A Curricular Countermemory of Curiosity

• In Event: Roots and Routes: Revisiting Dilemmas in The Purpose of Education

Abstract

Curiosity has been presumed to be natural to the growth of the child and the progress of science across a century of educational reforms, policy, and research. This paper traces how presuming curiosity as human nature elides a more complex history that links contemporary discourses of cognitive skill, psychological disposition, or scientific virtue to a romanticized child and functional psychology at the turn of the 20th century. As a counter-memory to the cognitivism that presumes curiosity’s timeless and innate nature, the paper suggest that claims of curiosity’s intrinsic nature need to be understood as reinscribing populational quality control, wherein curiosity offers a comparative marker to generate differences and exclusions that erects the non-crossable borders of “the West.”

Author

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison