Professor and author Dr. Frank Keil joins the podcast to talk about the academic superpower that is “wonder,” why generalist polymaths make for better specialists than specialists, and how to re-ignite wonder in our children if they’ve lost it along the way.
We are all wired to wonder. As early as infancy, we humans are testing the world around us, building causal structures to help us understand it all. This ability to wonder brings out the best in our student problem solvers — but that wonder also drops catastrophically by the time they hit elementary school.
In this episode, Dr. Frank Keil, Professor of Cognitive Science and Director of the Cognition and Development Lab at Yale University, and author of the book, Wonder: Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science, explains the absolute need for wonder and how educators can help.
Education systems everywhere miss the mark when it comes to fostering wonder, Franks says. But the good news is, it can be reversed.
Why Students Stop Asking Questions
In the fourth year of life, students’ desire to ask questions accelerates: Asking more why-and-how questions than ever before. Frank points out that some students can ask over 100 questions per day. When they come into elementary school, however, the number of daily questions decreases to 2 to 1 to none at all.
This significant drop is from a combination of three reasons that converge in a negative way. Frank shares those reasons:
1 - Misguided View: Most parents and teachers view younger student minds as bundles of cognitive deficits and limited by concrete thought, incapable of thinking abstractly. This leads to teaching only facts instead of deeper relational structures. Recent research, however, confirms how adept students are at finding deeper structures.
2 - High Stakes Testing: If you have a large classroom, a fact-based assessment is the easiest, and least controversial, way to test. And while many teachers would like to create assessments that teach deeper structure, it’s incredibly difficult to scale.
3 - Rewarding Learning: When teachers give students a reward for understanding a concept or getting a good grade on a test, they’re instilling the notion that learning isn’t fun since it’s worthy of reward for completing.
It’s important to remember that any negative learned condition can be reversed. Frank has never seen a case where the student hasn’t come back around with the right mentoring.
Modeling Wonder for Students
You can’t teach wonder. You can, however, model it for your students — a distinction Frank encourages us all to recognize.
Students know how to wonder, but what they don’t see is a reflected enthusiasm from teachers around them. We can’t expect our problem solvers of tomorrow to ask questions and be curious if it’s not modeled by those older than them.
There’s an abundance of ways to model wonder for your students. In the classroom or at the dinner table, ask questions like: Why do humans need to eat fruits and vegetables to get vitamin C but dogs don't?
Frank explains ignorance is not a curse but a blessing: We still have so much to discover — a lesson just as important for adults as it is for students.
Promoting Polymaths
With everything good said about wonder, is there a point where a student wonders too much, risking becoming a generalist instead of a specialist?
Frank says no: Wondering about a wide variety of subject areas won’t discourage excitement from a student’s preferred area of study, but it will give them a larger pool of knowledge they can use within that eventual specialty. For example, the STEM student who wonders about the arts will be better off for it.
Next Steps for Parents
For the parents looking to reignite wonder in their student, Frank explains it comes back to the basics: Make sure you’re asking why-and-how questions. If you’re at the zoo and see a hippo, ask your student why the hippo is in the water. This lets the student begin a dialogue. If you only asked a yes-no question, that student only has so much to say.
As straight-forward as this may be, it’s easy to forget. Frank suggests keeping a journal of questions to ask students and then learning something new yourself every month as a way to continue modeling wonder.
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Recommended Resources
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