The Curiosity Deficit: Why It Matters—and What to Do About It

Children ask hundreds of questions a day—until school teaches them not to. In this episode, educational leader, higher ed consultant, and The Collaboration Chronicle author Tawnya Means explores the growing “curiosity deficit” and what we lose when learning becomes an exercise in compliance rather than discovery.

Tawnya challenges us to rethink the purpose of higher education—not as the transfer of information, but as the cultivation of human potential. From reimagining assignments to using AI as a partner in thinking, this conversation offers a powerful vision for creating learning experiences that spark wonder, deepen engagement, and inspire lifelong learning.

Guest Bio

Tawnya Means is an educational leader and consultant helping universities navigate AI and digital transformation. With over 20 years of experience, her work focuses on developing human potential, reimagining learning, and using technology to create more engaging, meaningful educational experiences.

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Transcript

Purpose Before Jobs

SPEAKER_01 0:02

We have not asked our children, what pain do you want to solve in the world? What impact do you want to have? What are you passionate about? And so if we started to take our educational institutions and arrange them around this idea of helping people find purpose, helping them find value, helping them become a whole human, then we would build more of the empathy and wisdom and ethical reasoning and logic and courage and compassion for each other and connection to real humans, and those are actually the things that people value when they go to hire an employee, right?

AI Forces A New Education Rethink

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Children ask hundreds of questions a day until somewhere along the line, curiosity gives way to compliance. Well, in this conversation, we explore what happens when curiosity fades and why that matters more than ever in an AI-infused world. Tanya Mean's educational leader, consultant, and author of the Collaboration Chronicle invites us to rethink what learning is really for. Not just delivering content, but developing the whole human, helping students find purpose and prepare for lives of meaning and impact. So here's the question: Are we designing education for compliance or curiosity? Welcome to Higher Listenings.

SPEAKER_03 1:21

Well, Tanya, welcome to Higher Listenings. Thank you. Yeah, looking forward to this conversation. So let's dive right in here. So when the internet you know came along, it gave us information ubiquity and it really did compel us as educators to recalibrate and rethink our role and our value. It wasn't any longer the case that students had to come into the ivory tower to get the information that only we possessed and were able to share. They had it at their fingertips. So we had to reshape that paradigm and rediscover our role and our value there. It seems that AI is demanding a similar kind of rethink. Is that how you see it? Or does it go even deeper?

Changing Faculty Culture With Support

SPEAKER_01 2:04

I think you're exactly right. The internet gave us access to information. It opened up doors to more ideas and it brought us closer to a variety of sources. But I think what AI is asking us to do, and it's making it very obvious that we need to do it, is to say, well, what is education? What is it actually for? If AI can solve the assignment and do a be or better kind of work, then why do I need to know how to do it? What is the purpose of me as an individual learning that thing if that thing doesn't need to be done by me? And so if we think about AI as a cognitive partner, as a thought partner, and we're saying some of the cognitive tasks that we're currently doing could be done by a machine, then what deserves our attention as humans? And what value do we bring? And is the educational ecosystem designed to enhance our humanity? Or is it just to get us a job? Or is it just to measure GPAs and test scores and grades? I don't think it's the case that artificial intelligence is a threat to learning. I think it's recognizing that in some ways we really haven't done a good job of educating the whole person. Even as young children, we have not asked our children what pain do you want to solve in the world? What impact do you want to have? What are you passionate about? We've asked them, what do you want to be when you grow up? What job do you want to serve? Well, jobs are changing and the world is changing. And so if we started to take our educational institutions, our ecosystems, and arrange them around this idea of helping people find purpose, helping them find value, helping them become a whole human, then we would build more of the empathy and wisdom and ethical reasoning and logic and courage and compassion for each other and connection to real humans. And those are actually the things that people value when they go to hire an employee, right? They're looking for is this person a good fit for our environment? Are they going to help us do more and do better? We don't need to just give people jobs. We need to get them involved in movements and organizations that will make the world a better place.

SPEAKER_03 4:39

You are really speaking to this idea that the affective domain has to come to the center of the mission, which strikes me as requiring a lot of courage. Eric and I've talked a lot about this. We think you're right about where education needs to kind of recalibrate in this direction. But I think speaking of faculty development, this is a dimension of teaching that faculty are really quite far removed from in the main. And so it's going to take a lot of change management to effect this change at scale. And I know that you know your work in part is in helping institutions try to make that shift. So I'm wondering in its early days yet, but are you optimistic that this is going to accelerate and be embraced? Or do you see three more years of exploration before this really starts to take root?

SPEAKER_01 5:27

Well, one thing I think we have to recognize that when we speak about the faculty as a whole, or is the institution as a whole, we're talking about a mass conglomeration of lots of people. And so I think if we do try to narrow it down to looking at one, both from the student perspective and from the faculty perspective, yes, I think we are going to make a lot of progress. Is it going to be broadly across an entire institution? It's going to have some give and take. I think that there's going to be some people who are just, they hit it full on. They're so excited about the reinvigorated. Even I've even heard of people who are, I was so close to retiring, but I want to stay teaching because I'm loving what I'm doing right now. I'm really enjoying this. I'm learning so much. I'm engaging with my students. And so I don't think that it's necessarily age-bound. I don't think it's necessarily background bound. I think that there are people who are going to recognize the value of changing how we approach learning. And so I am very optimistic. I do think that the number of people, now it's self-selection, of course, people who come to my talks or come to my workshops, for the most part, they leave invigorated. And I'm not saying it's all me either. I'm saying that the experience of hands-on with something, of talking to peers, about addressing transparently some of the challenges we're facing, those are healthy. Those are good ways of helping people to feel like there's actually something I can do with this. I can move forward. So I am optimistic. I do think that there are some people who are just bound and determined, they are closed-minded, they just don't want to do anything. And a lot of that I think is related to fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I'm afraid you're trying to replace me. I don't know how I'm going to figure this out. And what does it mean for me? What's my role? And so those kinds of things are really challenging. But I think when we have leadership and we have support and we have faculty development that are all trying to address that, then I think we can move forward.

The Curiosity Deficit In School

SPEAKER_00 7:31

To your point around a meaning and purpose is something that we need to cultivate certainly in young people, but also when you point to the folks who say, I'm not actually going to retire because I want to invest, I want to help solve some of these issues. To me, that speaks to meaning and purpose. And I think that that is something that's almost inherent in academia, certainly in teaching. I mean, it's not necessarily a glamorous profession, it's a lot of hard work. So to invest your life doing that certainly speaks to that. Ikigai, I think the Japanese referred to that. But there's another component to this, right? There's this idea of curiosity. And I remember as a kid asking questions all the time, like do bees sleep, or why do grown-ups pretend to like salad? Um, what's a parliamentary democracy? You know, typical kid stuff, right? But you've written that by the time students reach college, our curiosity seems to be in retreat. So I think we could probably devote an entire podcast episode to this topic. But what do you see happening between kindergarten and college? And why is curiosity for you such an important issue? Because I know you wrote a whole piece called Yeah, the curiosity deficit. So yeah.

Using AI As A Thought Partner

SPEAKER_01 8:39

I think there's two pieces to it. One is I think that we know that four-year-olds ask an average of what 390, 400 questions a day kind of thing. They ask questions constantly. But then when they start school, that number drops dramatically. And if we want to look at why that happens, I think part of it has to do with a tie-in to another thing that I've talked about quite a bit, which is Bloom's Two Sigma problem. So Bloom's Two Sigma problem research over the last 40 years has shown that group instruction versus individual tutoring, the individual tutoring wins every time. Two Sigma is better. Students are so much more advanced in their learning when they have an individual instructor. But because of a great purpose of wanting to educate everyone, we have built a schooling system that has one teacher for 35 students or one teacher for 300 students when we start getting into college spaces. And that just doesn't work for encouraging curiosity or enhancing learning. And so when we start to think about how we've trained curiosity out of our educational system, we've said you get the right answers, you get the points. Not necessarily if they're good questions about the answers. And so we give students goals to earn good grades and to get everything right. And the what-if scenarios aren't part of that. And failure is not a good thing. It's actually detrimental to your academic career. And any exploration and failure, we want everybody to be careful and don't hurt yourself and don't do things wrong because you might struggle or to actually sit and be confused. We don't like that space. We don't encourage that. And we've separated the content from thinking, like where we say, what to think is how we're teaching, and rarely how to think. So the logic and the rhetoric and the process considerations are very rarely what we teach. And so because of that, we've trained everybody to be in compliance rather than discovery. So it gives the wrong perspective. It gives the focus on getting things right as opposed to exploring and trying to figure things out.

SPEAKER_03 11:12

So let's stick with this idea of trying to cultivate an attitude of curiosity and exploration. And we talked about this a little bit earlier, this idea of AI as a partner, as a thought partner in particular. What do students who do that well, what does that look like in practice? Can you give us some concrete illustration of what a partnering student is doing that a student who is gaming AI isn't doing, and maybe play this out just a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Yeah, absolutely. So let's look at a student who maybe doesn't have curiosity and therefore doesn't consider AI as a thinking partner, but as a tool to get stuff done. That kind of student is going to ask a question, and even if it's not a great answer, take the answer and just use it. They're not really digging into, well, why did it give that answer versus another answer? Or I've heard something different. How does that compare? If they're focused on just trying to get the answer as quickly as possible, then they're not prompting in the right way. And I don't mean prompting like we first heard about prompt engineers and they can make over$100,000 a year kind of thing. And so people are like, I'm gonna become a prompt engineer, and they're like figuring out all these techniques and even the things like you are an expert in physics and you're gonna answer these questions. It doesn't really matter if you say you're an expert in physics, it's not. It has all the knowledge. So those kinds of things that we initially thought about prompt engineering, I don't think are very valid anymore. And what I think we need to teach is thinking. And when we do that, for example, I might query, Claude, help me draft an outline for this project that I'm working on. And it can give me a lot of different things. And then I say, Well, ask me three questions before you give me the response. And when it does that, it's gonna ask me, Well, are you looking at the project in this direction or this direction? And it can start to get the ball rolling with my thinking. And then when I get the response, say, well, that doesn't feel quite right. In fact, that feels like too big for this project. Help me scale it back. What kinds of things can I remove from this project to make it more effective? And it can give me some suggestions. Well, you could remove this part and this part and this part. And so it's that conversation, that cognitive back and forth, that students who are using it as a thought partner start to develop that skill set. In addition to that, being able to have a transparent conversation. I wrote an article with Claude, and it took me 97 iterations before I got it right. You know, and and being able to feel comfortable talking to people about that and not saying, no, no, no, I did it all myself. It looks like AI, but really I did it myself. You don't want to present yourself as something you're not.

Teaching Thinking On Purpose

SPEAKER_00 14:01

So you we talk about higher ed and a key point of higher ed being teaching students how to think. But I'm gonna be honest, when I look back at my career in higher education, I'm not sure anyone explicitly taught me how to think. I think it was a byproduct of going to class, doing the readings, writing the paper. So if we want students to be able to actually think critically, which is vital, especially dealing with outputs from AI and those sorts of things, argue persuasively, stay curious as you talk about what does it look like to actually teach those skills on purpose, not by accident?

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Well, I think there's a few behaviors we can teach. The first one is teaching students to ask follow-up questions. I don't care if you're using AR or not, you should be asking students to ask you follow-up questions. If you're telling them something, say, now I expect what questions do you have? And you need to ask questions. And so, not just the what kinds of questions, but the why and what's it connected to, and what if you did something else instead? And what's the reasoning behind it? So modeling that behavior and encouraging that behavior. So I think that's the first one is just get people to stop just accepting what they get. The second one is a behavior around experimentation. So deliberately and intentionally planning to experiment. Test the claims, not just click the link and make sure the link goes to where you think it goes to or is a hallucination, but actually if it links to a source that's supposed to be connected to what you're talking about, throw that source into notebook LM and query it. You can use the chat to be able to say, explain this to me. What does that percentage mean? What do these findings mean? But experimenting with what you're learning and not being afraid that it might give you wrong answers. I think that's a second behavior. When you hear something and you don't know if you know it, you don't know if you know it, but you're kind of trying to elude yourself into thinking that you might know it. And so you don't really want to push too much on it. And so I think it's important for you to encourage students to articulate what they know and what they don't know. Because a lot of people think they know a lot more than they know. And so in that case, it's trying to teach people how to identify logical fallacies, how to identify where you think you know something, but maybe you don't know something, or trying to push back on connections that you think might be there, but they're maybe not very well thought out. And even just modeling that as an instructor. Student asks you a question and you don't know the answer, it's okay to say, you know what, that's a really good question. I don't think I know that. Let me go and do some research and get back to you, or let me model to you how I would figure it out. I think that's a place where a lot of instructors aren't really sure that they're given permission to do that because I have a PhD in that. I should know everything. Well, no, you don't, because there's too much in the world to know everything. And so recognizing that. The last one I think is just that iteration process. Like we need to be modeling that, we need to be showing that to students, and we need to have them figure out how it works too.

Scaffolding Knowledge Without Overload

SPEAKER_03 17:20

I'm listening to this conversation and I'm thinking, you know, yes, curiosity, yes to thinking, yes to character and you know, values, all good things. But look, at the end of the day, or maybe at the beginning of the day, there's got to be some content knowledge that we're building and leveraging to do all this thinking, to be curious about, to extend our curiosity and so on. How do you see the acquisition of foundational knowledge? You know, I have to know basic chemistry before I go to OCEM as a concrete example. Where's that fit into this new world that we're exploring here?

SPEAKER_01 17:52

Well, I think one thing that we can recognize is that we don't have to learn everything all at once. That there's a valid purpose for scaffolding, that repetition is a good thing, and repeated practice with something that you're just learning is a productive struggle. And that that value means that maybe 85% of what you are working on at the time should be a review and application of knowledge. Whereas just about 15% of it should be focused on something new. And if we can structure our courses that way, it kind of sounds counterintuitive. You're only learning 15% of new stuff. Shouldn't we be moving faster and progressing further? But really, the research has shown that if you scaffold learning in that way, then you have new neural pathways that are developed. The cognitive load itself decreases, which allows you to process in a more deep fashion. And students gain more confidence because they're covering familiar territory while they're bringing in new frontiers and new ideas. And so that means that we really should be offering students the opportunity for infinite practice. Try this as many times as you want until you feel comfortable with it. Continue to review what you learned three weeks ago while you're still learning new things, because you have the bandwidth to do it, but also because it's valuable for your really sinking that knowledge into your head and recognizing that it takes time for this to happen, that you can't just jump into something, get it figured out, and move on. That spending a lot of time on a topic develops your comfort, confidence, and uh sense of I belong here. I can do this. And I think that that's really important.

SPEAKER_03 19:54

Is there a compelling argument for why this content, this kind of foundational content, is important for me to internalize as opposed to outsourcing like the way I outsource my phone numbers? So why isn't basic chemistry more like my contact list? I don't need to know any of that stuff anymore because it's all on my phone, right? Um so how do we help students see the value in putting forward that kind of effort?

System Levers Beyond The Classroom

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Well, I think one thing is recognizing what students will need to develop wisdom in as opposed to have ready access to knowledge in. So ready access to knowledge is things like my phone numbers, right? Most of the time, I I do remember clearly my emergency phone numbers, right? Because I will need them at some point if there's ever an emergency. But all the rest of them, what value does it have in my head to take up space with a whole bunch of numbers? Because I don't need them in an emergency. On the other hand, if my profession is chemistry, then I'm gonna be using certain formulas and certain structures of knowledge in meaningful ways in a variety of different applications in order to do my job. Now, if I'm having to learn that, but then I'm going and being an artist, maybe it looks different. And so I think there's a piece of figuring out what part of the information is necessary and foundational for you to be successful in whatever you're choosing to do in the future instead of saying everybody needs to learn this just because everybody needs to learn it. And so I think that's one of the challenges that we have when we talk about curriculum. You know, what information is foundational to the next step, to the next step, to the next step, and what actually is helpful from each of these areas to the future of that particular person's life and experiences beyond the time in their classroom. Part of that also means that we need to help students to recognize this particular piece of knowledge that I'm giving you, it's really foundational. And you need to know it because X, Y, and Z. It's going to be something that you're going to rely on in the future. So I think we need to do a better job of making that distinction.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

My nephew's in trades, he's going to college for welding. And that's when he has to do math. Um, and I don't think he particularly liked math or was a great math student in high school, but he's got to do it. And we were talking the other day, and uh said, this is this kind of counts now because you're thinking about how are you actually going to design something, or if you make a mistake, it's wasted time, it's wasted material. It kind of got real for him, I think. Yeah, which definitely changed his motivation. So it instructors can do a lot, I think, in terms of their own teaching practice, but there's also systemic challenges. We have grading policies, we have assessment structures, there's institutional incentives, and all of that shapes student behavior. So if we want students to think more and comply less, what are some of the levers you think we need to pull beyond what happens in our own classrooms?

SPEAKER_01 23:13

I think we can do more to address the whole human. So, for example, um, bringing students together to learn from each other, peer instruction. We know that it's effective. We see that how an expert explains something to a novice versus how a novice who's just learned it can explain it to a novice, there's a difference there. And it can help sometimes the expert doesn't even remember how they learned it. And so it's challenging for them to articulate it. So I think some of it is recognizing how we teach doesn't have to be the standard lecture delivery where I, as the instructor, have all of the knowledge and I'm telling you what to do and you need to comply. So I think there's some of that. I think there's also a recognition from the person who is the educator of the value of the pieces and parts that they're sharing, trying to identify what's really core to what they're teaching versus the kinds of things that are, I'm gonna teach you how to access this information, I'm gonna teach you how to leverage this information, but I don't need you to remember this information because you're gonna be able to have easy access to it in the future. And when we think about systems, it's not just an individual faculty member in their one course teaching their however many students, and then nothing outside the walls matters. The incentive system that is set up in an educational institution quite often rewards faculty for being good at research or fulfilling their service, but not necessarily for being good at teaching. They often are good at teaching because they're passionate about it or because they have an interest or they care. But the system itself isn't designed that way. And when we think about a lot of these institutions now that have bought enterprise licenses to these platforms or have done one-time training to get everybody up to speed on something, they're missing the recognition that it's a culture, that it's an environment that needs to be affected, that there's all these different pieces and parts that play into that environment, that ecosystem, that if you're not addressing all of those other parts, then you're not going to be as effective. We have a curriculum that, first of all, the incentive system for changing the curriculum is pretty messed up. I propose a new course, that course could take up to two years for approval. And by the time it's approved, then it's obsolete. It's no longer valid. I have to still teach it because I proposed it. We have curriculum that is still holding on to some of the things that aren't as relevant anymore. And so recognizing that we don't need to take so long thinking about things before we actually do something about them.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

Progress, not perfection. Yeah, exactly.

A Future Built On Better Questions

SPEAKER_03 26:01

So, Tanya, we started this conversation with the homework apocalypse. So let's end it on a more positive note. I think you you have invested a lot of your writing focus and your consulting energy on trying to help institutions move toward a future that I think you see particularly clearly. So if we get this right, tell us a little bit about what you see on the horizon. What's the future look like for students, educators, and for learning itself if we make the right sorts of steps in the near term here?

SPEAKER_01 26:32

Imagine a classroom where the goal isn't to cover all the content, but to actually develop thinkers and that students come in with genuine questions and that they leave not with the answers, but with better questions or more questions. And that AI is really treated as a thinking partner, as a collaborator, as something to help students to articulate their ideas and test their reasoning and explore possibilities, and that failure and confusion and struggle are recognized as valuable and necessary steps to learning, that it's not a problem to avoid or a friction to remove from the process. And so, with that kind of a classroom, then we'll have students who come out of it with better thinking skills, more passion for their future, more desire to learn. Education will be focused on the whole human and not just the pieces of knowledge we might want to insert into that bank of learning that we have this fallacy of thinking that there is. I think that also means that educators will be liberated from exhausting work of grading, you know, 150 essays in a weekend so that people can get feedback. And they'll be freed up to do things that are relationship building, that are connecting students and ideas and engaging with people and fostering creativity and encouraging struggle and that kind of transformation that we can really be about the idea of developing human capabilities and not just transferring information from one place to another. And so when we do that, when we have that kind of vision, then it becomes a better society, I think. It becomes a more connected society, it becomes a more informed and better functioning society. But it has to be all of those parts together.

SPEAKER_03 28:31

Wow. I'm sold, Eric. How about you? Yeah, I'm sold. Yeah, Tanya, thank you. Thanks so much for your time, Tanya. This is wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

Brad, Eric, it was so wonderful to talk to you. I really enjoyed this conversation. Looking forward to another opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

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