In “A Talk to Teachers”, James Baldwin states that “the world is larger” which holds valuable meaning. When I read that phrase I thought about how much I really know about the world we live in. I always wonder about all parts of the world that we aren’t taught about and the truth is we barley even scratched the surface. We can tie the James Baldwin statement mentioned earlier to the statements I just made. All in all, we don’t know much about the life that we live and everything is surrounded by “what ifs” and the unknown. With this being said, I don’t think that we should let the norms of life/society control what we believe. All in all, with the unknown of the world being endless we should never let society or school kill our curiosity because that’s what drives us to be humans and peeks us as people and thinkers.
After reading the Guardian article, I agree with the idea that our education system goes against us questioning the system. Lets look at the Common core standards for example, its a strict and dead end way of learning. For example, if I do read a passage and have questions I’m graded by the questions that is given to me rather than my own question. So annotations and reading is basically only used to answer questions that is given to us. If we study the way that things are taught in the vast majority in school and how we are graded to compare how it affects the overall persons curiosity. If we constantly have people telling us what we have to think and what we have to answer just for a grade, sooner than later we will lose our own feel of curiosity and will to critical think. It shows with time how less curious we all got over the years. We went from asking questions all the time as little kids to saying “F it, I’m getting a grade for answering this question”. We got so tired of asking questions just to be told “No, you can’t think like that” or “That’s not correct according to the TEXTBOOK”. So us as students just lived with the fact that whatever is put in the textbook is the full truth and the whole history. Textbooks tell us that Christopher Columbus discovered America and never tell us that Abraham Lincoln might’ve also had slaves. But at a young age, we believe these statements based off of textbooks unless we think for ourselves. This is why curiosity is important, and we shouldn’t allow it to be killed by the education system.
The digital world is what helped my curiosity . Since a young age, I’ve been around technology whether it was video games, TV, Phones, etc. At first I just enjoyed using them just to use them, but as I started taking different computer classes in middle school and high school I realized that I wanted to understand it more. Whether it was the hardware or software I was fascinated with the overall working of technology. I was curious with the overall sense and as a result I chose this as a major, to answer my questions as a person who finds the topic interesting. I am able to ask questions that would further my research rather than researching topics I already know about. Technology is always updating so It’s a great way to further my study. Asking more questions will help me understanding and advance my major. Asking questions is a part of our everyday life and it what makes people good thinkers.
After reading your writing I’ve found that our ideologies similar greatly. I too mentioned in my writing that a basic fundamental characteristic of humans are their innate curiosity. It is this curiosity that truly makes our species so different from others. I also agree with you that the education system including common core doesn’t encourage student’s to ask questions and therefore muffles their curiosity.