The Girl Who Stopped Raising Her Hand
When I was in middle school, there was a girl who always sat in the front row. She was the first to raise her hand when the teacher asked a question. Her hair was always in braids, her skirt always long, and she never tried to stand out with her clothing. She wasn’t the type to have many friends and was not part of the “cool” group. But it seemed like she enjoyed school. I think she had a pure desire to learn, and she couldn’t contain it within herself.
The other students looked at her with a chill in their eyes. Over time, they began to mock her openly. They imitated the way she raised her hand and laughed loudly whenever she walked by. One day, she stopped raising her hand.
It’s no secret that conventional schooling is not well-designed for learning. Specifically, school doesn’t foster our curiosity, which I believe is the most important quality of learning.
I don’t know how many people keep their curiosity alive after many years of schooling. The number is probably near zero. Steve Jobs, as he recalls his elementary school days, said, “they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me.”
In K–12, I lost my curiosity. I’m grateful for Japan’s public schools and for parents who prioritized my education, and I know school is a privilege many still lack1. Even so, the system has blind spots, not only in Japan. Much of modern public education still follows the Prussian model2.
So what exactly kills curiosity in a place that should nurture it?
Peer Pressure
It wasn’t that she lost interest in learning; it was that something around her slowly made learning feel unsafe.
One answer is likely social pressure. This concept is vividly illustrated by the Asch experiment, conducted by psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s.
Here’s how it worked: a subject was shown a line with three other lines next to it, one shorter, one longer, and one the same length. They just had to pick which one matched. When alone, they got it right every time. But then five actors came in and gave the wrong answer one after another. Then it was the subject’s turn again. In one-third of the cases, they would answer incorrectly to match the other people’s responses.
It seems ridiculous that we conform to others even when they are obviously wrong. However, it can be quite useful from an evolutionary perspective. We are probably hard-wired to conform to others and stay socially connected. Human society can do things that no single human can do, such as hunting dangerous wild animals, farming, building cities, and more. Probably, we humans, by cooperating with one another, have become the earth’s dominant species.
So, sadly, her decision to abandon her curiosity for social conformity makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, especially when she would have been bullied otherwise.
Embarrassment
Peer pressure explains part of it, but not all of it. There’s another powerful force that quietly shapes how we behave in school: the fear of embarrassment.
I had chosen to comply with a group before she did. For me, embarrassment was probably a big factor. As we age, we start thinking about what other people think of us. This seems to happen for most people during junior high school, in my observation.
This shift in mindset, starting to care more about how others perceive us, is probably a gradual process for most people, but I vividly recall the event that nudged me to think in that way.
My homeroom teacher told me that I should think more about what others are thinking during a feedback session. Maybe he was well-meaning, but I wish I had known back then that adults could give me well-meaning but wrong advice.
I wasn’t thinking independently enough at the age of 12, so I started to consider how others perceived me more, and I became less and less proactive in classes. I didn’t want to draw attention. I didn’t want to get something wrong and feel embarrassed. We hate feeling embarrassed, so much so that we’re afraid to try.
School Bells
Even if you overcome social pressure and fear of embarrassment, the system still clips your wings.
You can see it in the curriculum, which is not designed in a way that allows us to explore things freely. This becomes painfully obvious when you look at how the school day is structured.
John Taylor Gatto, in his book Dumbing Us Down, talks about school bells as a symbol of the school’s structural system. As a teacher, when the bell rings, he has to “insist they drop whatever it is we have been doing and proceed quickly to the next work station.” I took it for granted, but we were constantly interrupted every hour, even if there was something we were interested in learning more about.
Think about the times when we are obsessed with something, we keep exploring for hours, days, weeks, or even months. I encountered Bitcoin right after college, and I spent every hour learning whatever I could about it. During that time, I taught myself computer science, game theory, cryptography, economics, investment, programming, distributed systems, and more. It was one of the most efficient times for me in terms of learning and growth.
I also remember the time when I was teaching my nephew how to program using Scratch. His curiosity was unstoppable. He just kept completely caught up on the screen, solving programming puzzles for hours until finally we had to tell him to have dinner. I was amazed at how much he could learn in such a short time.
Imagine if my nephew and I were in school; we would be interrupted every hour in the middle of learning.
In school, even when a student finds something worth chasing, the school bells keep pulling them away.
One Pace for All
Interruption is one problem. Speed is the other. Our system rarely lets students move at the speed they actually learn.
When I was in preschool, my parents enrolled me in a local cram school so I could do my elementary school studies early. I was around four or five, so my memories are a bit fuzzy, but I do recall struggling with a math concept that just didn’t click for me.
Looking back, this is simply because every kid develops differently. I think my brain development was probably delayed or not fast enough to start elementary school studies early as a preschool kid; I was also one of the last to lose my baby teeth and had my growth spurt later than most kids.
But the class just kept going, leaving me behind. And as the cram school curriculum, just like public schooling, was designed to teach fundamental concepts before it moved on to more advanced concepts, I was lost.
The opposite is equally bad for our curiosity. Since public school is usually designed to make sure no one falls behind, we often find ourselves learning about things we already know. But we cannot skip it; everybody moves at the same pace.
If we want to spark curiosity, we need to allow kids to learn at their own pace. We should make sure kids fully grasp a concept before we ask them to tackle something more advanced. If they grasp a concept quickly, they can move ahead and avoid getting bored.
We don’t have to lose interest if a concept is far out of our reach. Conversely, we don’t have to feel bored when we are exposed to what we already know.
Bringing It Back to the Girl
The crowd pressures and shames you, the bell interrupts you, and the pace rarely matches your learning speed. No wonder curiosity rarely survives. But sometimes, life outside those systems gives people the space to rediscover it.
When I started writing this piece, the image of that girl who sat in the front row surfaced in my mind for the first time in years. Out of curiosity, I searched for her name on Facebook and Google, wondering how she was doing.
What I found completely surprised me. She hadn’t disappeared into ordinary life. I learned that, from her Wikipedia page, she had transformed herself into a heavy-metal guitarist in an all-female band! On top of that, she also earned two silver medals in fitness competitions.
Seeing what she became made me smile and realize how powerful curiosity is. It can be dimmed, but it can also be reignited. We just need the freedom, the right environment, and sometimes a little stubbornness to follow what genuinely interests us.
According to Our World in Data, of the world’s 787 million children of primary school age, 58.4 million children did not go to school in 2021
Prussian schools pioneered modern education: teaching by year group, formal classroom layouts with desks and standing teachers, structured school days with bell schedules, predetermined syllabi, and daily lessons covering multiple subjects.