Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures

How frequently do we embrace Band-Aids, temporary treatment, and other inadequate solutions in lieu of doing the real work of addressing the core foundational flaws of our social systems?

We get educated out of our creativity. We unlearn our willingness to take risks and be wrong. Robinson goes on in his talk to define creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value.” Our education system is educating people out of having original ideas that have value. Let that notion sink in for a moment.

Honest naming is a kind of ethical responsibility. We have a moral duty not to simply accept a harmful narrative, even if it comes cloaked in positive associations as a result of tradition, efforts by the powerful to preserve that power, or ignorance. We must not cave in to peer pressure from dead people.

Education is a pipeline for young people to enter the economy, rather than their lives or the conversation the world is engaged in.

Are we so numb to when life is our teacher that we can only recognize learning when it has been tagged, packaged, evaluated, and offered as currency?

Teaching has been too closely associated with the transmission of knowledge as an object, the exchange of information from someone who knows to someone who seeks to know.

Thriving takes both labor and leisure. It takes curiosity. An education system that segregates labor and leisure and that removes curiosity from our essential needs drives and sustains inequity and must be challenged.

to author more beautiful futures, we must imagine and express what a fundamentally different possibility might be. As the award-winning poet and author Ocean Vuong described with stunning clarity: We often tell our students, “The future is in your hands.” But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to

Nor should the social contract be static. To remain relevant in changing times, such a contract requires amendments. It should exist in a constant state of redesign.

Radical Curiosity is what allows us to experience the joy and the wonder of bringing absurd impossibilities to fruition.