In all likelihood, therefore, the developmental students had heard the name Charles Lindbergh. It’s just that 90% never cared enough to follow through. They never looked him up in a reference book or on the web. They never asked their parents or teachers. They just shrugged and went on with their lives.
After more than 25 years teaching at the City University and State University of New York, I’ve come to the counterintuitive conclusion that the single greatest predictor of whether a student will succeed or fail in college is not what he knows when he graduates from high school but what he wants to know when he graduates from high school. Intellectual curiosity is more determinative than high test scores or good work habits because it precedes them — indeed, it causes them. The desire to know just for the sake of knowing, to pick up random facts and start drawing connections in your mind, is the hallmark of the lifetime learner.
I don’t think it’s counterintuitive at all. It’s a matter of being able to devise a way to measure it. However, having gotten the WTF? facial expression from many people when a subject like this is broached, I get the impression that the intellectual curiosity trait is not particularly widespread. There are scads of people who treat learning as a burden.
Man, this has been so true for me. I had worked in the trades for many years before attending college. I had very little patience with the nebulous “liberal education” idea (wrongly or rightly) and I only paid attention to stuff I could see the value of. Forced myself to learn how to parameterize functions (for the test) one semester and thought it was the mose useless thing ever – then I got interested in programming a ray-tracing program and I ate it up. Stayed up nights buried in the book.
I’m old enough to finally realize that not all of my experiences and desires are universal – but I have to say that the internal desire always seems to precede true learning.
I agree, and it’s a very discouraging thought that “there are scads of people who treat learning as a burden.” It’s clear that the objective has to be finding a way to not kill what I regard as the natural and inborn curiosity and desire to learn and to create patterns and connections. My stepdaughter is failing miserably in school and yet knows every word or every rap song, who is sleeping with whom, every nuance of an extraordinarily complex social network, etc.
Amen.
That’s why I love the internet. I am always wondering about this or that, and it makes me so happy to know that I can turn to my computer and look it up any time, virtually any topic. I love the library, too, but it’s not open all the time!