Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures

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.

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.

Why do we sit in a classroom at all? Why do we remove ourselves from the extraordinarily rich experience tapestries of living to place ourselves in artificial containers of instruction?

Few forms of curiosity are more powerful than conversation. An exchange of ideas is how we explore new possibilities. Conversations, when they are at their best, are unscripted vehicles for discovery. At scale, they create the symphony of discourse.

We need to bravely embrace the inquiries that have the potential to reorient, rehabilitate, and regenerate the complex challenges that we are confronted with.

What if we put our money, time and energy into what we say matters most? What if this school year celebrated imagination? In We Got This, Cornelius Minor reminds us that “education should function to change outcomes for whole communities.” What if we designed a school year that sought to radically shift how communities imagine, problem solve, heal,

Learning is a political act because all learning consciously or unconsciously impacts our ability to contribute to a more—or less—moral world.

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

Radical Curiosity begins with first-principles thinking. It requires breaking down ideas, assumptions, and narratives to their most essential components and then reconstructing them anew.