Do Schools Kill Curiosity? #86

Why some kids stop asking questions (and what to do at home to protect their curiosity).

If your child seems disengaged, says “I’m not good at this,” or melts down over learning, it’s easy to assume it’s about attention, behavior, or motivation. But often, what looks like defiance or lack of focus is actually a loss of curiosity. In this video, we break down what’s happening in your child’s brain when learning becomes about performance instead of exploration—and how that shift can lead to resistance, overwhelm, and disconnection from learning itself.

What You’ll Learn:

•  Why toddlers and preschoolers are naturally wired to learn—and what disrupts that 
•  The hidden impact of rewards, praise, and “getting the right answer” 
•  How to respond when your child says “I can’t” or “I’m bad at this” 
•  Simple ways to rebuild curiosity and intrinsic motivation at home 
•  How to reduce power struggles around learning, homework, or skill-building 

This approach is grounded in developmental psychology and neuroscience, but translated into real-life parenting. No scripts, no quick fixes—just a clear understanding of how kids actually learn, and how to support that without shutting it down. The goal isn’t to make your child perform better—it’s to help them stay connected to their natural drive to explore, think, and figure things out.

If you’re tired of second-guessing how to handle resistance, meltdowns, or “not listening,” this channel will help you respond with more clarity and confidence—especially in those everyday moments that feel the hardest.

Transcript

Losing Focus Or Losing Curiosity

Jon @WholeParent 0:00

What if your child isn't losing focus? They're just losing curiosity. And school might be the reason. Welcome back to the Whole Parent Podcast. My name is John. I am a parenting researcher and author. I'm a PhD student. I have a background in counseling, and I'm also a dad of four. And that means that I don't just talk about this stuff, I actually live it. And what I've found in my own life is that there's this huge gap between parenting advice on one side and the research. You have the research on brain development and uh like developmental psychology and attachment, and all of that is super valuable, but it feels way too abstract and too hard to apply for most families to actually use in their practical everyday life when their kids melting down or whatever the situation might be. And then on the other side, you've got all of this like parenting advice on the internet, the scripts and the quick fixes. And while that might work for a moment, it usually falls apart when you actually put it into practice over a long period of time. It doesn't work in every situation. And this podcast is designed to fill in that gap. We take the science and we translate it into something that you can actually use. A few days ago, I posted a video on social media, a few days ago from when I am recording this, that kind of blew up in a lot of different places. And the conversation was all around the school system and specifically like how school is structured and what its purpose is. And I want to kind of give you my introduction where I began to think about compulsory schooling and whether this is effective or good.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy. And we should treat it with the same status. Thank you.

Jon @WholeParent 2:21

It's called Does School Kill Creativity? And it's by Sir Ken Robinson, who is a longtime researcher. He's passed away now, he's no longer with us. But his central premise was this idea that really intrigued me. And it is that school, the way in which we do school, actually may not be set up for fostering creativity.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world, every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Everyone, doesn't matter where you go, you'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanity is in the bottom of the inner marts, everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the innerts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drummer and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics.

Learning Versus Schooling

Dopamine And Curiosity-Driven Learning

When Rewards Replace Wonder

Autonomy As The Missing Ingredient

Anxiety, Behavior, And Misfit Labels

Practical Ways To Rebuild Curiosity

Final Takeaways And Calls To Action

Jon @WholeParent 3:23

Kids come into this world like starved for learning. Like the sheer number of questions that a toddler will ask you, like they just poke at stuff. When you look at some of the developmental psychologists, like kind of the grandfather of developmental psychology is this guy, uh uh Jean Piaget, and he used to say that toddlers are like literal scientists. They are literally conducting the scientific method around them all the time. They test and they imagine and they interrupt and they dismantle and they get, you know, they like get stuck in side quests, right? Like they they talk to all the NPCs for all my video game fans out there. Uh they get distracted by all of the wrong details. They like just follow these threads and they become obsessed with them. And they learn, in other words, exactly the way that human beings have evolved to learn. And then, very slowly, and this kind of comes from the Ken Robinson TED Talk, but also his work. I've read his books now. Uh they're phenomenal. Slowly, systematically, we beat that down out of our kids. They we sort of like sand it off of them. By institute like institutions do that, obviously school, we're gonna talk about today. Schedule, but but like my schedule will do that. It's not all wait, I don't want to put the blame on one thing. Systems, adults being under pressure. If the system is functioning to strip away the sense of wonder, I promise you, like, we will fail. If the model of education rewards stillness over in curiosity and aliveness, and if it if it values answers over questions, and if it values compliance over, like I said, like curiosity, then what really we're doing is we are we are setting our kids up for something, but it I don't think it's learning. Because a lot of what has absorbed us in the idea of what education is is like grounded in this idea that the only place that kids experience education is in school. That compulsory school and learning are basically interchangeable. That if a child is like not doing school or not doing well in school even, then the learning must not be happening. And the child who is struggling in school, right, there's something wrong with that child. But those are just fundamentally not the same thing. School is a system, but learning is a biological reality. It's a biological drive. And sometimes those two things overlap beautifully. But sometimes, and I think increasingly so, they are actually direct conflict with one another. And what's been haunting me more and more is this question of like, what if one of the biggest losses of childhood is not just like stress or burnout or pressure, but or over testing even, right? What if it's the millions of kids that are learning that the safest way to move through life is actually by stopping their own curiosity? What if they learn to mimic thinking rather than actually thinking? What if they learn not to explore, but to comply? What if they don't develop a love of learning? And I know every educator out there wants to develop a love of learning, but actually they just learn in order to survive. And I think most of all, they learn not to trust their own instincts and their own mind, but to constantly look everywhere else for the right answer. Because I don't think that that just affects academics. I think it affects everything. I think it affects our motivation and it affects our mental health, and it affects whether like a kid starts to experience themselves as capable and powerful and alive, or just as like a cog, as something to be managed. And so as we get through this episode, I want to keep going back to this place of where we are today. Like, where how did education go from this curiosity-driven thing to like control-based schooling? And what does that actually do to kids psychologically? Why do some kids seem to come out of school loving knowledge like I did, while other kids just feel very exhausted by it? Like they seem just kind of burned out on education. And I think kind of maybe most importantly, I want to ask the question of what alternatives could look like. What if we could find something that was actually more human? And I don't think that that question is just like how do we help students succeed better in school. I think the question is how do we make sure that success doesn't cost our kids something more important? Their their curiosity and their mind. And I think at the core of all of this, it's is like I said, like I'll keep saying this, it's not really about school. It's about what kind of human beings we are training, that we are conditioning into our like being, whether it's our kids or other kids. So let's start where we always start by talking about the brain. Uh I think that's important. When a kid's born, uh, their brain is wired for curiosity, literally, biologically wired to seek out knowledge. I wrote the first chapter of a book on the education system. This is where I started too. Curiosity is driven by dopamine, among other neurotransmitters. But uh when a child is like wondering about something, like, and they ask a question and they experiment and they try and they fail, or like whatever, like they try again, um their brain actually is releasing dopamine that whole time. Not when they're getting their answer, which I think a lot of us mistake because that's when we have trained our kids sometimes to receive dopamine by getting the correct answer because they get adult attention, but actually just by moving towards the answer. And we all have experienced this. Like when we're deeply engrossed learning about something or like in a flow state of like enjoyment, like that process is internally rewarding. Like it's it is it is rewarding in and of itself. So the process of seeking new information is itself rewarding. And that's how learning is, and I'm gonna use this word here, like supposed to work. It should work. I know I don't like to say should because it's like I'm shooting on myself, but it should work this way. But then, like immediately, this is where stuff starts to change. Because when we set up systems of learning, houses of learning, we call them schools, um, they have to be externally controlled. And so the focus, bec like almost necessarily when we have these certain metrics that we use, like grades, becomes right answers and performance and evaluations. And so the dopamine starts to attach itself not to the rewarding experience of learning, but to the experience of those other things, the external motivation. This is the thing that we have to understand. This is central to the work of Alfie Cohn from a couple episodes ago, and he didn't talk about this in that episode, but I've heard him talk about this many times. He has lectures on this stuff. Uh, what we know is that external and internal motivation are on opposite sides of a scale, like a balancing scale. I'm trying to do it with my hands here for those watching the YouTube video. Plug for watching the episodes on YouTube instead of just listening to them. But uh they're on like a s they're on like a balancing scale. So as internal, uh intrinsic, what we call it, motivation goes down, extrinsic motivation goes up, and vice versa, as extrinsic motivation is as we increase extrinsic motivation, uh, intrinsic motivation goes down. I think I just said the same thing twice, but you get what I'm saying. And here's the thing extrinsic motivation, when we are in control of the system, it's necessarily extrinsic. So as we reward kids for all of these things, like grades and homework and tests and all of that, and just learning, like getting the right answer, right? Even if we had none of those things, so we just reward them for getting the right answer, that becomes extrinsic motivation, and that has a direct, direct cause and effect relationship with intrinsic motivation. That part of motivation of the value of learning comes from the experience of dopamine being released in your brain because just for the sake of it, right? So instead of exploration being rewarding, it's the outcome that is rewarding. Instead of the question being rewarding, it's the answer or even just the approval, right, that comes from answering correctly. And usually when a child, the child stops asking, like, what am I curious about? It is because they have begun to ask, what do I need to do to make the teacher happy or to get the answer right or to like pass the test? And this is what it looks like, again, to move from that natural intrinsic motivation to extrinsic motivation. And like I want to say, when we were setting up these systems, on paper, extrinsic motivation seems great because it usually leads to compliance. Most of the kids are going to be able to sit still and follow directions and complete assignments and perform well on the tests because they are expected to. Then we're going to give you a good drawer award for doing a good job. And they didn't like care about how good the pictures were. They cared about like, did you do what we told you to do? Use the markers starting now. Stopwatch goes. The kids who were rewarded for using the markers, when the reward was then removed after the experiment was over, something tragic happened. These kids who absolutely loved drawing stopped drawing. They didn't care about drawing anymore. We had effectively trained them to not care about drawing by giving them a reward for drawing. Again, that was another episode. I'll get into that. I can't go into that today. But like, understand, this is like how it works. The brain literally goes, oh, if I'm not going to get the reward, like then why would I do this anymore? And when the pattern gets repeated over and over again, like it literally changes what our kids believe about themselves. Like, I love drawing. They won't think that anymore. The same thing is true when we start rewarding kids for learning information. I don't love learning. Why would they? We've taken away the love of learning by rewarding them for doing it. So you hear kids start to say things, and I've heard my own kids say these things, and they've almost no extrinsic motivation. Like we unschool our kids, that's a whole other episode for another day, but they have almost no extrinsic motivation. But just hearing it from friends, they'll say things like, I'm not good at math, or I just don't like math, or I'm not creative, I'm not a good drawer, or I'm bad at this or that. And I hear it all the time from other kids in their lives who do go to school. I'm bad at school. And what they mean is that I learned that my natural way of thinking doesn't fit within the system. And once that belief takes hold, believe this, their relationship to learning will start to change. It will. Not because they don't like learning. I am convinced that every single human likes learning, like we are evolved to love learning, but because the mode of learning has changed. And one invited their brain to explore and be creative and think critically and follow threads again. And the other one just wants them to perform. And over time, if most of your learning experiences fall into that second performance-based category, which is the truth for the overwhelming majority of kids in this country and around the world today, then the brain is going to adapt. Because the brain is nothing but adaptable. It becomes more efficient at the compliance things that following the directions and less practice at the curiosity. And the more I think about this, the more worked up I get about it. Because I realize that it's not just like these individual moments, it's these huge environmental movements that are happening. Like these are shifts in human psychology because kids don't just like adapt to one experience. They adapt to what is consistently expected of them. And more and more when we reward that and we correct it when they follow the wrong thread or we control them and say, okay, now it's time to move on to this or that or the other, even when they're like deeply engrossed in something. Like you start to see that these like patterns are all built in ways that are just destroying our kids. And they're built honestly because of control, if we're being honest. Peter Gray, who I hope to get on the podcast soon, is a play researcher but also studies school. He has a great book called Free to Learn. Again, I'm sure we'll talk about it when he's on the podcast. But when I read that book and it went into the history of modern compulsory schooling, and it goes piece by piece that it is in no small part, in fact, entirely based on control and controlling people and the way in which they move and think and move through the world. Like sit here, learn this in this way, follow these Bell schedules, this over here, okay. Now you're getting involved in that, like let's switch you to the next thing, eat for 30 minutes over here, right? Like there we we accept that as normal now. And there were reasons for that when you're trying to manage a large group of kids and turn them into factory order, factory workers, like you need that order and you need that control. But from this psycho purely psychological standpoint, autonomy is one of the most central and important developing skills in young kids, is one of the primary drivers of motivation. So when kids feel like they have ownership over what they're doing, like choice and agency and voice and their learning, like their engagement is going to go up, and when their engagement goes up, their their persistence is going to go up, and their ability to tolerate frustration and working towards a task is going to go up. And you compare that to when their autonomy is low, like the something else is going to go up, like resistance and disengagement. Or yes, compliance, but just like internal dissociation and can and disconnection. If you want a great example of this, watch your kid play play in a way that they really love, but that is they're struggling with or they're frustrated with, like building a tower, or or like even in a video game like Minecraft. I have watched my kids demonstrate the absolute height, the most extreme version of attention and of persistence and frustration tolerance and problem solving in Minecraft world. And you say, oh, John, that's a video game. Kids love video games. Why do kids love video games? Because it's the only place in their life where they have control. It's their only place in their life where they can act out this natural drive to learn and be curious. And so this is like, I worry because I think this is where mental health starts to get into the picture, right? If a child's natural learning tendency is curiosity and movement and questioning and creativity and all these things that they get in places that aren't really about learning per se, although the whole world's about learning, but those things, at least in the houses of learning, are consistently being overridden, they don't just disappear. Like they get redirected. And sometimes they get redirected into anxiety, and sometimes they get redirected into avoidance or behavioral uh issues. Why is it that all of the kids who have behavioral issues also are like, you know, double gifted or twice gifted? They're all the really smart kids who have the behavioral issues, they're all the really curious kids who have the behavioral issues. And then why is it all that all of them wind up becoming like uh ingenious inventors of things later on in life? They had behavioral issues because they didn't like being controlled, right? So what we're like what we're actually experiencing is that like labeling is what we label as a problem in children is actually just a mismatch between the child being in this environment and that that is not set up for their learning, and they're just kind of pushing against that. And I I do not want to like I I I should pause here and say, I do not want to demonize school, or certainly teachers who are absolutely doing their best to do like when I sit down with teachers and say, okay, here are my goals for education for kids, like from a developmental psychological perspective, I think this is like our goal. Every single teacher that I've ever sat down with says, yes, I agree. And I'm not telling you, so I'm not demonizing like schools individually. I'm not demonizing the teachers who are doing their best and are often the people who want the change the most. Or I'm not telling you that you have to go to your school tomorrow and pull your kid out and just go live in the woods with them or something. I want to just spend this moment together towards the end of this episode to think clearly about what's happening so that we can actually respond more intentionally. So what do we actually do with this? Let me give you a handful of really practical things after we take a break that you can do with your kid to try and make school work for you. Okay, so here are my practical things that you can do that don't require you to overhaul your entire life. Although if you want to, like by all means, let's talk about that. But we can start to rebuild some curiosity and stuff like that inside of the education system that your kids are already in. And by the way, this is kind of where I've mentioned him a couple times, Surkin Robinson's work sort of ended, like this is the end of his career when he was uh when he had cancer or just before he was diagnosed with cancer. This is the work he was doing. So, first, we need to start rewarding questions in our kids more than we reward answers. So when your kid asks you something, instead of just jumping straight into an explanation, I want you to pause and reflect it back. Say something like, oh, that's a really great question. What do you think? How could we figure that out together? Let's let's look it up. You remove in those moments from this like reward of knowing to the reward of wondering. So you like really dig into those moments, and I hope that this invokes a sense of wonder for you as well. Find a way that you can be curious again, because I promise you it's gonna make your life better too. My second tip is to start creating as much, like spend as much time as you can creating pockets of autonomy in their life. Uh, it can be as simple as doing fewer extracurriculars so that your kid has more independent free play time, or like letting your kid even just I'm I'm trying to think of like the simplest example. Like, let your kid help you make the schedule for after school. Like, like, do they can they choose to do uh their snack before their homework or when they're gonna do their homework, or uh let them pick a topic that they want to explore with you, right? Let them lead you to a project, even if it winds up being messy or less efficient. And I get it because I'm there with you. Uh the one thing I will say is like if you cut back on a lot of the extracurriculars and stuff, you're gonna have more space for that. But I just want to say like autonomy doesn't, I think a lot of parents get scared off because they think that it has to be everything. It does, it's not an all or nothing thing, as my therapist used to say, if it's not all or none. Even small amounts of autonomy completely change how the brain engages. So whenever you can, find places for your kid to have autonomy. Number three, normalize uh not knowing the answers to things. There are a lot of kids who kind of shut down the learning process because they are afraid of being seen as the kid who doesn't know the answer to that. So I want you to be the first person to say, I don't know. I have no clue. Let's figure it out together. Oh, let's like like just let them see you as a lifelong learner. Oh, you know what? That's a really interesting question. I've never figured that out. Let me look it up. And yes, you're teaching them how to research in those moments and look up and sort good information from bad information. And should we always be getting our information? Should we should where should we search? Should we search TikTok for this answer about the moon landing? Probably not. Probably search somewhere better. But uh, you know, you might get answers that are not fully grounded in science. But not only are you teaching them how to learn, I think more importantly, you're teaching them that you are still a learner. Like you're not just a knower of things, you're a searcher for information. Number four, separate performance from identity. This is really, really essentially important, especially if you're going to keep your kids in a school where grades are used, which is, by the way, basically every school. Uh, when your child struggles, and I don't care if your school got rid of letter grades and they use like exceeds expectations and just needs work, or they use one, two, three, four, or they use like lion, eagle, badger, whatever, like I don't know. Like whatever your family, your school's using as a grading system, if your kid is in a school that grades in any way, needs improvement, you know, that's the one that I always got, needs improvement on the sit still and doesn't talk in class box in my elementary school report card. Uh never just resist the urge to label, like never label. Instead of saying things like, and this, this by the way, is there's so much research into this, instead of saying things like, you're so smart, or or the thing that my dad used to say, like, why aren't you trying harder? That was a brutal one for me. Focus on process, right? Oh, you got stuck on that, or oh, that is tricky, or oh, you kept going, right? Those, that's that's rewarding. Saying you persisted, you kept going, that's positive. Rather than saying you are smart, you got the right answer, right? What you praise becomes what they value. If you value good grades, if you I maybe you do, but if you place so much value on good grades, they will place so much value. If you place so much value on persistence and learning and uh investigation and exploration, they will too. Uh you are trying in these moments desperately to help them see their identity in terms of effort and exploration rather than just outcomes. And then fifth, I want you to, again, this is kind of going back to the the first one about autonomy, but whenever you can, I want you to protect unstructured curiosity time. So this I the reason I separate this from autonomy is because this includes like if your kid is going down a rabbit trail with something and it's time to go and move on to the next thing, understand that that is what school is built on, this idea that they're doing something and then they get they have to stop, put it, put, put it down, and move to the next thing. Like time where nothing is assigned and your kid is just learning in the way that they learn that does not need to be optimized for efficiency. Like just leave enough space that you can follow wherever that thread leads their brain. If every single hour of a child's life is directed, like they will inevitably lose the habit of being curious. And I'm gonna be honest, a lot of this stuff is stuff that I am constantly working on in myself as well. There's so many moments, like I said, in the car a couple days ago, where it would just be easier and faster to tell them to stop asking questions or or maybe just give them the answer and to get things out of the way or just get the compliance or whatever, especially with four kids, especially at the end of the day, especially when the global uh world is taking up parts of my brain that I wish it wasn't. Um the thing that I try and do is just keep reminding myself, do I want to raise a kid who knows how to follow instructions or a kid who knows how to think? Because the world that our kids are growing up into doesn't actually need people to be able to follow instructions. Not only do we have literally millions and millions, maybe billions, of kids who are going to be able to follow instructions and follow directions, we also have AI and all of these other places where we we don't need more robots. What we need is people who can ask questions and adapt and create and think independently and tolerate uncertainty and tolerate frustration and just stay in it when problems don't have clear answers. And that's those are not skills that magically appear in adulthood for kids when they have been trained out of them. We either continue to practice them in childhood or they slowly atrophy. As Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson say in The Whole Brain Child, you lose what you do not use in your brain. So here's what I want to leave you with. Your job is not to help your child succeed at school, or at least it's not just to help your child succeed at school. Your job is to help them stay connected to themselves within that system and to protect the part of themselves that asks those questions and notices things that other people miss and gets pulled towards things for no other reason than that they're interesting. Curiosity is not something that we have to instill into our kids. Understand that. Like this is not a skill to be learned. They come into the world this way. Our job is to make sure that we do not let the world take it out of them. A curious kid becomes a thinking adult. And a thinking adult is a free adult. And a free adult is hard to control. And maybe that is actually the problem is that the system was built to make us easier to control. If you like this episode, make sure that you check out the Parent Lab, my online community. You get full access to all of my course library and live calls and direct access to me. We can work through your specific stuff. We can talk about schooling, it's 27 bucks a month. You can cancel anytime. Link is below. And until next time, I'll see ya. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. We have a ton of five-star ratings and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. And so it's a really quick thing that you can do if you have 15 or 20 seconds. 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