Around 15-24 weeks into pregnancy, a mother starts feeling the kick of her child. It is a very fascinating and surreal moment as a parent. But, the curiosity of a child begins here. It is a subtle act of letting know the mother that she has had enough in her womb and is curious about exploring the world. When a child opens her eyes to see the world for the first time, she is scared and cries immediately but as time progresses, she starts babbling not only with living beings around her but also with objects, things, furniture and what not. When she is placed on her baby bed, she rolls her head in the direction of the movement of adults. She laughs when we laugh, she cries when frowned upon, she imitates the actions of adults and she carefully observes the phonetics of simple sounds like mama, papa and try to reproduce the same and is nearly there many a times and her curiosity just gets better from now on.
When she reaches the age of crawling, she creates chaos in the house. she tries to reach every nook and corner of the house, curious to know what's out there. She tries to put every bit of debris present on the floor into her mouth curious to know the taste may be😆. Whenever you sit at a place holding her even for a few minutes, her first instinct is to get away from you and crawl to explore the world. But as soon as you stand and even if she sniffs a dime that you are going out of the home, no matter where she is, she comes cruising towards you and opens her arms to lift her up and raises her arm showing the way out. Such is her curiosity.
When she crawls, she is curious to walk, when she walks, she is curious to run and then to jump and so on. A child's curiosity is like an Akshayapatra, it is never ending, atleast as long as she remains a child.
Does it mean that a child tend to lose curiosity as she turns into an adult? The answer is a yes for the majority out there. A research conducted by NASA shows that children in the age group of 5-10 years scored 98 percentile in a creative test and when same test is conducted after 5 years for the same set of children, they could hardly score 30 percentile and even worse, when they became adults in high school, the score dropped to a meagre 12 percentile. This study is an apt depiction of how a curious child turns into a boring adult. But why is it so?
The answer lies in the question itself!! The word "Why". This is a word which is most often used by children but hardly used by any adult today. My grandmother tells me about all the weird questions I used to ask as a kid. Listening to a few of those questions now, I would simply laugh and think of how naïve and ignorant I was as a kid. But hidden behind those weird questions was the curiosity to know what I did not know. And she tells me that most of those questions would start with the same why. But, what could be possible reasons for diminishing rate of usage of why in adults. Is it the education system? Or is it the physiological changes responsible? Or is it simply laziness😝. Let's see!!
First day of school is the most memorable event in a child's as well as in a parent's life. While a child feels insecure about entering into a new environment, a parent dreams of his child being successful one day, mostly with a job in the hand after college. But we fail to acknowledge that the current education system has its own flaws. In a way it restricts a child's ability to think with an open mind. I still remember being given a slate in my childhood. My teacher used to draw an alphabet on it and ask us to redraw the same alphabet on the one she already drew. This process used to repeat many times and it is the beginning of what is called 'Conditioning of mind'. Also almost everyone of us remember being taught "A for Apple, B for Ball" and so on. That's the beginning of learning process for most of us. Even today, when I pass over my school, I hear loud chants of the same phrase uttered by kinder garden kids in a perfect sync and rhythm.
We acquire so much knowledge through out schooling but we fail to be curious about the questions that decide our life. For instance, what do I really like to do in life? Am I really following my passion? We learn a lot of subjects through out our schooling ranging from Math, science, economics and even humanities but if you ask a student at the end of secondary school to name a subject that instills curiosity so as to pursue it as a career, in most cases you may not get an answer.
People around us mostly relatives, ask "Hey!! what are you doing" but they don't ask "Hey!! What do you really like to do?" Your life is well poised if you have an answer for the later!!
This blog is a subtle attempt to remind the readers that as long as there is a child in every one of us, there can't be an end to the curiosity. I will be posting short stories in the form of the conversation between a daughter (Nidhi) and her father (Vasu) as to how Nidhi's questions ignites curiosity in a boring adult, Vasu.
Thank you for your time. Hope to see you soon!!
Very thoughtful :)
ReplyDeleteThought-provoking!
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