Watch a four-year-old for ten minutes. Why is the sky blue? Where does the rain go? What happens if I mix these two? They run experiments all day long, treating the world like one big laboratory and themselves as the lead researcher. No one teaches a toddler to be curious. It comes built in, like a heartbeat. Now picture that same child at fourteen, slouched in a Grade 8 classroom, hand firmly down, eyes on the clock. The questions haven’t vanished. They’ve gone underground.
In The Curiosity Curve, narrative scientist Debra Clary makes a point that should stop every parent and teacher in their tracks: Curiosity isn’t a gift some children are born with, and others lack. It’s a muscle. And like any muscle left in a sling, it wastes away when it isn’t used. Clary argues that two forces are responsible for the wasting. The first is the pressure to conform, the quiet social rule that says putting your hand up too often makes you the odd one out. The second is a schooling habit that prizes the right answer on the test over the messy, fruitful business of actually wondering.
Here in Cape Town we know what a neglected muscle looks like. Leave a bicycle out in the southeaster for a winter, and the chain seizes, the gears grind, the thing that once flew downhill now barely turns. Curiosity rusts the same way. Not through one dramatic blow, but through a thousand small moments where a child’s question was met with “we don’t have time for that now.”
To understand why this matters, it helps to look under the bonnet. Clary describes Curiosity as a coordinated event in the brain. When a child senses there’s something new to learn, the midbrain, the seat of drive and desire, switches on. It’s wired to the hippocampus, the memory centre, which stores the new information. And the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward hub, lights up too, releasing a small hit of pleasure the moment discovery happens. In plain terms, the brain pays the child for being curious, and that little payment trains them to come back for more.
This has a quiet implication most of us miss. Every time we answer a child’s question for them, like handing over a parcel they didn’t get to unwrap, we pocket the reward that was meant for them. The discovery still happens, but the pleasure of finding out goes to the wrong person. Do that a thousand times and you’ve taught a child that Curiosity is something other people do on your behalf.
There’s also a sweet spot worth naming, because Curiosity can misfire in two directions. Too little, and a child runs on autopilot, bored and disengaged, doing the bare minimum to get through the period. Too much, and their attention scatters like marbles dropped on a hard floor, every shiny idea chased and none seen through. The skill we’re really building isn’t just more Curiosity. It’s Curiosity that can go deep, that can stay with a hard problem long enough to crack it.
So what do we actually do? Clary’s answer is refreshingly practical and lands squarely within the Rudder4Success way of working. You don’t lecture a child into Curiosity. You model it.
Picture a child who asks why the tide comes in. The quick route is to answer: the moon, gravity, done, on with the day. The richer route costs thirty seconds: “Good question. What do you think pulls the sea up the beach?” Now the child is doing the lifting, and the reward hit lands where it belongs. When they guess wrong, treat the wrong answer as a clue rather than a failure, the way a doctor treats a symptom as information rather than an insult. When they bring you an odd idea, give it a moment of genuine air before you judge it.
For a classroom, the moves are small but compounding. Start a lesson with a question whose answer nobody yet knows. Reward the good question as loudly as the right answer. Let a learner sit with “I’m not sure” for a beat instead of rescuing them. Say “I don’t know, let’s find out” yourself, often, so they learn that not knowing is a doorway rather than a dead end. Children read us like weather reports. If the adult in the room is openly curious and unbothered by uncertainty, the child learns that uncertainty is safe to walk into rather than something to flee from.
This is the quiet engine underneath Rudder4Life’s Teenage Guide Rudders: Knowing Myself and Guiding Myself. A young person who has learned to ask bold questions of the world has also learned to ask them of their own choices. The same muscle that wonders “how does this work?” eventually wonders “is this who I want to be?” Curiosity, practised young, becomes self-reflection later.
There’s an Ubuntu truth threaded through all of this. A child’s Curiosity is not theirs alone to keep alive. It is held in trust by the adults around them, kept warm by every teacher who pauses and every parent who answers a question with a better one. We are, each of us, the keepers of someone else’s wonder.
The good news in Clary’s research is that the rust comes off. Curiosity rebuilds with practice, at any age, in any classroom. The bicycle can be oiled. The question is simply whether the adults will pick up the can.
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