When pitching the idea for the show to the BBC, John Lloyd, QI<\/em>\u2019s producer, reportedly noted that, \u201cThere is nothing more important or strange than curiosity.\u201d While all animals share the drives for food, sex, and shelter, \u201cPure curiosity is unique to human beings. When animals snuffle around in the bushes, it\u2019s because they\u2019re looking for the three other things. It\u2019s only people, as far as we know, who look up at the stars and wonder what they are.\u201d<\/p>\n But in a world\u2014or a universe\u2014that offers endless things to be curious about, and limitless ways to snuffle around in the bushes and wonder at them, particularly in this new Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), how do we decide what is most important to know, and how best to teach, learn and use it?<\/p>\n People have been trying to figure this out for thousands of years.<\/p>\n The Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt, built sometime in the third century BCE, was the largest and most famous center for scholarship and the exchange of ideas in the ancient world. Originally organized by a student of Aristotle\u2019s, the library was charged with the ambitious task of collecting all the world\u2019s knowledge.<\/p>\n Boasting perhaps half a million papyrus scrolls and early books on subjects ranging from mathematics and physics to geography, medicine, philosophy and the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; and hosting visiting thinkers and lecturers from both the West and the East, Alexandria was a beacon for learning, and a monument to human curiosity and accomplishment\u2014until it was sacked and eventually burned to the ground in a series of civil wars and invasions.<\/p>\n Today, our Alexandria is Google, with the company mission<\/a> to \u201cOrganize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.\u201d<\/p>\n And, hopefully, fireproof.<\/p>\n Of course, Google has recently been joined by Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Apple and thousands of other companies around the world using artificial intelligence to organize and make available everything we have ever thought or created.<\/p>\n But whatever form human knowledge takes, papyrus or lights flickering on a screen; and wherever and however it is stored, flammable wooden shelves or massive underground, air-conditioned server farms; we still face the dilemma, perhaps especially now, of how best to use <\/em>it\u2014and even highly intelligent minds do not always agree.<\/p>\n Will artificial intelligence be the dawn of a new Age of Enlightenment? Or the beginning of the end of our species? <\/p>\n Will it lead to bold breakthroughs in science, technology, and art? Or to the devolution of thinking and creativity as we all become dependent on ideas recycled through AI?<\/p>\n I\u2019m as curious about these questions as anyone, especially as Northern Essex Community College develops our own policies and processes for how we use AI.<\/p>\n Like a growing portion of the American population<\/a>, I also listen to a lot of audiobooks, and recently spent a chunk of my weekend going old school with Ian Leslie\u2019s treatise on human exploration and understanding, written in the pre-AI, Stone Age days of 2014, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n While not focused on artificial intelligence, Curious<\/em> addresses something far more important and more likely to be a predictor of where the current maelstrom around AI may take us: Human nature.<\/p>\n Leslie is a British author, speaker, and advertising consultant (clearly a curious man himself) who writes about social trends, psychology, politics, and whatever else catches his interest.<\/p>\n In Curious <\/em>he describes how curiosity works, some of the challenges of becoming curious in a technology-dependent world of haves and have-nots and offers some tips for strengthening your own curiosity.<\/p>\n For truly curious deep divers, you can read Leslie\u2019s book and learn about diversive, epistemic, and empathic forms of curiosity, how memory works, and the importance of culture to creating and efficiently passing along knowledge.<\/p>\n Or, for Google- or ChatGPT-age skimmers, here are a few of the key takeaways: <\/p>\n That last one may be one of the most important\u2014and debatable\u2014ideas in Leslie\u2019s book.<\/p>\n Basically, Leslie argues that, in order to be curious in the first place, we have to know at least a little<\/em>about a topic, in order to want to know more<\/em>.<\/p>\n AI champions and AI skeptics can both rally around this one: Used effectively, AI can help us learn enough about a topic to want to know more; or, AI can fill-in-the-blanks with simple information on demand, stopping curiosity before it gets started.<\/p>\n At heart, Leslie is an educational traditionalist, who believes there is an important place in schools for a canon of facts and ideas that students should be taught\u2014by rote memorization if necessary\u2014in order to have a base to build on.<\/p>\n Like E.D. Hirsch back in the 1980\u2019s, who argued in Cultural Literacy<\/a> <\/em>that every American child should be taught basic facts about history, geography, literature and other topics, and even included a lengthy list of necessary topics, such as the Bible, the Civil War, gravity, the Alamo, and phrases like \u201cEasy come, easy go\u201d; Leslie suggests that we can, and should, decide that some ideas are more important than others. <\/p>\n He also tries to dispel a few \u201cmyths\u201d about progressive approaches to education that he thinks do more harm than good, including the ideas that \u201cchildren don\u2019t need teachers to instruct them\u201d; that \u201cschools should teach thinking skills instead of knowledge\u201d; and that \u201cfacts kill creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n And in attempting to debunk those myths, Leslie runs smack into some rather widespread trends in education today, including a few we practice here at NECC, like self-paced learning, competency-based education, instruction based on individual student \u201clearning styles<\/a>,\u201d and the \u201cflipped classroom<\/a>\u201d or \u201chybrid classes<\/a>,\u201d in which traditional lecture material is shared with students outside <\/em>of class, and class time is used for discussion, active learning, and self-directed work groups. <\/p>\n While Leslie might appreciate what we call our \u201cCore Academic Skills<\/a>\u201d in areas like written communication, quantitative reasoning, information literacy, science and technology, public presentation, and global awareness; he might doubt our larger ambition, which is to help students become effective \u201ccritical thinkers\u201d so that whatever subject matter they are studying or grappling with, they will have the necessary reasoning skills to make informed and effective decisions.<\/p>\n And we\u2019re not alone in striving to get out of the box.<\/p>\n The most popular TED Talk of all time is an 18-minute presentation by another British author and speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, called \u201cDo Schools Kill Creativity?<\/a>\u201d (which inspired this even shorter, animated version, \u201cChanging Education Paradigms<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n As the first few seconds of his talk will quickly show, Sir Ken has little time for the Great Ideas approach to teaching and learning but instead challenges us to \u201cradically rethink\u201d the way we teach kids, and invites educators to encourage young ones to dance, experiment and make mistakes. <\/p>\n Paraphrasing Pablo Picasso, Robinson suggests that \u201cAll children are born artists. The challenge is to remain artists as they grow up.\u201d<\/p>\n A few takeaways from his tirade against the sausage-making approach to teaching and learning:<\/p>\n Like Maria Montessori a century before him, Robinson strafes at the purely rational and practical approach to education, and advocates for more personal freedom for students to pursue their natural curiosity and creative impulses. He spurns notions of any kind of common curriculum; and finds devices like standardized tests not just dampening but deadening to curiosity and the human spirit.<\/p>\n Here, too, whether you\u2019re an AI skeptic or an AI champion, you can find grist for your mill: While relying on AI to create for <\/em>you removes human creativity from the equation, using AI as a tool to enhance your own <\/em>ideas can take human creativity to new levels.<\/p>\n There are, of course, benefits, challenges, and unproven theories behind both Robinson\u2019s freewheeling Creativity<\/em>, and Leslie\u2019s more rational and pragmatic Curiosity.<\/em><\/p>\n Letting students follow their strengths and natural impulses toward discoveries, new information, and artistic creation, with or without AI, can be liberating and joyful. It leaves the door to possibility wide open, embracing many ideas, cultural norms, and forms of expression. It can also, honestly, be a little messy and hard to manage, especially in time- and resource-constrained classrooms.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the \u201ccultural literacy\u201d approach can feel overly rigid, prescribed, and limiting; and in an age when the world is connected, and connecting, like never before, a standard list of what should be known risks being parochial and excluding other cultures and perspectives.<\/p>\n Still, it\u2019s hard to argue with Leslie when he points out that two of the greatest minds in western culture\u2014Shakespeare and Galileo\u2014were each born in 1564 and likely attended schools that lined students up in rows to recite Latin grammar from ancient classical textbooks by Seneca and Cicero.<\/p>\n Would they have accomplished even more, or much less, with the aid of ChatGPT, Perplexity AI or Claude?<\/p>\n When it comes to whether and how we embrace artificial intelligence, perhaps the most important takeaways from Robinson and Leslie are the points they agree on.<\/p>\n Both scorn standardized testing, Sir Ken because of its rigidity and lack of creativity, and Leslie for its superficiality. <\/p>\n Robinson is direct on the matter: “Not everything important is measurable, and not everything measurable is important.\u201d<\/p>\n One of Leslie\u2019s tips for staying curious is to \u201cturn puzzles into mysteries.\u201d For him, a multiple-choice question is a simplistic puzzle, while an essay requiring you to tap into a storehouse of deeper knowledge is a far worthier mystery.<\/p>\n The highest and best uses of artificial intelligence, Robinson and Leslie would argue, are not the simple storage and retrieval of simple, measurable information, but vaulting farther in the quest to unravel humankind\u2019s greatest mysteries.<\/p>\n Perhaps most importantly right now, both Leslie and Robinson share skepticism about short term \u201ctraining\u201d of people toward simple, mechanical tasks that can be (and are rapidly becoming) automated, and that will not prepare them with deeper knowledge for lifelong career pursuits.<\/p>\n Already, the ranks of computer coders, data entry clerks, bookkeepers and all kinds of customer service agents are being replaced by \u201cagentic\u201d AI tools, while professions that still require emotional intelligence and human discernment<\/a> like healthcare, education, management, art and design are likelier to have bright futures.<\/p>\n For his part, Leslie has even prepared a list of \u201cNine Principles for Success in the Age of AI<\/a>,\u201d which include tips like, \u201cDon\u2019t be human slop\u201d, \u201cImpose your personality on your work\u201d, \u201cDevelop strong judgment\u201d and, channeling Sir Ken, \u201cExpress yourself creatively.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/necc.edu\/newsroom2\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/11\/2026\/03\/image-1.png\")
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