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Is it really hidden? If, as we talked about in BBI, the brain is constantly making sense of the world--filtering inputs, ignoring inputs, crafting stories, figuring out what needs figuring out to negotiate each day----a natural inquirer---then is the inquisitiveness really captive or hidden because of what parents or schools "do" or "don't do?" Maybe there is a less wrong way of looking at this. We heard from at least one participant yesterday that his students are not interested or equipped to ask questions and be inquirers. But those same students were described as pre-adjudicated youth. So, I'm thinking that they got to be pre-adjudicated youth (I used to work with kids in a pilot program to keep them from becoming adjudicated many moons ago.) by being very creative about their approach/response to the raw material of their world. Maybe they are employing inquiry to be successful as defined by their current perception of that state...they are still being natural inquirers of that which interests them or that they need to be interested in to "make it." 

This story gives us a different set of questions right? It is no longer how do we foster hidden inquisitiveness, it becomes how do we get kids to apply their inqusitiveness to what we want them to be interested in?

In my own classroom---parents will tell me all the time that if their child isn't interested in the topic they will just ignore it--the learning goes in one ear and out the other and they see no curiosity or energy----parents frequently say that they hope that 5th or 6th grade will be the grade in which their child starts paying attention, even if they don't like the subject. Well what do you do when you aren't interested in a subject? Does that mean that the "inquiry-mode" has been driven from you?