Reviving Wonder and Curiosity in a Regulated World
I’ve taught for twenty-five years in a university School of Architecture. Each year, as I begin working with a new group of students, I witness the same thing: a striking absence of curiosity. It’s as if the fire inside them has been extinguished by years of lockstep education—schooling that discourages real questions and rewards staying in line. They assume my classroom will be no different.
But then I ask them to question deeply. I invite them to explore the tentative possibilities that flow from their hearts. And something shifts. For many, the fire reignites—not because of what I teach, but simply because I’ve asked them to be curious.
I don’t think most parents fully grasp how deeply our regulated world drains their children’s sense of wonder.
What Is a Sense of Wonder?
Childhood development psychologist Edith Cobb was a passionate advocate for wonderment. In her book The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, she identifies a sense of wonder as the root of lifelong creativity—the wellspring of both artistic and scientific invention in adulthood.
Wonder, in her view, is taking joy in the possibility of “more to come,” of “more to do,” and of “more to know.” A sense of wonder requires an element of mystery — of the new and unknown — which a child confronts with a mindset Cobb calls an “expectancy of fulfillment.” In other words, the unknown must feel approachable and knowable through active exploration.
Cobb also emphasizes that wonder involves “a sense of the cosmic.” It’s the feeling that what a child is experiencing here and now—in this one place—somehow reflects the nature of the whole world. What is discovered here offers insight into the cosmos. This expansive feeling, this sense of opening up the universe, carries a certain grandeur. It feels like coming into contact with something vast and deep—something alive with infinite potential.
Curiosity—a character trait we hope to nurture in every child—is the act of embracing a sense of wonder. When we wonder, we see the world as untamed possibilities to be discovered. Curiosity is the thirst to discover them. It’s our wanting to know.
The Children’s Museum: A Vital Counterpoint to Regulated Education
Children need access to settings that counterbalance the rigidity of formal education. They need places that reawaken wonder. This is a vital role of children’s museums. While schools often rely on lockstep instruction, museums tap into the power of play: open-ended, explorative, and self-directed. These are essential ingredients for sparking wonder and curiosity.
However, there’s one critical ingredient that a children’s museum can offer only through intentional design. Edith Cobb gives us a compelling description of this: children need opportunities for a special kind of play, for what she describes as, “cosmopoetic exploration of an environment.” This is play within a setting that feels vast, open-ended, and “untamed.” This is what evokes that feeling of expectancy, of open possibility.
And yet, Cobb also reminds us that children possess such powerful faculties of imagination that they can become overwhelmed by too much possibility. Environments that are chaotic or feel like jumbled collections of random stuff can be disorienting and even oppressive. Children need a “boundaried world”—a setting with discernible patterns, composed of “semi-structured material.”
These elements, when carefully balanced, create a cosmopoetic experience—one that simultaneously conveys the qualities of a wild frontier and an orderly universe. It invites curiosity and exploration without overwhelming. Many natural environments—forests, deserts, canyons—possess this delicate balance, but designing such an experience within a manmade setting is a complex challenge.
When a museum succeeds in creating it, it offers children a formative moment. The place becomes part of their understanding of the cosmos—with all its wild beauty. This sense of living wildness becomes part of them. The curiosity it evokes energizes their creative spirit and lays the foundation for a lifetime of insight and invention.
In such a place, a child’s sense of self expands. The environment becomes part of the child’s inner world, and the child becomes at home in the universe. Walt Whitman captured this beautifully:
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon, and received with wonder,
… that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of
the day… or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and
white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the March-born lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter,
and the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf …
In our regulated world, children feel the pulse of such living wonders only fleetingly. It can’t be recreated on a screen or in a typical classroom. But museums are well-positioned to help re-balance this delicate equation, managing efficient operations while making more room for wonderment.
The details of how to create cosmopoetic experiences is a complex matter that requires collaboration with skilled designers, but the whole process of reviving children’s sense of wonder and curiosity begins when the leaders of a museum open themselves to the possibility of it, and decide that they must give this priceless gift to their visitors.
