Young Luke Rattigan schools the Doctor in the meaning of “tautology.” (“The Sontaran Stratagem,” Doctor Who, created by Sydney Newman, C.E. Webber, and Donald Wilson, Series 4 [revived era], Episode 4, BBC Wales, 2008)
One of the more grating moments of the rebooted Doctor Who series from the late aughts occurred in the episode “The Sontaran Stratagem.” The scene in question involved the young, American, obnoxiously arrogant tech genius Luke Rattigan (not the writers’ subtlest work there) having a fit of pique over a slight gaffe on the part of the Doctor, who has just said something about the ATMOS system that Rattigan created. Because the S in the acronym stands for “System,” saying “ATMOS system” as the Doctor did means that one is saying “system system,” effectively.
“It’s a tautology!” Rattigan whines. “A tautology!”
It is a petty, childish moment, and despite the genuine irritation it invokes, I cannot deny that it was a powerfully memorable bit of writing and acting, as it has lived in the collected brain-holes of my entire family for the better part of the past two decades. Occasionally, in fact, we’ve used the line as a bit of pantomime when one of us wishes to create humor out of a moment of tedious pedantry.
“You can’t say ‘added bonus,’ because a bonus means something additional. It’s a tautology! A tautology!”
(Exhibit A for making the case that the McColls were criminally overlooked as a potential sitcom family, producing a steady stream of riotous side-splitting humor)
I find this voice playing in my head these days when I come across the phrase “lifelong learners” in print or online. In education circles, “creating lifelong learners” is frequently cited as a primary goal.
But we know now that learning happens throughout the waking lives of all of us. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in their 2018 report, How People Learn II, stated, “Individuals learn outside of school and throughout their lives….outside of formal schooling, what and how much people learn is directed by their own choices and circumstances.” (National Academies, p. 197).
Maybe we’re figuring out how to use a new app, or we’re using that app to pick up the basics of another language. Or maybe we’re memorizing the lyrics and musical arrangements of all the songs on the album our favorite artist just dropped. Or we’re finally teaching ourselves how to spatchcock a chicken or the proper form for deadlifting. Or we’re matching faces to names in our new workplace or recalling navigation to that excellent coffee shop we stumbled across in our new neighborhood.
We can’t help ourselves. We learn stuff because we need to and because we want to. But mostly we do it because our brains are wired for it. Imagine how awful it would be if our brains DIDN’T do this! You sit down to watch the first episode of a new TV show that you’re all excited about, and then the next week, you have no recollection of the names of any of the characters or their relationships to one another or the conflicts that arose between them or the challenges that they faced. It would be as though every episode was the pilot for you.
Friends, Episode 2, “The One With All Those Guys Whose Names I Can’t Remember” (actually, it’s “The One With the Sonogram at the End,” Friends, created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, Season 1, Episode 2, Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions in association with Warner Bros. Television Studios, 1994)
Which, of course, it isn’t, because of all the things you learned in the last episode.
So saying “we hope to produce lifelong learners” is kind of like saying, “we hope to produce organisms that metabolize sugars or shed skin cells regularly.” What, then, do we mean when we say someone will be learning as long as they have life? No doubt there will be important variation in answers to this question, but as a starting point, I feel the majority of educational thinkers would insist that a lifelong learner remain healthily and energetically CURIOUS.
Me personally, I think curiosity is just the genuine hope that the head you lift off your pillow in the morning will have more new interesting bits in it before it hits the pillow again that night. To me it means feeling the tug of a mystery or the involuntary head-tilt of wonder and then indulging the feelings that follow.
But that’s just me. Naturally, when it came to what experts on the subject might think, I was understandably…erm…
In the mid-20th century, psychologist Daniel Berlyne noticed something unusual about curiosity, relative to other virtues or intellectual traits: it shared qualities with basic urges, like hunger and sex. Berlyne noted that hunger and sex cause sensations which prompt the body to take action in order to alleviate those sensations. The process of alleviation is often experienced pleasurably by the organism in question.
These, Berlyne observed, are the same basic elements of the experience of curiosity: a person comes up against a new environment or a question leading into a new realm of information. An internal “itch” forms, pushing the person to explore the environment or to find the answer to the question. Upon satisfying this urge, the person experiences a sense of pleasure, of varying intensity. This is the happiness we see on children’s faces when they open birthday presents, and it may be one reason sales of advent calendars are slated to almost double in the next 7-8 years.
The picture than finally answers the question, “What if a birdhouse and a croquembouche gave birth to an advent calendar?” (Accessed on Etsy.com, 6 August 2026)
Berlyne’s outline of the brain’s behavior during curious encounters has been verified by neuroscientists who tracked subjects’ neural activity with an fMRI scanner. Not only do we now know whence curiosity originates in the brain, but we have confirmed that satisfying curiosity produces the same sorts of dopamine bursts as good food or sexual release.
In fact, small amounts of dopamine are released even before curious urges are satisfied, during the “seeking” phase (for good or ill, this fact has been exploited by the makers of countless video games to keep players “engaged”). This likely contributes to children’s giddy enjoyment of such things as treasure hunts and hide-and-seek. It makes more complex puzzles more satisfying, as one must first address smaller unknowns in order to achieve the larger goal – like answering intersecting crossword clues to help work out the longest themed answers, or like taking on an adventure game’s smaller quests to receive information or items that help solve an overarching mystery.
Indeed, a good argument could be made for the most engaging element of curiosity being the element of surprise. When it comes to trying to cultivate a sense of curiosity in the classroom, this argument provides both one of the greatest educational opportunities and one of the greatest educational obstacles.
First the obstacle: formal curricula essentially function on the mathematical inverse of surprise. In most schools, each day’s lessons are fastidiously crafted, often after numerous iterations and adjustments. Learning objectives are known and frequently stated up front. The trajectory from the start of class (i.e. Arrival of Students Who Do Not Possess the Day’s Content and Objectives) to the end (i.e. Successful Installation of Content and Objectives in Students’ Minds) follows a relatively straight line, guided by leading questions, review of selected past material, and gentle exploration of new material. As a general rule, surprises tend to be treated as distractions that deplete precious minutes of class time and endanger the day’s mission.
But so often the best teachers behave like judo masters, finding ways to use the weight of obstacles as a force to defeat those same obstacles. Take for instance the review and statement of objectives that many teachers use to start their classes. I once knew a science teacher who had a set of boxes with resettable combination locks on them (something like this, or perhaps this, maybe this, or even this – unless you want to 3-D print your own). In each class, he’d put a series of review questions on the board; the answer to each question was the code to open one of the boxes. The first student to come up with an answer got to try opening a box – if it didn’t work, the student had to figure out their mistake and try again. If the combination worked, the student would open the box to discover some piece of that day’s lesson – a bit of lab equipment, perhaps, or a stated goal for the day on a piece of paper.
Here’s what the 3D-printed cryptex looks like, in case you were…curious (accessed at Printables.com on 11 August 2026)
Et voila! The element of surprise, rather than distracting from review and goals, becomes a fuel that pushes students to test their recall of past material and to find their goals for the day’s work! While some may suggest that this technique naturally lends itself to a science lesson, questions can be asked on any number of subjects. Students can be asked to find instances of specific images, motifs, or character behaviors in novels, with page numbers being used to calculate combinations. Similarly, questions leading to lock combinations could be asked in other languages, with the mystery boxes concealing sets of vocabulary for the day’s work.
Beyond this, it is important to note that the combination locks and strongboxes or cryptexes are merely props – the same effect could be achieved by having students recite answers as passwords to the teacher as “Spymaster” or “Sphinx”; in this role, she or he would, upon being told the correct password, hand out folded pieces of paper with nuggets about the day’s work.
But in truth, even this level of complexity may not be necessary. In her book, The Hungry Mind, the psychologist, researcher, and Williams College lecturer Susan Engel refers to a 1991 article by James Stigler and Harold Stevenson, “How Asian Teachers Polish Each Lesson to Perfection.” Early in the article, Stigler and Stevenson relate the story of a Grade 5 teacher in Japan who enters her classroom with a plain brown paper bag that makes a clinking noise as she walks to her desk, raising the interest of all the students in the room. At her desk, she removes six different glass containers from the bag – a bottle, a vase, a pitcher, and so on. She wonders aloud which would hold the most water, and the children shout their guesses. The teacher points out that they don’t all agree, then wonders again how to find out who is right. From here, the teacher largely follows the lead of the children: they want to fill the containers with water, so she arranges for water to be brought to the room. They want something to transfer water from the holding bucket to the different containers, so she provides paper cups. By the time the activity is over, the children have worked out for themselves what a bar graph is and how to read it, and they have planted seeds in their minds related to data integrity – all stemming from a paper bag and some wondering. (Engel, 181; Stigler and Stevenson, 2)
Archival photos of math classes from the 1920s
In their book In Search of Deeper Learning, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine tell analogous stories, notably one involving a high-school math class and a bag of balloons. Using a “see, think, wonder” protocol, students are encouraged to ask whatever questions they can (again, student questions are turned into the driver of the lesson, not the obstacle to be circumvented); some are answered, and some are not. Prompted by a student, the teacher blows up a balloon and wonders aloud, “How many breaths will it take to blow this up?” As students respond, the teacher then wonders if there might be a way to know how many breaths will fill any balloon. As the students begin suggesting methods, another teacher enters the room with a balloon large enough to hide behind – and the true challenge is set. (Mehta and Fine, 301)
All of these strategies can ensure that curiosity is exercised in classrooms, and schools might do well to provide professional development opportunities for faculty to brainstorm further possibilities and to receive training to employ them. That said, schools who wish to actually embed curiosity, who expect curiosity to endure through the lives of their students, will need to think more holistically – that is, to look at learning that goes on beyond the classroom.
When I was but a mere whippersnapper of a teacher, one of the first professional development workshops I attended included a viewing of the video, How Difficult Can This Be? by the acclaimed educator Rick Lavoie. About 56 minutes into the video, he discusses the work of the Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, noted for developing a framework of the stages of moral development in children. Lavoie illustrates one of Kohlberg’s central tenets by describing a fictitious week during which he (Lavoie) decides to formally educate his son on the virtue of honesty. His “curriculum” involves hours of readings about historic figures noted for their honesty, religious texts that offer wisdom on the subject, role-playing, and more. At the end of the week, to celebrate his son’s success in completing the work, Lavoie takes him to the movies, where prices for children under 12 are lower. Lavoie tells his son, “I know you’re 12, but when we get up to the counter, tell the lady that you’re 10.” Lavoie and Kohlberg assert that this five-second exchange with the boy teaches him more about honesty than all of the work of the preceding week.
I’ve been thinking about this moment in this video for over 35 years, because it illustrates a truth about education that we often overlook – a point entirely connected to my earlier remarks about “lifelong learning.” When we use that phrase “lifelong learning,” we typically have our eyes focused on a distant horizon, watching to make sure that our aging students continue to learn up through their octogenarian years and beyond (an observation, I repeat, that is unnecessary because human brains are neurologically wired blah blah blah). The point being, by focusing so far ahead, we miss a lot that’s happening at our feet.
The concern around lifelong learning seems to stem from our idea that learning is much harder to do when it happens outside classrooms (no, it isn’t). We educators can wear blinders as far as this idea goes, as though schools do Learning With a Capital L which is somehow distinct from and better than all other varieties of learning. Of course, if we tried to present this point of view to any toddler, they would look at us as though we had a third ear in the center of our collective forehead. After all, from Age Zero to the day they start school, children experience learning as watching, listening, climbing onto things, banging things against different things, occasionally popping smaller things (or smallish pieces of bigger things) into their mouths to see what can be gleaned that way, and of course asking 497,000 questions once words become available to them.
A book series from the 80s tried to help parents with children’s questions. This one has 60 pages just about things a velociraptor can run faster than.
In school, climbing, banging, and masticating are typically frowned upon as learning techniques. Which would be fine, if questions were allowed. But copious research tells us that, across the years of school, children ask fewer and fewer questions, likely due to being discouraged from doing so in the classroom. In The Hungry Mind, Susan Engel reports that preschool toddlers can ask as many as 107 questions every hour, but by the time many children are in Grade 5, the majority of questions asked in a classroom are being asked by teachers, as a way to direct students through a particular lesson. In one particularly bleak anecdote, Engel tells of a Grade 10 history class she observed, in which a student raised his hand to ask a question about the American Revolution. Rather than entertaining his inquiry, the teacher simply said, “I can’t answer questions right now. Now it’s time for learning” (Engel, 100).
Schools can preach curiosity all they want – they can put up posters about famous curious people, present guest speakers who offer exciting stories about curiosity, talk about curiosity in all school communications. But the moment a teacher says, “I can’t answer questions right now. Now it’s time for learning,” the students become Lavoie’s son in the ticket line, being told to lie about his age by his father. They understand that adults SAY things about curiosity and they BEHAVE certain ways with regard to curiosity, and they perceive a fundamental disconnect between what is said and what is done. This disconnect colors everything else the school tells them about curiosity.
It is incumbent on all schools, then, to look within themselves – perhaps to do an audit to see how often student questions are allowed in class. In such an audit, categorizing the variety of questions would be important: if teachers allow questions on the topic at hand, but never engage any questions that might lead a discussion even slightly afield, this signals an important idea to students about the school’s tolerance level for curiosity.
More than this, though, schools need to look beyond the classroom: if a child is late coming in from recess because she was transfixed watching a caterpillar snack on a leaf, or if a child, asked to put away PE equipment, attempts (repeatedly) to get a ball to bounce on every step of a staircase when dropped, are these punishable offenses? Are the reasons for the children’s behavior discussed?
And then there’s the matter of role models – to what degree are admin, faculty, and staff in the school assessed on their demonstrated curiosity? Is this a part of professional evaluations?
My father was truly one of the most curious people I’ve ever known. He made sure we had not just one complete encyclopedia, but several (these were the pre-interweb times, mere moments after Charlemagne rose to power), along with numerous other reference books. At the dinner table, as we all discussed our days, when words or topics came up with which my father was unfamiliar, he would pop up from his chair, walk into the room next door, and pull out whatever volume might appropriately sate his need for answers. It was from him, I believe, that I developed my own instinctive insistence on answers – to this day, whenever a question poses itself in my mind, I feel compelled to track down information that satisfies it.
(This is actually annoyingly true – earlier in this essay, for instance, I used the word “spatchcock.” While I was able to let it lie for my first few read-throughs of the draft, on my third reading I just couldn’t take it anymore. I mean, it’s an utterly bizarre word. I had to know where it came from. For those playing at home, I can tell you the prevailing theory is that the word is an old-time portmanteau of the phrase “dispatch a cockerel.” You’re welcome.)
The reference for the earliest known definition of “spatchcock” – Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, compiled by Francis Grose, Esq., originally in 1785, though this is from the third edition of his dictionary in 1823
Who are the role models of curiosity in your community? Here’s one test you can use to flush them out: ask students, “Which of your teachers is most likely to be distracted from classwork when students ask certain questions?” This isn’t a perfect test, to be sure, but students have a keen sense for teachers whose mind is only vaguely tethered to the matter at hand and ready to float away with the students into more interesting explorations – generations of students over the years have waged quiet psychological warfare trying to be the hero who subtly, gently, but effectively sets their teacher loose.
And when a teacher abandons the day’s work for other pursuits – current events, a construction project across the street, a paper airplane contest, the controversial final episode of a much-loved TV series – how is this viewed by his superiors? To complicate it further, if one teacher on a team is more prone to digression than others, and falls further and further behind in the units of study, is the curious teacher sanctioned? Or are the others on the team urged to indulge moments of curiosity? To use the tech vernacular, do you treat curiosity among faculty as a “bug” or a “feature”?
If you require inspiration, I could point you to the book, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character[1], one of the collections of memories of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. In the chapter, “The Amateur Scientist,” Feynman describes his period doing graduate work at Princeton and later working as a lecturer and researcher at Caltech, during which he developed a deep and ongoing fascination with the ants that lived around, and at times inside, his houses. Despite the activities having little or nothing to do with his actual studies, Feynman talks of long hours and elaborate experiments employed to understand ant behavior. Ultimately, what he learned enabled him to humanely remove an ant infestation from his pantry in California. One of the greatest minds of the past 100 years literally spent his time making bugs a feature. (Feynman, 93-97)
Feynman was not fired or chastised for his entomological pursuits; he was not told that his obsession with ants was creating problems in his lectures. Of course, it would be easy to look back and say, “Oh, well, but he did that because he’s a genius! That’s the way of geniuses – it’s part of their process.” And there may be some truth in this. But I feel that Feynman himself would say that this is not his process; it’s just the process. It’s the way our brains work.
Decades of research have shown that children’s curiosity is used by their brains to build ever more elaborate understandings of the world around them. As they encounter new elements of that world, children ask questions and assess and explore until they’re able to fit the new element into their expanded worldview. The larger we allow children’s worldview to become, the greater the resource they have to draw on when addressing challenges. Curiosity feeds development of confidence, risk-taking, and creative problem-solving.
Which means, if we are successful in supporting curiosity in the classroom AND we are able to avoid punishing curiosity outside the classroom AND we set up adults in the community who effectively model curiosity for children…then we…will probably need some way of knowing how well students develop curiosity, right?
I say this because in the examples I gave above, all the students were assessed on was the content delivered in the class, not on the level of curiosity they demonstrated. That science teacher I mentioned? He didn’t track who the first student was each day to start cracking the box codes, nor did he take notes on how the students investigated new pieces of lab equipment they may have uncovered. But he did caution students who were unsuccessful at opening a box, telling them they needed to review their old material more.
The students in that Japanese class? The teacher made sure they knew what a bar graph was, but no credit was awarded to students who fell silent and focused on the paper bag the second they noticed it, nor to those who asked the best questions once the glass bottles were revealed.
The curiosity was used as the key to the treasure, but it was not the treasure itself. Which makes no sense from a biological standpoint – earlier I referred to neurological studies that confirm that satisfying a curious urge causes a dopamine release in our brains. Dopamine is a vital chemical in human behavior construction: due to the curiosity/dopamine connection, humans find learning pleasurable; when humans find behaviors pleasurable, they have a greater tendency to continue those behaviors. Therefore, reinforcing the curiosity/dopamine response will likely strengthen the desire to learn.
Notice, if you will, that nowhere in the research does the content of the learning matter with regard to the dopamine response. In other words, taking an interest in the way the concept of quantum superposition enters into the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment will produce precisely the same neurological response as seeking out the answer to the question, “Hang on, was that a young Sam Rockwell I just saw in that second-season repeat of Law & Order?”
Spoiler alert: yes, it was (“Intolerance,” Law & Order, created by Dick Wolf, Season 2, Episode 20, Wolf Entertainment in association with Universal Television, 1992)
So using curiosity as a key and treating the content as the treasure misses the point: the content is not the thing that will produce lifelong learning – the key is. To put it as American author John Barth did in his 2001 novella, Dunyazadiad, “The key to the treasure IS the treasure.” (Barth, 11)
Now, we have all sorts of tests and standards and measures for our content, but very few instruments for measuring curiosity.
To start, there is the question of what, precisely, to assess when looking at children’s curiosity. When schools describe development in math and language, they utilize report cards that identify various learning components, such as those in this sample. Each smaller category addresses a different way a student’s skills in the larger category might manifest.
How might we understand curiosity in terms of its composite elements? For instance, does a child limit her curiosity to things that directly affect her in the moment? Or does she show equal investment in ideas entirely outside her realm of experience? What is the scope of her curiosity?
There is also the concept of engagement – when he receives his graded English essay back from his teacher, does a student simply look at the grade on top, and toss the paper away? Or does he look at the grade and immediately pore over the margins reading every one of the teacher’s comments? How quickly does he react to new things? How excited does he become?
Then we could consider students’ ability to generate questions (that is, once we build space for curious questions during our classes) – do students come up with questions quickly and easily? Can they access the vocabulary they need to express their questions clearly? Do their questions suggest avenues for discussion and/or exploration? Such considerations speak to the fluid nature of students’ curiosity.
With all this as a foundation, we might provide enough subheadings for our own reporting on students’ development of curiosity, using a reporting structure like this one:
Next, for each subheading related to ELA and math, there will exist sets of corresponding standards, achievement of which can be expressed as a point along a continuum (a grade, a number, perhaps a ranking like “Approaching/Meets/Exceeds”) with descriptors:
Analogous continua, then, would need to be constructed for curiosity’s subheadings. Take engagement. How might this manifest, in concrete terms? A child who does not engage with his curiosity might receive new information, but not do anything with it. He would not formulate follow-up questions on a topic, for example, or manipulate a new object to try to intuit its structure or operation.
A child whose engagement with curiosity is somewhat more developed, on the other hand, upon being presented with a new concept or object, will verbalize connections that reflect their interest – “I saw a bear like that at the zoo, only it was a lot bigger, and it wasn’t red,” or “My cousin has a white board that blows air like that, except it’s a game and it has legs.” These connections will naturally lead this child to questions, like “Is that bear in a zoo?” or “Can we play a game on that board too?”
Over time an engagement continuum takes shape:
While this continuum is incomplete (we haven’t stated how those students with heightened engagement might express it), it is worth noting that the continuum as written here could be used in any grade for any subject, not unlike many descriptors in conventional school subjects. Grade-specific variation there tends to be found in curricular standards and objectives.
One of the subcategories for mathematics achievement above was “Geometry.” This means that a school (or school district or local or national curriculum) will likely have written goals for students with regard to their geometry skills and knowledge, differentiated by grade. In Grade 6, for example, the Common Core sets this as one objective for students in geometry:
CCSS MATH CONTENT 6GA
Students will solve real-world and mathematical problems involving area, surface area, and volume.
Set under this objective are standards to demonstrate acquisition of the objective:
“CCSS MATH CONTENT 6GA1: Students will find the area of right triangles, other triangles, special quadrilaterals, and polygons by composing into rectangles or decomposing into triangles and other shapes; students will apply these techniques in the context of solving real-world and mathematical problems.”
Curiosity, then, should have comparable standards and objectives:
CCVE CURIOSITY CONTENT 6BD
Students will apply existing knowledge to speculate about newly encountered, real-world situations, across disciplines and outside the classroom.
“CCVE CURIOSITY CONTENT 6BD1: Students will use knowledge of area, volume, and geometry to interpret and make sense of new information and situations presented to them; students will actively employ these skills to determine the practicability and logic of new information.”
I envision a standard like this being assessed in any number of places:
- students given a chunk of honeycomb and a frame that is X by Y centimeters, who on their own set about determining how many cells the frame could have
- a debate during advisory over a local news article about a student arrested for a senior prank involving framing the football field with stolen flagpoles and the plausibility of said plan
- a girl doodling in her notebook with notes from The Maze Runner, using details of the kids’ activities to create a scaled map of the maze
These curriculum components for curiosity are only samples of what’s possible, of course, but even these provide a tantalizing taste of what a school might be like when it truly prioritizes curiosity. I find myself imagining answers to questions like…
How would lesson plans be different when designed to assess standards of curiosity?
How would classroom dynamics change when curiosity is a daily objective? How would dynamics change in other areas of school?
What would happen long-term to the student experience – to the interactions of students with one another and with teachers – as students grow in their curiosity?
I imagine a time in the not-too-distant future, at a brand-new school, where students are given more freedom, encouraged to follow their own pursuits alongside those of the school, but to do so as part of the formal curriculum, giving equal weight to what the students want to know and study. Setting up a lab to study ants, say, while they learn their physics.
Which, oddly enough, brings me back to that Doctor Who episode where I began. Because, as it happens, my description of that imaginary school strangely resembles Rattigan Academy, the institution founded by Luke Rattigan, with some of the billions he made from his tech empire. Turns out he has devised a plan that will render the Earth uninhabitable. But he’s not terribly concerned, as he has also worked out a way to survive while everyone else dies. And, worst-case scenario, he figures he can always just head off into space.
Can you imagine? I tell you – the ideas those scifi writers have…
Of course, Rattigan doesn’t succeed, partly because all his students turn on him when they find out he wants to kill their families and friends. If he’d been a little more interested in them as people, he might have twigged this sooner.
Mostly, though Rattigan loses because the Doctor grows curious about his goings-on. This is, for me, possibly the great secret to the long success of Doctor Who: it is a TV series built almost entirely around one man’s curiosity. The character of the Doctor actually started out as a bored inhabitant of the planet Gallifrey who wanted to “see the Universe,” so he stole a TARDIS (a machine to help him travel through time and space) and spent hundreds of years wandering around finding out about stuff.
Soooooo many episodes involve the Doctor wondering what made that ship crash, or why all the people on the station are cryogenically frozen, or what secrets the library can tell us about that alien creature. But even in small moments, when he’s not saving a planet, the Doctor’s primary motivation seems to be curiosity.
In one of my favorite old episodes, “The Ribos Operation,” the Doctor and his companion Romana have been taken prisoner by a bloodthirsty warlord, who believes they are in league with a con artist who tried to steal billions from him. The Doctor can’t resist the opportunity to ask the con artist questions about his past and what led him up to his latest caper. Romana, frustrated by his nonchalance, yells at him, “There are men out there planning to kill us, and you’re just sitting here?!” The Doctor reassures her warmly and invites her to sit with him, saying, “Oh, Romana, when you’ve faced death as many times as I have, this is much more fun.”
The Doctor & Romana find themselves in yet another curious situation (“The Ribos Operation, Part 3,” Doctor Who, created by Newman, Webber and Wilson, Season 16, Episode 3, BBC Television, 1978)
The Doctor’s curiosity is all the things we want children’s curiosity to grow up to be: broad and deep and fluid and obscure and constantly engaged. Many, many of the Doctor’s greatest foes are machines (or partly machines, anyway): the Daleks, the Cybermen, and the Great Intelligence, to name only the most obvious few. They are all fixated on their single purpose, which renders them uninterested in anything else. Invariably, it is this very predictability which has allowed the doctor to be so successful against all of them so very many times.
The Doctor points out that the Movellans, an army of androids obsessed with defeating the Daleks, never learned games like Rock, Paper, Scissors (“Destiny of the Daleks, Part 4,” Doctor Who, created by Newman, Webber and Wilson, Season 17, Episode 4, BBC Television, 1979)
What a fantastic role model for young people – all people really – in an age when technology is so often presented as an existential threat. The Doctor embodies the idea that technology can never defeat us or replace us, as long as we can exercise our curiosities. The Doctor is fascinated by stars and technology and history and music and art and biology. He is fascinated by the mysteries he encounters and wonders about ways to escape the perils facing him and the Earth and others. And in the midst of all that, he still finds time to be fascinated by people.
Which is something AI can never do. If you tell AI to write an article for you about curiosity, it won’t take time out to give you a psychological profile of the eponymous hero of a scifi TV show or to detail the nerdy preoccupations of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. And it certainly won’t show you a picture of the man who first committed the etymology of the word “spatchcock” to print. Because, as far as AI is concerned, these people are not important, so there is no need to mention them.
Just like there is no need to mention the fact that the etymology of “Doctor” is the Latin word docēre, meaning “to teach.” So the Doctor, it turns out, is not merely a role model for our students, but a role model for our teachers too.
Like the Doctor, we need to arrive in our schools ready to show our students that we can’t let things that frighten us keep us from connecting with people, getting to know them. Indeed, just as the Doctor delights in all the new people he meets and all the new places he visits, we need to model for our students the joy that comes from curiosity and discovery. Because that’s what curiosity’s kick of dopamine, that little neurochemical flicker, is: for lack of a better, more scientific word – it’s joy. Our curiosity about the world and each other is quite literally a joyous experience.
What a fantastic thing to teach our young people: not only is curiosity the superpower they can use to save the world, but as they do, they will feel incredible. You might say that the joy of curiosity is a kind of added bonus. But of course…
Works Cited
Barth, John. Chimera. New York: Random House, 1972.
Berlyne, Daniel E. Conflict, Arousal, and Curiosity. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1960.
Engel, Susan. The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.
Feynman, Richard. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!” – Adventures of a Curious Character. New York: Vintage, 1985.
Lavoie, Richard. How Difficult Can This Be? Understanding Learning Disabilities. PBS Video, 1989.
Mehta, Jal and Sarah Fine. In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2018.
Stigler, James & Harold Stevenson. “How Asian Teachers Polish Each Lesson to Perfection.” American Educator, No. 15, January 1991.
[1] I was very sad to learn that the sequel to this book was NOT entitled, “No, I’m Not Joking, and Stop Calling Me Shirley!”: Further Adventures of a Curious Character
