Curiosity is the sweetest form of dissatisfaction.

Childhood is a time when serendipity plays a large part in learning. Teachers can help children stumble across areas of knowledge that they didn’t know they were interested in – unknown unknowns – and that they find dull or intimidating at first pass.

Rabinow thought the most important was ‘a big database’ of memorised knowledge: ‘If you’re a musician, you should know a lot about music … if you were born on a desert island and never heard music, you’re not likely to be a Beethoven … You may imitate birds but you’re not going to write the Fifth Symphony.’ The earlier you start building your datab

When we first started, the question was, ‘Where is the enemy?’ That was the intelligence question. As we got smarter, we started to ask, ‘Who is the enemy?’ And we thought we were pretty clever. And then we realized that wasn’t the right question, and we asked, ‘What’s the enemy doing or trying to do?’ And it wasn’t until we got further along that

he found that as journals moved online, scholars actually cited fewer articles than they had before. A broadening of available information had led to ‘a narrowing of science and scholarship’.

the perennial debate over what schools are for. The fault line in these debates is this – should schools be places where adults transmit to children the academic knowledge that society deems valuable? Or places where children are allowed to follow their own curiosity, wherever it takes them?

William Shakespeare went to the kind of school that would have horrified Sir Ken. Its pupils were made to learn, by way of repetition, over a hundred Latin figures of rhetoric. They were also expected to become familiar with texts that had little to do with their immediate experience, by ancient authors like Seneca and Cicero.

Every scientist stands on the shoulders of giants, every artist works within or against a tradition. A baby learning language from the adults around her is the most recently formed link in what the educationalist Paul Harris terms an ‘ancient tutorial system’.

Epistemic curiosity is hard work; it involves sustained cognitive effort. That makes it tougher, but ultimately more rewarding.