“Curiosity killed the cat” we were told as children. Previous generations said children should be seen and not heard. We were not encouraged to question the way of things and the accepted hierarchy of society. For generations, most did as they were expected to do.
Education for everyone went some way to changing that; doors opened, paths beckoned and ripples were seen in the very fabric of life. Individuals took to the skies, literally, others invented things, found fossils, questioned history and fought against the status quo, from Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi to Emmeline Pankhurst. Printing machines roared into life and books were affordable to all, libraries flourished. Everyone wanted answers to the how, the why, the unknown.
Maria Montessori said: “The secret of good teaching is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sewn, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination.” She recognised the power and significance of children’s innate curiosity and the role it plays in their development. “Our aim is not merely to make the child understand and still less to force him to memorise, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his inmost core.”
Every time we give our children just a snippet, a morsel of information, a new and tantalising question or fact connected to their growing frames of reference about life itself, we potentially ignite their curiosity, their interests, their desire to learn more, to investigate into the night, to the ends of the earth.
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