When I was somewhere around five years old, my father asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I responded, “a starving artist.” I imagine it was received with the warmth of an entertained chuckle, but I was quite serious. I was going to draw my way through the world, observing what I could, learning as much as possible, ever curious about everything I encountered; so started my love for Leonardo da Vinci. I was quite in tune with my creativity, and my family indulged my passion with everything from memberships to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, to art classes, acting classes, and books on books on books, especially my favorite – a compilation of Leonardo’s notebooks. Growing older I realized making art was not, as it turns out, my forte and, though I still take time now and then to indulge in some art-making in my free moments, I opted instead to study art. I majored in both English and Art History, which left me quite often with more questions than answers. That curiosity never waned, thank God.
My favorite part about my studies was how it helped me grow as a person, as a member of society, questioning what traditions we had and why, what was important to our ancestors, through what they wrote about and painted, and why. Why? Always the question, why? I could turn this article into an argument on how this makes the Humanities such an important area of study often overlooked by American schools, but I’ll save you from it… this time.
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However, it does make me question education in general. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my brief introduction to the educational system and Common Core State Standards, it’s that we have a history of making our children’s education SO answers-based that we stifle their natural curiosity, the very thing they should be training. There’s right answers, wrong answers, and a curriculum to get through, so there’s not enough time to allow the myriad of questions that brews in every child’s mind, but I argue that those questions are exactly what we need to entertain. The worst thing we can do is to stifle a child’s curiosity in the interest of pushing them to get through school just to have an “education”. School should not be treated as something to just “get through” so that they can have a degree under their belts. An education is worth nothing when students have not truly learned. That is why Albert Einstein said that “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think” and “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”
It is not teaching dissent to allow students to question why they’re in school and learning what they’re learning. I argue that’s what they should be doing. However, it is the educator’s job to harness their curiosity and teach to it, to show them that it IS important to question, to be curious, and then to show them how to use it. By all means, teach the facts, the books, the curriculum, but also teach our children how to DISCOVER the world around them, so that they might know it truly.
Leonardo and Einstein have one major thing in common, and no, it’s not that they’re geniuses. It’s their curiosity. They sought to learn by being observing and questioning everything around them. Leonardo was not just a painter, but a botanist, biologist, inventor and philosopher. Einstein was so far ahead of his time we are only just now beginning to prove some of his theories correct. And how did they learn to harness that curiosity? Not in their desks, sitting singularly in a row in a stifled classroom, memorizing tables and conjugations and literary devices and historic fact, but by seeing the world around them and questioning why it was the way it was, that there might be some way to change it, better it, by understanding it fully. They did not settle for “well, that’s just the way it is.” They challenged the world by knowing it better than anyone else, and did not use it to their own devices, but to benefit others. THAT is a true education.
I think that’s something this world could use a lot of right now.
