, and perhaps the dismantling of rigid standards, as Dom mentions, might be a great way to start fostering that curiosity.
ReplyDeleteGreat comments, all. Let's try to get specific about just how we can reliably stimulate curiosity, then work on the political conditions which would enable that to work.
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