Curiosity, Experiments & Questions
My younger daughter who is 3 years old had a string in her hand and she was trying to wrap this string around the knob of a drawer, while I was busy on my phone and suddenly I heard her calling me. I asked her what happened? She said can you help me to wrap this string around the knob. So I asked her “Why do you need to wrap it around?”. She didn’t reply. I asked her again “Why you want me to wrap this string around the knob?” She didn’t reply again. I knew she wanted to try and pull out the drawer using that string but I didn’t say anything as I wanted to know what her answer would be. So I tried asking her again the third time, why do you want me to do this. No Reply again. I finally gave up and asked her, do you want to pull the drawer? She said “Yes”, I said “Ok!, why don’t you just pull it with the knob, why do you want it to be wrapped with a string?
To this she replied, Because I want to do so. I want to wrap and then pull out.
You see such answers are very common with children, where they don’t put their logical minds to experiment or put constraints to experiment with new objects and things around them. They just have fun exploring and trying new things in new ways.
The other day when we visited a public toilet, her question was about the “Public toilet Doors”, why don’t they go all the way down? I was so amazed at my 3 year old daughter questioning such thing, that I as an adult never questioned it.
Our schooling & education system rewards children for the answers they produce, but rarely on the questions they ask. Behind every chapter in our CBSE textbooks, you will find questions which are created by adults and children are expected to know these answers for the questions. If you look at these questions, you would know, no child could ask such questions. You will come across a completely different set of questions if you let the children question the topic in an open forum. We are missing a big part in our education system, our children’s questions. Creating a space for them to question freely on the learning topic and not on the structure of “where to write”, “What to write”, “When to submit”. Even if we go multi disciplinary in our education but the main core needs to change is to let them question, let them experiment and let them try new things in a practical way. We need to let them create their own theories and their own learning models before we feed them through a general pipe of outcome which are answers to the defined questions. How can we change if our questions does not change for the topics which has been laid for years. The real curiosity can be grown by making them question and not asking them answers for the questions which are prepared by adults..
Children’s curiosity, their experiments and their questions are so amazing that sometimes it challenges your own thought process and makes you learn to question even the basics of things.
Their curiosity and their questions teaches and reinforces my thought process about “Experiments”, “Experimental Mindset” & “Innovation”.
To have an experimental mindset, you ought to Be like Children “No Constraints” “No predefined approach”, “No Logical Reasoning “ “Just Curious to question”, “to try and learn”.
You might discover something new or learn something with just this curiosity to have fun while doing some experiments.
#experimenters #experimentalmindset #questioning #childlikecuriosity
