Let me cut the preamble and get straight to the answer, which is: No.
Anecdotal evidence 1
I went to traditional schools with an array of largely indifferent teachers, and it did not kill my curiosity. The literature lessons were rather boring, and that put me off literature for quite some time; I disliked the chemistry teacher, and that killed any ambitions I might have had in that department; but I still managed to leave school with a profound intellectual curiosity. Assuming I am not a freak, my own experience leads me to believe that if a few children have some innate intellectual curiosity, a run-of-the-mill school like the one I went to with uniforms and all the desks in rows facing the front and the lessons beginning and ending by the bell, is unlikely to kill it.
Anecdotal evidence 2
Over the years I have made a close study of two female children. They have also been going to run-of-the-mill schools. Up to a certain age they would respond enthusiastically to the idea of going out on little educational field trips into the surrounding countryside looking for mini-beasts (a term used by their teachers, and one that I was happy to borrow). After a certain age that enthusiasm completely vanished. Why? Was it school? Perhaps the more rigorous high-school biology lessons with the dreaded SATS took the edge off things, but I don’t think that was the decisive factor. No, to be perfectly blunt, the decisive factor was sex. Field trips meant wearing boots and other clothing suitable for tramping around the countryside – all utterly sexless – and if you have just spent hours doing your nails, you don’t want to be outdoors doing things that might damage them.
However, it is not hormones that kill curiosity; it is a certain kind of culture. Compared to school, a far greater threat to intellectual curiosity is posed by the premature sexualisation of the young. The intellectually curious person gives all her attention to the object of knowledge. Some of the things in schools that people have objected to – things like uniforms – can help to tone down the self-centred liveliness of the child and create the space in which the mind might give all its attention to something beyond itself. Outside school, though, the trend in the West is to heighten the child’s concern with her (prematurely sexualised) image to such a degree that it begins to stifle intellectual development.
Curiosity about what?
Some of the talk about curiosity seems to run together different kinds of curiosity. On the one hand there is the intellectual curiosity that ultimately matters in a modern education. On the other hand, there is the sort of curiosity present in the very young child that must make sense of an unfamiliar world. Doubtless children are born with lots of the latter, but not the former. Intellectual curiosity is something that needs to be cultivated. If it were otherwise, civilisation wouldn’t have been progressing so slowly and so fitfully for the past 5,000 years.
The cruder sort of curiosity seems safe both in our schools and in our society at large. The ratings for soap operas would drop to zero if no one were curious about how the story is going to unfold.
As far as intellectual curiosity is concerned, we need to look beyond schools to see why we are failing to encourage it.
Bashing the wrong thing
Education is not just schooling. Arguably, the most important lessons in life are learned outside school. Where do young people learn that footballers are more important than scholars? Not in school. Now, if the culture outside schools is more of an educational force than schooling, and if it is antithetical to intellectual curiosity, then we should be bashing it, not schooling. I side with those who see, if not a wholesale dumbing down of culture, a massive failure to create a more intellectually engaging public life. When students see that image is far more important than boring old linear discourse, when the most prominent people in society are sportspeople, entertainers and celebrities, and when there is no great and hallowed debate that they are being called upon to join, and instead are obliged merely to join the workforce, where employers, in the first instance, just want to see that they have the right certificates, intellectual curiosity loses its meaning and purpose, and only a few oddball characters who are able to ignore the general tide of history will manage to sustain it.
But why all the fuss about curiosity?
Why make curiosity the central plank of a critique of schooling? Is curiosity the key to education? What sort of society would it be that made curiosity the key and left individuals free to go wherever their own peculiar interests took them? Wouldn’t it resemble Jonathan Swift’s Laputa, full of unschooled individuals lost in their private intellectual worlds, unable ultimately to form anything amounting to a community?
To make sense of the priorities in education we first need to imagine what a better society would be like. Suggestion: A slightly better society would be one that is held together more by a shared understanding of itself – an understanding that is instituted as one that can be continually challenged and debated. In such a society, schools would need to encourage an awareness of how important that shared understanding is, and they would need to plan lessons on how societies in the dark epochs of the past relied upon much cruder techniques of social adhesion – techniques like propaganda, advertising, dawn to dawn entertainment, personal debt, fear of unemployment, etc. If teachers did their job well, some students would be curious to know more about this great intellectual tradition. Here, curiosity is not the be all and end all, because what ultimately matters is the object we are to devote our curiosity to, and the significance of that object is something that has to be socially instituted.
With a different view of the good society, we end up with a different critique of contemporary schooling: the criticism that they do not provide the intellectual framework for any such newly invigorated democratic society – a society in which people abandon their home cinemas and hurry past the empty football stadia on their way to the town hall to discuss all the latest issues. But, again, it would be silly to criticise schools for failing to prepare students for a world that does not yet exist. Inevitably, they have to prepare students for the world that they will in fact face, and if that is an intellectually stultifying world, the effects will be felt with equal inevitability inside school.
