Every child begins life as a question asker. Why is the sky blue? Where do butterflies sleep? Why can’t I see my thoughts? Curiosity is our earliest teacher, our brain’s engine for exploration and learning. From infancy, we are wired to wonder (Kidd & Hayden, 2015). But curiosity does not emerge, or endure, in isolation. It is sparked, sustained, and shaped through relationships, through how others respond when a child reaches out with a question.
Today, that relational scaffolding is eroding. We are living through two quiet but profound crises.
The first is a crisis of curiosity. Across childhood and into adulthood, people are asking fewer questions, taking fewer intellectual risks, and spending less time learning new things. Research shows that curiosity declines sharply as children move through school. Kindergarteners ask roughly 26 questions an hour; by middle school, that number drops to fewer than two (Engel, 2021). Recent analyses suggest the same pattern now extends into early adulthood. The share of young adults who express trouble learning new things has increased meaningfully in the past decade (Burn-Murdoch, 2025).
This decline in curiosity is often misread as developmental. It isn’t. It is systemic and relational. Children learn—through testing culture, social norms, and performance pressure—that answers are rewarded more than inquiry, efficiency more than exploration, and certainty more than wondering aloud. A U.S. study of high-achieving students found they were less curious because curiosity was perceived as risky to grades and outcomes (Engel, 2021).
The second crisis is a crisis of connection. Social ties are thinning. Children and adults have fewer friends (Survey Center on American Life, 2021; Twenge et al., 2019). Classrooms feel more evaluative than relational, and workplaces feel more transactional than developmental. Digital systems are increasingly replacing human exchange. Loneliness is rising even as information becomes abundant.
These two crises are not parallel. They are deeply connected.
Curiosity is not simply an individual trait or mindset; it is a relational capacity. We ask questions when we feel safe to not know, when uncertainty is welcomed rather than penalized, and when learning is shared rather than performed. As social connection erodes, curiosity withers.
This matters because curiosity is a core skill of the future. Far from being a distraction from learning, curiosity is its deepest source (Gruber et al., 2014). It fuels learning, creativity, problem solving, and adaptability—capacities that cannot be automated, even as AI accelerates access to answers.
If we want to prepare learners for an AI-shaped world, we must address both crises at once. Rebuilding curiosity requires rebuilding relationships across classrooms, families, and communities where questions are invited rather than rushed; where learning is social rather than solitary; and where wonder is treated not as inefficiency, but as the starting point of growth.
The Neuroscience of Wonder
From the moment of birth, the human brain is wired for curiosity. Infants exhibit what scientists call “preferential looking” (Fantz, 1963). They spend more time gazing at novel or surprising events because their brains are actively seeking prediction errors—the gaps between what they expect and what they observe. They are looking for signals that something is worth learning. This is not passive absorption; it is active neural construction.
Neuroscientists discovered that states of high curiosity activate the brain, not only for the information we’re curious about but also for incidental information encountered at the same time (Gruber et al., 2014). Curiosity, it turns out, opens a neurological window (Kang et al., 2009). When we wonder, we learn better, remember longer, and connect ideas more richly.
The regions associated with motivation and reward light up during curiosity states, creating what researchers call the “curiosity loop” (Kang et al., 2009): The brain predicts, encounters novelty, releases dopamine, and then seeks resolution. This cycle drives infants to explore their environments, toddlers to disassemble toys, and children to ask the relentless “why?” that characterizes early childhood.
But here’s what makes curiosity uniquely human: It requires safety (Lerner et al., 2019). The brain must signal that the environment is secure before exploratory circuits can activate. When a child feels threatened, judged, or invisible, the amygdala—the brain’s fear detection system—hijacks attention, shutting down the very neural pathways that enable wondering.
In my book Love to Learn: The Transformative Power of Care and Connection in Early Education (PublicAffairs, 2025), I make the case that love is a neurobiological condition for learning. By love, I don’t mean romantic love, but rather the micro-moments of deep connections between humans. When students experience those connections, they develop relational intelligence—the skills of relating, trust, and collaboration that underlie not just learning, but lifelong flourishing.
Curiosity, then, is not only cognitive; it is fundamentally relational. The brain learns best in the context of trusted relationships. When children feel safe, supported, and valued, their natural drive to explore can fully ignite, and learning becomes not a performance, but a joyful act of discovery.
When Relationships Ignite—or Extinguish—Curiosity
Young children’s brains are optimized for exploration, with more synaptic connections than adult brains, allowing them to form novel associations and test hypotheses at astonishing speed. But this neural plasticity depends on co-regulation. When a caregiver responds to a child’s curiosity with interest—leaning in, extending the question, wondering alongside them—the child’s brain receives a neurochemical cocktail of oxytocin and dopamine that reinforces exploratory behavior. The brain registers: My curiosity is valued. Wondering is safe.
In high-quality early childhood programs—Reggio Emilia schools, Montessori classrooms, and exemplary preK settings like those in Boston Public Schools—educators create what neuroscience would call “optimal curiosity conditions.” (Shah et al., 2023). When a three-year-old spends 20 minutes watching a snail, their hippocampus encodes, their prefrontal cortex hypothesizes, and other brain circuits consolidate learning. Teachers in these settings document children’s theories, extend their investigations, and treat questions as invitations rather than interruptions. The environment becomes a laboratory where wonder is the curriculum.
But access to these brain-building environments is profoundly unequal. While some children experience daily invitations to explore—small teacher-to-child ratios, open-ended materials, unhurried schedules—others encounter early learning environments constrained by large class sizes, rigid curricula, and teachers stretched too thin to follow a child’s curiosity. This creates what we might call a “curiosity gap” that begins in preschool and compounds over time. When some children’s brains receive consistent relational support for wondering while others are trained early for compliance, we create divergent neural pathways before formal schooling even begins.
Further, when a child’s curiosity is met with dismissal, redirection, or impatience, whether due to systemic pressures or simple adult exhaustion, the brain can register this as a threat. Over time, repeated experiences like this can sensitize the brain, dampening curiosity and engagement. Children learn to inhibit their questions to avoid the emotional pain of being ignored or corrected.
When teachers say, “I’ve never thought about that—let’s explore,” they activate mirror neurons in students’ brains.
This is why kindergarteners ask a lot more questions than middle schoolers. The decline isn’t developmental; it’s relational. Research by neuroscientist Leah Somerville (2011) shows that adolescence is marked by heightened neural sensitivity to social evaluation, making teens especially attuned to peer judgment and the risk of embarrassment. Asking a question becomes an act of vulnerability, a public admission of uncertainty in a context where the brain is hypersensitive to social risk.
The question marks fall silent not because curiosity disappears, but because the relational conditions that support it erode.
Why Schools Inadvertently Suppress Curiosity
Across grade levels, most teachers report that curiosity and student engagement are essential to learning, yet the structure of schooling systematically suppresses it (Engel, 2021). Here are four reasons why.
Wonder doesn’t run on a bell schedule.
Learning requires time for synaptic consolidation—the process by which short-term experiences become long-term memories. The brain needs space to encode and time to integrate new information with existing schemas. Curiosity, meanwhile, is inherently unpredictable. Early childhood educators know that a puddle after a rainstorm can become an inquiry into ecosystems, a question about shadows can spark an exploration of light. But as children enter formal schooling, time becomes rigid. A genuine question may be difficult to answer in a teaching block. When teachers face pacing guides and test windows, they must choose: Follow the curriculum or follow the child’s neural readiness to learn. Under pressure, the curriculum usually wins.
Curiosity can look like chaos.
When students wonder aloud, debate, test hypotheses, and revise ideas, their brains are highly active. The default mode network—associated with creative thinking and mental exploration—becomes engaged. Students may appear off task—talking, moving, gesturing, drawing—and educators might tamp down what seems like a chaotic learning environment.
But this is precisely what deep learning looks like. The brain’s executive networks (responsible for focused attention) and default networks (responsible for imagination and connection-making) must communicate dynamically for complex learning to occur. Classrooms optimized for quiet compliance inadvertently suppress this neural collaboration.
The system rewards one right answer.
Standardized assessments measure what neuroscientists call “convergent thinking”—the ability to arrive at a single correct answer. But curiosity is divergent. It generates multiple possibilities, explores tangents, tolerates ambiguity.
From elementary through high school, report cards, rubrics, and grades reward speed and accuracy. Students learn that inhibiting curiosity and producing expected answers receive external rewards (grades, praise, gold stars), and their brains produce dopamine hits as a result. Over time, these external rewards override intrinsic motivation. The brain’s curiosity circuits—designed to seek novelty—become subordinated to performance circuits designed to avoid failure.
Teachers are caught in a system that fears uncertainty.
Teachers don’t suppress curiosity because they don’t value it. They suppress it because:
- Teacher evaluations emphasize classroom management, standards coverage, and “time on task”—metrics that favor control over exploration.
- Large class sizes make it neurologically impossible to track and respond to 30 or more simultaneous curiosity trajectories.
- Chronic stress and exhaustion deplete the resources needed for improvisational teaching.
- Unpredictable questions can expose gaps in teachers’ own knowledge, triggering the brain’s social threat response.
In schools with high teacher turnover, overcrowded classrooms, and insufficient materials—conditions more common in under-resourced communities—the conditions that suppress curiosity intensify. Teachers operate in survival mode (high cortisol, low autonomy, constant monitoring), relying on procedural routines to reduce cognitive load. Curiosity becomes a liability they cannot afford.
Wonder-Full Classrooms
Despite these curiosity-suppressing challenges, teachers can make strategic, thoughtful moves to encourage wondering in their students. Encouraging curiosity doesn’t mean abandoning structure. It means restructuring relationships to activate the brain’s learning systems. The practices that work in high-quality early childhood settings can—and must—extend upward through every grade level. Here are some ways to replicate them.
Create a safe space for wondering.
When teachers consistently respond to questions with interest—even if they can’t pursue them immediately—they signal to students’ brains: Your curiosity matters. You are safe to wonder here. This predictability calms the amygdala and allows the prefrontal cortex to allocate resources toward exploration rather than self-protection.
Practices that build this safety:
- A Wonder Wall—a designated space where students can post questions and curiosities using sticky notes or other materials (borrowed from early childhood practice).
- “Curiosity pauses” embedded into lessons: What do you notice? What surprises you?
- Public celebration of questions, not just answers.
In under-resourced schools where these practices have been implemented—often through partnerships with organizations focused on inquiry-based learning—teachers report that students who rarely spoke began contributing, that classroom behavior improved (because engaged brains are regulated brains), and that standardized test scores often rose as a secondary benefit of deeper learning.
Show students the unexpected.
The brain learns most powerfully when it encounters something unexpected. Instead of beginning with explanations, teachers can present puzzling phenomena: a video of a plant moving toward light, an image of frost patterns, a dataset with an anomaly. This activates the brain, which detects conflict between prediction and observation.
This approach mirrors what happens naturally in play-based early childhood classrooms: a cardboard box becomes a rocket ship, a rainbow becomes a mystery. The materials might be humble—water, sand, magnifying glasses—but the cognitive architecture is sophisticated. These same principles apply in secondary classrooms, where a puzzling graph or historical photograph can generate the same neural curiosity as a preschooler examining a beetle.
Model curiosity to normalize not-knowing.
When teachers say, “I’ve never thought about that—let’s explore,” they activate mirror neurons in students’ brains. Students observe an adult modeling exploratory behavior without anxiety, which down-regulates their own fear of uncertainty.
Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (2007) found that learning is most powerful when it involves emotional resonance. When teachers wonder aloud, they create emotional permission for students to do the same.
Let students explore together.
Small-group inquiry, partner talk, and collaborative problem solving allow students’ nervous systems to co-regulate. The social engagement system enables students to stay calm and curious in the presence of trusted peers.
A 12-year-old’s brain still needs what a 3-year-old’s brain needs: relational safety, unhurried time to explore, and adults who believe their questions matter.
This is why early childhood educators rely on small groups: They intuitively understand that connection activates exploration. Yet as children move through school, collaborative learning often gives way to individual seatwork—precisely the opposite of what developing brains need. At Design Tech High School in California, for example, learning is organized around interdisciplinary, real-world projects, with students working in small teams to investigate authentic questions and share their thinking publicly. Because assessment emphasizes revision, reflection, and exhibitions rather than tests, curiosity is encouraged through structure, time, and relationships.
Advocate for curiosity conditions for all.
Protecting curiosity cannot fall solely on individual teachers. It requires systemic advocacy:
- Reducing class sizes so teachers can respond to individual wonder.
- Providing planning time for inquiry-based instruction.
- Expanding access to high-quality early learning programs.
- Eliminating policies that punish schools for exploration.
- Funding professional development in pedagogies of curiosity.
- Creating evaluation systems that value student questions, not just quiet compliance.
- Developing measures of curiosity, such as Stanford University’s MAGIC research initiative, which aims to design performance-based assessment tasks to measure students’ curiosity and creative thinking.
When early childhood models of learning—where curiosity is protected, relationships are central, and time follows the child—are extended through K–12, all students benefit. But students facing systemic barriers benefit most. Inquiry-based, relationally responsive teaching narrows achievement gaps precisely because it addresses the conditions under which all brains learn best (Freeman et al., 2014; Immordino-Yang et al., 2019).
Humanity’s Competitive Advantage
We have entered an era in which artificial intelligence can retrieve information, solve equations, summarize texts, and generate explanations in seconds. But AI cannot wonder. It cannot feel the pull of the unknown or discern which questions are meaningful, ethical, or worth pursuing. The more powerful AI becomes, the more essential human curiosity becomes.
To ignite that curiosity, we must rehumanize learning: more connection, more trust, more room to wonder aloud. When children feel seen, safe, and invited to explore, their brains do exactly what they were designed to do—seek, connect, and grow.
This requires extending the wisdom of early childhood education upward, recognizing that a 12-year-old’s brain still needs what a 3-year-old’s brain needs: relational safety, unhurried time to explore, and adults who believe their questions matter. And it requires insisting that curiosity-rich learning is not a luxury for affluent schools, but a civil right for every child, in every community.
In the end, perhaps the most transformative words an educator or parent can offer are also the simplest: “I see you. Let’s wonder together.”
