ArtemisWe need to encourage curiosity in children more.
Incurious people are killing the world.
The first thing people want to teach kids is how to "obey", how to walk in lockstep, but that's not the kind of human we should be trying to grow.
It's tough because there's a certain amount of control you *have* to have over kids you're responsible for. You have to keep them safe, and feed them, and maintain your own sanity.
But still...
Training people from infancy to submit without question to "authority" is a wild choice.
Almost every human starts out incredibly curious. As soon as kids learn language, they start asking question after question after question. It's so constant it's exhausting. That makes me think that incuriosity is learned.
Em (existing out of spite arc)One of the constant hallmarks of the people driving the global rise of fascism is a total lack of curiosity. They have no desire to understand the world or other creatures better. They don't want to learn anything they don't already "know". They don't want to correct or refine their beliefs. They simply don't care about anything that happens that doesn't concern them.
But when you remember that people can and do literally beat the curiosity out of their children...no wonder we have so many small-minded adults.
If we ever want anything better for humanity, we are going to have to do better for kids, specifically.
Morgan ⚧️@artemis I've said it before and I'll say it again: stifling kids' curiosity sabotages their ability to learn empathy. We'll be fine with a few people who have low empathy, there always will be people who had a lower capacity for it in the first place and that's fine. But a society in which most people who could have easily been empathetic are prevented from learning that... And we're taught empathy is the only reason for compassion... That doesn't end well for any of us
Jacqueline@raphaelmorgan @artemis I think that "empathy" as a term refers to multiple related concepts that are all subtly different from one another, and a person can have one type of empathy but not another.
@raphaelmorgan @artemis someone can have empathy on a cognitive level but not an emotional one, as one example.
Riley S. Faelan@artemis It's not necessarily true that this is the common source of protofascists. Scientists have looked into it, and while authoritarian upbringing correlates weakly with authoritarian personality in children, there's a hairy confounding factor: it correlates very strongly with authoritarian personality in parents. Which brings in a whole forest of confounders yet to be successfully analysed and interpreted.
OTOH, curious children can apparently be taught to mask their curiosity by way of violence and other child abuse.
Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary@riley @artemis
One thing I think gets too little credit in the way children grow up is how their teachers act and what their school environment is like. School tends to be treated culturally like its influence isn't as important as parents', even though most parents' only means of choosing schools is to move (and good luck with that nowadays) and children frankly tend to be stuck at school for longer spans of the day than they spend with their inevitably-working parents.
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@riley @artemis
In the US, schools tend to be *very* controlling, *especially* as both school shootings and desperation not to lose funding because of bad standardized test scores became overwhelming factors. Authoritarian elements were bad enough when I was in school that I wound up dropping out because of them; they're clearly far worse now.
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@riley @artemis
For my own part, I was in a widely-acclaimed public school system in a rich, right-leaning suburb. It had a private school too, but both the public and private schools were seen as high-quality and valid choices there, with no stigma either way, just lacrosse rivalry.
The public school in Yuppieville was decent enough at the actual *school* part, sure, but it was still intolerably controlling and clearly thought something was wrong with *me* in particular.
@riley @artemis
(Aside: it used to be a pretty Republican town back in the day, including being anti-LGBTQ+. I looked up my old house on Google Maps a few months back and a Pride flag was waving in front of it. Makes me wonder if the Republican pivot to being against schooling rubbed these particular rich suburbanites who were very proud of their schools the wrong way and they're now corpo Dems...)
(Aside: it used to be a pretty Republican town back in the day, including being anti-LGBTQ+. I looked up my old house on Google Maps a few months back and a Pride flag was waving in front of it. Makes me wonder if the Republican pivot to being against schooling rubbed these particular rich suburbanites who were very proud of their schools the wrong way and they're now corpo Dems...)
@pteryx There's different views on what a "good school" is supposed to do, and they tend to translate into personality bias in the selection of teachers. (But it's also a curious tidbit that right-wingers tend to be more aggressively seeking out teaching positions, so non-selective systems of teacher recruitment tend to gather a lot of right-wing teachers.)
On one side, there's the idea that a high-quality school is one attended by children of aristocrats, so its desirable education outcomes are making children familiar with future noblemen and learning the sort of behavioural patterns that will allow them to work for life in a well-paying royal court. In European discusions, this is typically associated with the English "public school" system (which, as you probably already know, corresponds to "private schools" in many other structures, including USA). Eton is this sort of school.
On the other side, there's the idea that a high-quality school is one where skills needed to build and maintain the next generation society's common infrastructure are tught well. Typically, schools focused around this sort of thing are imagined as technical, because technical infrastructure is kind of more tangible, but in systems like that, future lawyers are taught largely in the same way. In European discussions, this is typically associated with the German "Abitur" track (or for pre-WWII history fans, the "Gymnasium" network).
Both are far more common than just a few stereotypical countries, though, and, especially where school systems are not homogeneous, most countries have significant numbers of schools of both kinds, as well as many that just aim to get by and don't particularly care about being good schools.
@pteryx Stereotypes notwithstanding, I'd particularly recommend looking at Finnish schools for techniques of curiosity-encouraging education. Have I already hyped the tutkimustehtäviä ? (Some authors prefer the term tutkimusongelma; the basic idea is the same; the slight difference is in the focus.)
si_irini
Court Cantrell does not comply@artemis This whole thread is a message I wish every human on this planet could hear and take to heart. Thank you so much for sharing these thoughts and expressing them so clearly.
Stargeezer Smith@artemis
Help them learn to read, and support that effort by making age appropriate books available along the way. If they develop the skill and interest in reading, I think they will stay curious and informed.
Most of the MAGAs I know don't read for information, as near as I can tell.
Mystery Babylon 
@stargazersmith @artemis Also, and I know this is maybe a hot take, but emphasize that reading CAN be a pleasure but it isn't supposed to be solely a pleasure.
A lot of adults could do with a reminder of this.
Jonah Gibberish@artemis child liberation is human liberation.
Maggie Maybe@artemis I think this is because a lot of them have been conned by religion, they were groomed to believe things that were impossible to prove and that made absolutely no logical sense. They are taught to be delusional because that delusion tells them they can do whatever they want all day long as long as they ask their daddy for forgiveness at night.
Why would they be curious about anything when they have faith that sky daddy will take care of it all, and if it seems like he isn’t, it’s just because he has a plan they know nothing about. There’s no reason for them to be curious, they have their blind faith.
Kevin Karhan 
@artemis nodds in agreement
Exposure to diversity and having the provilegue to travel a lot at a young age propably "vaccinated" me against becoming a racist asshole...
@artemis And if somebody should want to see studies about this, the relevant keywords are 'right-wing authoritarianism' and 'openness to experience'. RWA is the psychometric scale that closely corresponds to fascism (indeed, it's literally built on Adorno's work on F-scale, basically just using more advanced mathematics to extract the relevant data and crunch the numbers); 'openness to experience' is the O in the Big Five aka OCEAN model of personality.
The relationship between Openness to Experience and political ideology
The relationship between Openness to Experience and political ideology was tested in two adult samples, one in Belgium (N=100) and one in Poland (N=146). A Belgian sample of students (N=105) and political party members (N=80) was also studied. In accordance with previous investigations, significant negative correlations between Openness and right-wing political ideology were obtained in the Belgian adult sample as well as in the student sample. A rather weak but significant negative relationship was obtained in the Polish sample. Contrary to expectations, the relationship between Openness and ideology was not replicated in the political party sample. Analyses of the Openness facet scores indicated significant relationships between the Openness to Fantasy and Actions facets and the ideological variables. Openness to Feelings and Aesthetics were much weaker correlates of political ideology and correlations between Openness to ideas and political ideology were inconsistent.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188699900135X. And it's not one of these hard-to-replicate findings, either; I specifically picked a study not conducted in North America, where most of them come from.
Kiki Buber@artemis Curiosity and its clustered attributes: imagination and empathy.
Callisto@artemis And they have a very limited idea of what does concern them.