(UFF -2008)CURIOSITY: a path toward knowledge? 4Cu

(UFF - 2008)

CURIOSITY: a path toward knowledge?

            ⁴Curiosity's virtue is its greed. It wonders, often indiscriminately, about everything it focuses on. Curiosity carries you, limited by time and space, beyond the immediate. It knows no boundaries, and it pushes you to learn about everything that's still unknown or unfamiliar to you. ¹It can as easily direct itself to the ancient Egyptians as to the wriggling pond-life under your microscope. But that's also its vice, for it's usually directed to very particular interests - say, to ballet or to bugs. You therefore have to make strenuous efforts to extend its range, so that your wonder about ballet becomes knowledge about dance, or so that your fascination with bugs turns into a lifelong love affair with the entire natural world.

            When you were a child, your eagerness to learn defined your behavior. You were full of wonder about everything - touching, holding, maybe wrecking anything that came into your reach. And as soon as you could talk you were full of questions: ²why is the sky blue? why is up up? why can't tomorrow be yesterday? You found everything "curiouser and curiouser", as Alice found it in Wonderland. Adults tried to answer your endless questions (even if you sometimes drove them crazy with them), for they knew that by rewarding your natural inquisitiveness and by satisfying your excitement to know, they'd help you to learn and, equally important, to acquire a taste for learning throughout your life.

            Yet you must keep this in mind about knowledge: it isn't the same thing as information. Knowledge is information that has been given organization, meaning, and use. ³Facts exist by themselves. Knowledge is a human creation.

            ⁵Hydrogen and chlorine are elements of nature. That's a fact. Your understanding that, when combined, these two elements create new substances, such as hydrochloric acid, which has certain characteristics that hydrogen and chlorine independently don't have, constitutes knowledge.

            Knowledge differs from information as music differs from sound. An orchestra warming up doesn't make music; it makes only noise. It makes music when the conductor takes over and each performer follows the score in cooperation with one another. Music is sound given form and significance. Similarly, knowledge is information given structure and meaning. The facts in your head become knowledge when you put them together so that they're related to one another and, put together, take on meaning that is large than the mere facts alone. Nothing has meaning by itself. Information has to gain meaning from the application of human thought. To attain knowledge, you must struggle endlessly to derive meaning from information.

            Curiosity can be every student's best friend. It's the inner signal of what your mind and spirit want to know at any particular time. You ask questions and pursue your curiosity for a single reason: to create knowledge.

(Adapted from BANNER, Jr., M.J. and CANNON, H.C. The elements of learning. New Haven: Yale Press, 1999.)

 

Glossary

greed = ganância, avidez

wriggling = remexendo-se, contorcendo-se

to wreck = destruir

to reward = recompensar

to pursue = buscar, perseguir

to struggle = esforçar-se

 

Mark the option in which the apostrophe S is used as in "curiosity's virtue" (ref. 4).