I’m always surprised when I meet people who aren’t curious.

I’ve always been curious. About everything. When I was little, I asked questions incessantly. People used to tell my mom to stop answering them but she didn’t. I’m really glad she didn’t because it made me feel like it was okay to ask all the questions I had. I still ask questions. All the time. I don’t worry about looking stupid. I figure I can’t learn unless I ask. That’s always been my principle.

I figured everyone to be curious. Some people might be scared or shy and thus not ask but they still wondered. How can anyone look at the sky and not wonder why it’s blue? Why mirrors reflect backwards? How can people drive without knowing how a car works? Almost every kid I meet stacks on the “why?”s so often that I knew it was built into our system.

So the question is: Do we get too shy to ask or do we not care?

There definitely is a section of people who get “too shy to ask.” They’ve either been shushed or, even worse, humiliated somewhere along the line and decided it’s best to stop asking. They figure if they don’t ask, they can’t be made fun of and they can’t feel stupid. We spend so much time trying to not look stupid that we choose to hide our lack of knowledge instead of taking the opportunity to learn. Which means we stay “stupid”, isn’t that a bit stupid?

As much as those people make me sad, the people in the second category make me even sadder. Do people really stop being curious? Last year, when I was teaching, I had kids who had already decided that they were “no good at math” and when we had our math lessons, they would tune out. They weren’t curious why something worked the way it did. They just wanted to know (be told) the right answer and move on to the next problem. Their curiosity had been completely squashed out of existence.

I can’t think of anything sadder.