What Killed Curiosity? The Education System Did Its Job
From memorization to authority worship, modern education conditions students to comply, not to think independently or challenge what they’re told.
We always heard when we were young that “curiosity killed the cat.” But now, as an adult, I find myself asking a different question: what killed curiosity?
The sheer number of my peers who have become completely incurious astounds me. The way many of them have shown themselves susceptible to state and ideological propaganda completely blows my mind.
I would blame the school system for failing to equip my peers with the critical thinking skills needed to bypass propaganda, but I’m increasingly convinced the system was not ineffective — it was very effective at carrying out its actual objective.
It does not seem to me the school system my peers and I went through was ever designed to enable critical thinking, curiosity, individual thought, or the pursuit of truth. Instead, it seems to lead people toward the conclusion that there is only one right answer to a question, one solution to a problem, and one correct way of doing things.
I started noticing what set people apart when it came to critical thinkers and what I would call the NPCs of society. Independent people and entrepreneurs, I noticed, had far less tendency to believe false narratives. These were often the people who questioned COVID policies, did their own research, distrusted official messaging, and doubted the effectiveness of certain government mandates.
However, when I went to the OSAP protest in downtown Toronto and debated protesters on their positions, something else revealed itself to me — something I had started noticing more broadly among people who disagreed with my positions. Many of them were highly educated and placed enormous weight on institutional validation when deciding what positions people should hold in society.
Then I thought back to an interview between Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Simone Gold. Dr. Gold spoke about her experience as a doctor and the structure of medical school. She described many of her peers as incurious after news of COVID became widespread. When she tried to discuss it at work, many colleagues seemed uninterested in examining it deeply, particularly in discussions around treatments such as hydroxychloroquine.
She described doing her own independent research on the drug and asking colleagues whether they were considering it for their patients. According to her account, they showed little interest at the time. Then in March, after Donald Trump publicly mentioned hydroxychloroquine and media coverage turned sharply negative, she said many of those same colleagues suddenly became very vocal about how bad it supposedly was.
She also spoke about how medical school taught students much like any other school. Students were presented with material by a teacher — the authority figure. They were told to take notes, memorize the information, learn it, and reproduce it on exams. She highlighted that students were largely led to ask only approved questions, and that there was little true critical thinking, particularly in the first two years.
People who went through the school system often see nothing strange in this. Many believe this is simply how school should function. But Jordan Peterson pointed out the implicit assumption underneath this structure: what you are taught is presumed correct, and your role is to learn it and demonstrate possession of that knowledge.
That kind of thinking may function inside the boundaries of a classroom. The real world does not operate like that.
