Very Curious

In the newspaper over the weekend there was a mildly intriguing article about Singaporeans and their values. I think it was the Saturday edition of The Straits Times. It seems that someone had been around surveying the local populace with regard to how they'd rank 20 so-called 'values'. The lowest ranked of all had been curiosity. Now, as to whether curiosity (which, as we all know, is fatal to cats) can be regarded as a value as such was not under discussion. But of its dismal ranking there was no doubt. (Interestingly, honesty - a dubious virtue if ever there was one, as any Jesuit would tell you - topped the list.)

Today I was giving some advice to a young lady getting rather hot under the collar about her presentation for Theory of Knowledge, when it struck me that it was so often the vexed question of curiosity, or rather the lack of it, that might be at the root of her difficulties, and those of so many students I come into contact with. Essentially my advice boils down to this: it's useful to be genuinely interested in how you know what you know, or think you know, and how others know, or think they know, what they know in framing an issue for a presentation. Once you get interested in that, what to do follows naturally. (Although it also involves a lot of real work as opposed to vaguely tossing around opinions.)

Quite often, when discussing presentations, I find myself simply asking students how they know what they claim to know as they make their various statements, hoping that this will make them think in TOK-fashion. Quite a few look at me as if I'm mad, for which I don't really blame them. My guess is that they'd rather I tell them what to say and they think I'm kidding when I tell them I don't know what to tell them to say.

The odd thing is that whilst I am extremely lazy in intellectual terms in any number of embarrassing ways, an unhealthy sense of curiosity about pretty much anything that can be questioned has never been one of my failings. So I just don't get it when people (some really very bright ones in many ways) appear to revel in a profound incuriosity to get them through life.