Curiosity's Future Past: Historicizing a Pedagogical Object

• In Event: Remaking Curriculum Through Psychic Confrontations: On Curiosity, Imagination, and (Re)Memory

Abstract

Across a variety of disciplines curiosity endures as a biologically verifiable function that connotes particular ways of thinking and being in the world that education would draw out “naturally” from children. The paper offers an examination of how curiosity has come to define a desired quality of human nature that generates differences and exclusions. It historicizes the norms, values, and judgments that a) delimit what or who counts as curious and b) differentiates and divides children and populations on these bases. Whereas to lack curiosity in the past risked falling on the side of degeneracy, today it is to threaten economic productivity and national competitiveness, which have become the privileged discourses of a politics that divides productive from disposable bodies.

Author

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison