Watch a toddler take a few unsteady steps across a living room and the whole family may erupt. A fall is treated as part of learning, phones come out, and nobody demands perfect balance on the first try.
Years later, that same child may hesitate before asking an unexpected question in class or offering an unfinished idea at work. Neil deGrasse Tyson captured the contrast in a recorded interview, saying, “We spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.”
His line is rhetorical, but research on curiosity and praise suggests the concern deserves more than a laugh.
A warning about everyday conditioning
No teacher needs to announce that curiosity has an expiration date. The message can arrive through smaller signals, such as rewarding only the expected answer, rushing past questions, or treating an unusual idea as a distraction.
Curiosity is the desire to seek information when something is unknown. Divergent thinking is related but different, since it means producing several possible answers instead of hunting for one approved response.
Both require some comfort with uncertainty, and that comfort can shrink when every task feels like a test.
The famous creativity numbers are shaky
A widely shared story claims that George Land and Beth Jarman tested children with a creativity assessment connected to NASA and found that 98% of five-year-olds scored at a “genius” level. The percentages supposedly collapsed as the children grew older.
Those figures are memorable, but their scientific foundation is difficult to verify. A source check points readers to the pair’s 1992 business book, “Breakpoint and Beyond,” rather than a readily identifiable peer-reviewed NASA publication, so the exact numbers should not be treated as settled fact.
A preschooler can still turn a cardboard box into a spaceship, a store, and a hat before lunch, while an adult may freeze when told to “think outside the box.” That familiar contrast helps the claim spread. It does not prove the percentages.
Praise can make difficulty feel dangerous
Stronger evidence comes from six experiments by Columbia University psychologists Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck. Fifth graders praised for being intelligent later showed less persistence, less enjoyment, and poorer performance after failure than children praised for hard work.
Why would a compliment backfire? When success is framed as proof that a child is “smart,” a difficult task can threaten that identity. Process praise instead focuses on strategies, concentration, persistence, and useful changes, showing that mistakes can contain information.
Curiosity needs room for uncertainty
A 2022 study led by Jamie Jirout at the University of Virginia developed a framework for identifying classroom practices that may support curiosity. The researchers tested it in 35 elementary math lessons and found low levels of curiosity-promoting instruction in that small feasibility sample.
The framework highlights actions such as asking students to generate questions, giving them time to explore ideas without fixed steps, and responding positively when they admit uncertainty. “Any questions?” is easy to ignore, but “What could we ask to learn more?” gives curiosity an actual job.
This does not mean classrooms should abandon structure or let every interruption take over. Children need guidance, knowledge, and limits. The point is to leave enough open space for a question to become part of learning rather than evidence that someone has fallen behind.
The same habit follows adults to work
The pattern does not end at graduation. In a busy restaurant, the dishwasher or youngest kitchen assistant may notice the fastest way to reorganize a station while the manager is focused on schedules and the dinner rush.
But a useful idea will stay silent when offering it feels unsafe. Leaders can change that signal by treating a half-formed suggestion as a starting point, not an inconvenience. The idea may work or fail, but people quickly learn whether curiosity is welcome.
How to unlearn sitting down
One practical step is to ask the “dumb” question on purpose. Often, it is the question several other people had but were too careful to voice, and it can expose an assumption everyone else stopped noticing.
It also helps to follow a curiosity with no obvious payoff. Learn a language phrase, a kitchen skill, or an obscure corner of history simply because it pulls you in. Curiosity without a reward is a muscle many adults rarely exercise.
Parents, teachers, friends, and managers can offer the space they once needed themselves.
That means listening a few seconds longer before correcting an odd idea and watching the internal supervisor that whispers, “Not here, not now, who do you think you are?”
The warning is not a five-step education plan, but a reminder that the child once applauded for standing up should not spend the rest of life believing that sitting quietly is the safest way to succeed.
The main research on curiosity-supporting classroom practices was published in Frontiers in Psychology.
