Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures

The best way to teach curiosity is to throw ourselves at living. To make life our classroom, and our tremendous bundles of experiences our curriculum.

through curiosity can reveal people to themselves. But formal education largely remains a vocational enterprise in which, Sir Ken argues, we are being steered away from the things we love “on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that.” Love has been rationalized out of the system of education, but it is central to the deeply personal an

Too often, legacy narratives serve only a small group of people who possess power or, at their most destructive, actively disempower certain groups, populations, or ways of being in the world. When social systems fail to truly serve vast numbers of people and communities, that is when we see challenger narratives begin to emerge.

When we travel, when we move beyond what we know, we increase the scope of what we conceive as possible. The more time we spend in the unknown, the more we appreciate that anything is possible. Our curiosity is strengthened proportionally. Conversely, when we limit our exposure to diverse ways of being in the world, curiosity narrows.

A cultural interregnum is a transition between fundamentally different sets of values catalyzing an evolution in shared frameworks of the human experience. During a cultural interregnum, ideas from the past decline, as we question the legacy narratives and, in turn, the norms, beliefs, and mindsets that we inherited from preceding generations. Simu

As a compass of values, unschooling seeks to acknowledge the burdened history imprinted on the education system. Informed by the courage to confront this imprinting, the unschooling movement is just one example of how to transcend institutionalized education by stepping beyond its walls.

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.

Without a robust culture of curiosity, imagination is rendered impotent, and all we’re doing is surviving the day, administering transactions, on autopilot, surrendering our agency, and perpetuating an ineffective status quo. We become managers of the end state of a problem-solution continuum. Our roles become reduced to administrators of predeterm

Operationalizing solutions is now more important than authoring new wisdom. It is telling that the graduate-level business degree is called a master’s in business administration. The problem is that administering blueprint solutions from past challenges naively underestimates the complexity of today’s world. And it leaves us ill-equipped to address