The Nature of Curiosity: An Educational Counter-Memory of a Scientific Object

Today’s child is exhorted to “be curious.” Historians, psychologists, and educators offer curiosity as innate to the child’s development, intrinsic to scientific progress, and essential to humankind’s history and destiny. In contemporary education discourses, curiosity promises a means to intervene in gendered and racialized disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers through pedagogical reforms that will tap into children’s natural interests in order to ....