FROM THE HEADMASTER 1) Stay foolish: This comes from Steve Jobs’ famous address to a as science, as metaphysical as religion or as personal as ‘Why is Aunt Stanford graduating class. He told them to ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’. Julie acting so weird nowadays?’. Despite his many flaws, Jobs was always on the lookout to learn and understand more. Like many curious people, he accepted that what 5) Be a ‘thinkerer’: Ian Leslie crashed the two words ‘thinker’ he didn’t know or understand was always a mountain, next to the and ‘tinker’ together to come up with this. To tinker is to work on molehill of what he did know and understand – and he was always the details and processes – the small incremental improvements keen to transfer dirt from one pile to the other. He had what James in things. To think is to have the big ideas. To be a thinkerer is to Clark Maxwell regarded as the ‘thoroughly conscious ignorance that combine the micro and the macro – the concrete and the abstract. is the prelude to every real advance in science’. We can do that too. You can see how this would have a multiplier effect. Leslie uses the example of Benjamin Franklin – a man who simultaneously made 2) Build the database: Mature curiosity workswhen we already know small improvements to the efficiency of the printing press and helped things and learn more. This fosters new questions. Curiosity works invent the modern democratic republic. hand in hand with ‘content delivery’, not as an alternative to it. I don’t know how bridges stay up really (the weight of all those cars!) but 6) Turn puzzles into mysteries: A puzzle is something that gets I am sure that I would have better, curious questions about it after solved. It is a superficial level of problem. A mystery is something sitting with our engineering teacher Lindsay Raven and listening to deeper. If puzzles are the waves, mysteries are the ocean. After you him for a few hours. As Ian Leslie says, ‘Highly curious people, who have solved the puzzle of how a bridge stays up, you might delve have carefully cultivated their long-term memories, live in a kind of into the mysteries of how gravity works. The more you dig into a augmented reality; everything they see is overlaid with additional puzzle the more you can simultaneously get answers and find even layers of meaning and possibility, unavailable to ordinary observers’. deeper questions. 3) Forage like a foxhog: The key to this one is that there is no such Curiosity gives the life spark for so much of what we do at Newington. thing as a foxhog. There is a fox and there is a hedgehog. A fox Every art class, every basketball game plan, every maths problem and evades capture by unpredictably trying a dozen different strategies. every navigation practice in cadets is an opportunity to be curious The hedgehog has one tried and true strategy – sit still and put or a (wasted) opportunity to just let it slide by. We are determined at up its spines. The Greek poet Archilochus puts it: ‘The fox knows the school to keep making it not just the initial spark but also the fuel many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’. By foraging that propels our boys through their school, their education and indeed like a foxhog this advice is telling you to be both a specialist and their whole lives. And maybe to fill the Science department with a generalist. Modern society needs more expertise than ever octogenarians in 70 years’ time. as knowledge explodes. At the same time, it needs more cross fertilisation of different strategies. This advice tells us to get more Mr Michael Parker depth and more breadth at the same time. Headmaster 4) Ask the big ‘why’: I often say in class that asking ‘why’ three times will get you to the heart of an issue and asking ‘why’ five times will probably get you somewhere ridiculous. But asking ‘why’ is the surest 1Leslie I, 2014, Curious, Quercus, London. freeway to the centre of things. This can be as profoundly mechanistic Did you know... Our first recorded cricket The John Waterhouse Our first scholarships match was against a Society honours a offered both within and team of boys from Horton Newington student and outside the school were College, Tasmania, in teacher who later headed awarded in 1905. February 1864. two of the first high schools in NSW. 2 | Curiosity | News Autumn 2022