Curiosity comes first
A child who wants to know something will outwork a child who has been told to know it. Curiosity is not a reward for finishing the syllabus; it is the thing the syllabus exists to serve.
What I believe
Curiosity, inquiry,
and learning how to learn.
A set of convictions about how children learn, what schooling leaves out, and why the best of it should not be reserved for the families who can already pay for it.
I came to these beliefs the long way round, through mathematics, physics, and computation, where you cannot fake understanding for very long. The subjects were unforgiving, and that turned out to be a gift: I learned that being confused is the start of the work, not evidence that you are bad at it. What took longer to notice was everything my own schooling never got round to, and how much of it I ended up assembling late and in public.
School is where most children decide whether they are “a maths person” or not, whether questions are welcome, whether being wrong is safe, whether their voice is worth raising in a room. Those decisions tend to stick. That is why school education, rather than anything later, is where I want to spend the next part of my life.
The convictions
Eight things I keep coming back to.
Questions before answers
Inquiry-led learning starts from a real question and lets the explanation arrive as the answer to it. The order matters. An answer to a question nobody asked is just something to memorise.
Learning how to learn
Most of what a child will need has not been invented yet. The durable skill is the method: notice what you do not understand, work out how to find out, check whether you were right.
Understanding over recall
I have spent years on problems where a remembered formula is worthless and only a real grasp of why it holds will do. School is where that difference is first taught, or first lost.
Teachers who are still learning
The best teaching I have received came from people who were visibly still curious themselves. A school is only as good as the ordinary daily work of the adults in it, and that work deserves respect.
The subjects not on the timetable
Arguing a point and being argued with. Working in a group. Standing on a stage. Making a case to a room. Playing a sport and losing well. Civic sense. Noticing where another person’s boundary is. Paying attention to your own attention. None of this is an extra.
Taught at ten, not at thirty
These are handed out as professional-development courses to adults who are already halfway through their careers: fast, late, and to people whose habits have set. A child has years to practise, and practice at that age is cheap.
For every child, not a few
This kind of education is usually sold at a price that sorts children by their parents’ income, and it thins out sharply the further you get from a metro. I do not think inquiry, curiosity, and careful teaching are expensive by nature. They are simply rationed.
Bring your
experience to this.
These are convictions held openly, and they get sharper in contact with people who do this work every day. If you teach, run a school, or have watched a child lose their curiosity in one, I would like to hear from you.