Questão de Inglês — Interpretação de Textos (Understanding) — VUNESP 2025

The Missing Ingredient in Education? Curiosity.

It’s easy to forget how important individual passion is in education; too often it can feel like it’s a game of just painting by the numbers. But if we all think about it for a moment, isn’t learning actually meant to be a joyous experience? If you think about your own life, haven’t you had an afternoon fly past because you’ve been gripped by a certain task, a particular lesson, a specific train of thought? School education is no different. If we make room for young people’s individual curiosities, notice and nurture them, we can make learning a natural experience.

Once we find that individual spark in a child, in many ways, the hard part is over. They can lead the way with their learning and they don’t have to be coaxed into it. Curiosity can be utilized through inquiry-based learning and schools all over the world are already making the most of this type of learning.

For instance, children are driven to the museums where they are engaged in stories, games and activities. To develop curiosity, children identify an exhibit on a particular topic and are encouraged to ask questions about the exhibits to fill in the gaps in their own knowledge. Along with utilizing manmade resources suc as museums, nature itself has an important part to play in inquiry-based learning. The world is full of natural wonders which can spark curiosity in children.

Not only is identifying and encouraging curiosity pivotal in a child’s educational career, but it will be useful for them in the working world too. By instilling these behaviours early on we can help kids to become lifelong learners, which they will need to be, as single-track careers become an antiquated idea and we’ll potentially find ourselves working several different careers within our lifetime. Curiosity may have killed the cat in decades past, but it could be the key to a more stable future for the next generation.

(Josephine Lister. Disponível em: https://hundred.org. Adaptado)