Wagner's Question #4: Motivating Curiosity and Imagination

What do we need to do in our schools to motivate students to be curious and imaginative and to enjoy learning for its own sake?

It just occurred to me that this is a rather strange question. I have not yet seen a young child who is not curious. And while some have wilder imaginations than others, few need to be motivated to pretend and fantasize, to explore and experiment and invent. I agree with Sir Ken Robinson who says: "We are educating children out of their creative capacities" and that we need to "radically rethink the fundamental principles by which we are educating our children." At the 2008 Apple Education Leadership Summit, Robinson said that the current curriculum is "siloed to an extraordinary extent, which stills the connections between the disciplines, which are the heartbeat of a properly conceived form of creative education."

The video below is from TED.com. The video of the Apple speech is at Edutopia.