You have heard the myth. Babies are born with natural curiosity: They scan and roam their environments. Young children start school so eager to learn they are wide eyed and thrilled. Rather than nurture this natural curiosity, teachers unwittingly turn the fun of learning into a rat race for good grades and academic awards. They even subject students to high-stake tests. In no time at all, the schools have extinguished the natural curiosity out of their students. The students now hate school and lack motivation.
This myth is right on two counts: Babies enjoy exploring their environments, and many middle and high school students dislike school. The error is in assuming that the exploratory behavior of babies has something to do with the intellectual behavior of adolescents.
Intrinsic motivation theorists say that exploratory behavior and intellectual activity are two manifestations of the underlying interest in learning. They have written that because babies like to explore their environments, high school student were born with a natural curiosity for learning.
Based on my studies of life motives, I suspect intrinsic motivation theory is invalid. Consider the people you know who are explorers. Notice that only some of them are also thinkers. Consider the people you know who are thinkers. Notice that only some of them are also explorers. Intrinsic motivation theory implies that exploring (e.g., babies roaming environments) and thinking (e.g., students learning math) are commonly motivated by a need for stimulus novelty, but this assumption seems to be invalid.
Daniel Boone was a legendary eighteenth century explorer. John Filson described him as a "curious" man because Boone loved to explore new places. Yet Boone also disliked being confined to a room and, thus, hated school. He took to "rough male sports" much more than he took to book learning.
Issac Newton was arguably the most influential intellectual ever. He had a thirst for knowledge even as a young boy. He observed somebody hit a tennis ball and wondered about the paths of projectiles. Although Newton was always thinking, he wasn't much for exploring. He spent many months more or less alone in his Cambridge University dormitory working on exciting new mathematical ideas.
Explorers like Boone aren't necessarily intellectuals like Newton, and intellectuals like Newton aren't necessarily explorers like Boone. We should not assume that exploratory and intellectual behavior is motivated by a common curiosity.
Exploratory curiosity is quite different from intellectual curiosity. Exploratory curiosity is the result of attraction of novel stimuli accompanied by fearlessness. Intellectual curiosity is about ideas and the need to think. The exploratory behavior of babies does not imply that high school students were born with a natural curiosity for intellectual learning.
Since exploratory and intellectual curiosities are two different motives, coincidentally some people enjoy both exploring and thinking. John Glenn, the first man to walk on the moon, enjoyed science. Edmund Hillary, the first man to explore the peak of Mount Everest, wrote a number of books. The mythical men of the starship Enterprise were scientists: known throughout the universe as a great thinker, Spock boldly went where no man had gone before.
