Radical Curiosity: Questioning Commonly Held Beliefs to Imagine Flourishing Futures

Sendak understood that stories can be scary. He believed that we should all—kids and adults alike—experience stories that deliver encounters with all the emotions available to us; that scary stories are how we become prepared for any eventuality. Indeed, this is the very reason we need stories. We don’t do well with uncertainty, and so we seek out

Society is deeply uncomfortable with curiosity as a way of living, leading, and doing daily business. Yet, ironically, curiosity is the fuel to transformative leadership and value creation.

We have amazing tools at our fingertips. But the crises of our time are not commercial, technological, or scientific; they are fundamentally humanistic. We need an inquiry into the assumptions and the inherited design of the modern human experience. How will we live, learn, work, play, and sustain ourselves in the twenty-first century?

In the worst of these conditions, knowledge is wielded as a tool of power through which education systems can actively oppress entire populations, preventing the awareness of their own agency in their lives.

For hooks and Freire, the classroom is a mirror of the world. So, when the world struggles with sexism, racism, and the many types of prejudice shaping social life, our education system struggles with them as well. The space for learning can be one of oppression, or one of liberation.

As the world has become more complex, singular-solution frameworks no longer suffice. Today’s challenges require interdisciplinary approaches, diverse perspectives, and the ability to remix existing knowledge into new cocktails fit for the occasion.

The irony of this emphasis on production is that it is contradictory to the origins of the notion of school. The word “school” derives from the Greek scholē, originally meaning “leisure.”

Where do the power structures and agency of learning reside? Who has power: the learner, or the educator and the institutions that deliver education services?

length distance outside our radius of exposure. Yet our present experience is anchored by legacy narratives. Our past is a silent investment partner in our future. Our ability to contribute to the next emergent chapter in our story is dependent on our ability to distinguish between resilient wisdom and situational practices that are no longer relev