Chana Messinger on Children and Curiosity

Part 1: What keeps our curiosity hungry?

This month we’re reading an installment from Martyn Wendell Jones’s parenting newsletter “Dang” and my guest is Chana Messinger, a math teacher and one of my favorite people to argue with.

In this exchange, we’re talking about how our own curiosity has changed since we were children. In the second part of our conversation, we’ll talk about our experience as teachers inviting others into curiosity.

Leah: Martyn talks about the physical force of his son’s curiosity:

Fox learns in the manner of a flood ascertaining the height of a levee […] Here is the beginning of knowledge: with the application of force—the rising flood of Fox’s endless curiosity—what gives, and what stays firm?

and I recognize myself in that description of that (usually childish) need to know. Most people have that sense of urgency ebb as they grow up, but I think you’re like me in that you’re still a lot hungrier in the face of uncertainty than most people—you seek out what you don’t know. Do I have you right? Where do you recognize yourself in the description of Fox and why do you think you’ve retained that desire to explore?

Chana: I actually think that as I’ve gotten older I’ve lost some of that intensity, but retained a sense that curiosity is a virtue, which to a cynical view leads to using it as attire, as an identity marker and signal of the kind of person I want to be seen as. What’s still true is that I love learning things as they come to me, so maybe we can separate curiosity into (at least) two pieces: the interest in knowing and the willingness to hear (a passive aspect) and the fire, the feeling that one simply must know, that causes seeking out and wikipedia rabbit holes and so on. Or perhaps only the latter properly ought to be called curiosity—I’m curious (haha) what you think.

When I reflect on the reasons for this change, part of it is simply being less energetic; I associate the two quite strongly, though there is also a systematic, careful, Hufflepuff type of curiosity that perhaps demands less. Even so, acquiring new information, synthesizing it, opening dozens of tabs all seem to require an amount of cognitive slack that I suspect many of us find dwindling as we juggle our demands.

The second reason is that being curious feels like it has higher stakes now. I’m more aware of how much there is to know, and more subject to a kind of paralyzing epistemic insecurity, that whatever I learn will be woefully incomplete in the face of true understanding. Less relevant in the case of fun trivia, more in the case of ethically fraught political issues, or empirically messy questions of all kinds. 

I recognized this more passive part of myself in the parent’s self description, “My curiosity is still idle, as it has always been; [...] My current question is whether Bingley, the name of our dog, is to him a word that means our dog in particular, dogs in general, or pug dogs in particular...The mystery remains.” I’m still interested in the world, questions still come to mind. But there’s also an adult nonchalance about the world remaining mysterious, without the “well, go do experiments and find out!” spirit that could have had this essay ending with an answer to the question.

So I’ll speak to what has kept me passively curious, and then note how I’ve grown in the more energetic curiosity you describe lately. 

When Fox’s pursuit of the oven is thwarted, he immediately switches to the glasses. That’s part of his activity, but also points to a sense that everything is permeated with delightful explorations, that nothing is yet in a mental category of “figured out, nothing else to see here”. I’ve never lost that—and maybe it’s an earnest, magical sense that has kept me curious. I’m happy to lose myself in fantasy and science fiction, and the fantastical and scientific way of looking at the world we live in, too, where every kind of expertise adds an augmentation to the reality you see, adding depth, context, history and richness, without finding it cringey or uncool. That can take you a long way towards an openness to the world and what it has to teach you.

In addition, along with curiosity, lightness (as regarding belief) is one of the rationalist virtues, and it’s one I’ve felt ideologically committed to in a deep way for many years. That commitment has kept me open to new ideas and excited to learn I’m wrong longer than I might have done without it. Certainly I’ve built something of a brand on charitability, and that keeps me from dismissing ideas I don’t like or that don’t make sense to me without giving them a fair shot. As a result, while I’m susceptible to curiosity-sappers, I’m resistant to curiosity-stoppers.

But the active element is so joyous, and I love it so much! So I’ve been putting thought and effort into strengthening it. Being close to people who look up everything as soon as they have a question has implanted that habit, and reading and reflecting on sovereignty has given me more fortitude in the face of uncertainty. It’s been incredibly rewarding to recultivate that fervor that you so kindly attribute to me. 

How have you avoided the pitfalls I point to? Have you seen them present in others?

Leah: For someone who mostly hates exercise, I think I still do have a lot of the energy and force behind wanting to know. I’m not that different than a child in this (nor in wanting to run down flights of stairs or see if I can slip through a narrow space between two poles when I’m on a walk—I try to remember not to do this last when I’m wearing my baby now). 

I really like the Feynman quote “Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” And I feel my experience has borne it out. My husband has teased me that my favorite genre of book is “biographies about things that aren’t people” (e.g. fungi, zeppelins, and bees, to pick three recent examples). I keep getting reinforced in my expectation that everything has a whole world hidden in it. So, who can resist looking?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments about how your own experience of curiosity has changed. What sharpens your hunger to know?