Instinctual Curiosity: From Pedagogical Tool to Eugenic Measurement

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  In Roundtable Session: Temporalities in Curriculum: A Contemporary Examination of Lessons From the Past and Implications for the Future (Table 19)

Abstract

Curiosity is a virtue, but it also has been a tool to exclude. This paper is a social epistemology of how curiosity became naturalized as a pedagogical tool linked to social engineering in the early 20th century. It examines how early psychologists defined instinctual curiosity as a key factor in explaining how the child learns. It then traces how curiosity-coded behaviors distinguished between innate versus intellectual forms of mental development, leading toward abstract or scientific reasoning. Instinctual curiosity and its role in learning came to inform social scientific efforts to devise more holistic experimental measurements beyond IQ, most notoriously in eugenicists efforts to measure desirable human traits tied to efforts to regulate migration in the U.S.A. according to race.

Author

• Christopher M. Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison