Watch what happens when a one-year-old takes their first wobbly steps across a living room. The place erupts. Grandparents well up. Someone lunges for a phone to film it. That kid could stagger straight into the coffee table and we would still applaud, because falling over is part of the job and everyone in the room knows it.
Now picture the same kid, fifteen years later, asking a question the teacher did not plan for.
Different energy, isn’t it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson put it more sharply than I ever could: “We spend the first year of a child’s life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There’s something wrong there.”
He’s right, and it has nagged at me for years. Because the line isn’t really about children. It’s about what those children turn into. Us.
The most successful training programme in history
Nobody sits you down and says the quiet part out loud. There is no assembly where a teacher announces that curiosity has a shelf life. It happens through a thousand tiny corrections instead.
You learn that the right answer beats the interesting question. You learn that putting your hand up too often is annoying, and putting it up with something strange is worse. You learn to read the room, and then to become the room.
School starts it. Rows of desks, a bell that decides when your thoughts are allowed to change subject, a gold star for colouring inside the lines. Then the office picks up the baton and runs the same play for the next forty years, just with worse lighting and a lanyard.
By the time you’re an adult, “sit down and be quiet” isn’t something anyone has to say to you anymore. You say it to yourself. In meetings. At dinner parties. In your own head, about three seconds before you were going to say the thing.
That’s the part that gets me. The training worked so well we became our own supervisors.
What we were actually optimising for
There’s a study people love to quote, run by George Land and Beth Jarman, who had built a creativity test for NASA and then pointed it at small children. Something like 98 percent of five-year-olds scored in the “genius” range for divergent thinking. Retested at ten, the figure collapsed. By fifteen it was down in the low double digits, and among adults it was barely a rounding error.
Now, I’ll be honest with you. That study gets passed around the internet like scripture, and the sourcing is a good deal shakier than the headline. Treat the exact numbers as folklore rather than physics.
But you don’t need the figures to feel the shape of it. You’ve watched a four-year-old turn a cardboard box into a spaceship, a submarine and a hat inside ten minutes. You’ve also watched a grown adult freeze when asked to “think outside the box,” which is a phrase we only had to invent because we spent years building the box ourselves.
Tyson’s wider point lands right here. Kids are born curious. What we mostly do around them, without ever meaning to, is treat that curiosity as a mess to be tidied up. Every “because I said so,” every “we don’t have time for questions right now,” is a tiny withdrawal from the same account. Do it for long enough and there’s nothing left to draw on.
I once ran a room full of people told to sit down
I spent years in restaurants before I started writing, and I sold the little chain I’d built when the pandemic hit, so I have some skin in this one. Kitchens taught me the lesson better than any classroom ever did.
Here’s what I got wrong for a long time. I assumed the good ideas would come from the people with the titles. They mostly didn’t. The sharpest fix to a collapsing Friday service, the menu tweak that actually sold, the smarter way to plate a dish when the tickets were stacking up, these almost always came from commis chefs and dishwashers. The youngest, quietest people in the building. The ones trained hardest to sit down and shut up.
They’d had the ideas the whole time. What they didn’t have was any evidence that offering one was safe. The moment I started treating a half-formed suggestion as interesting rather than inconvenient, the room got louder in the best possible way, and the food got better with it.
That’s the trick nobody teaches you. Curiosity in others isn’t fragile because it’s rare. It’s fragile because it’s been punished, and it comes roaring back the second the punishment stops.
How to unlearn sitting down
You can’t undo thirty years of conditioning with a motivational quote, and I’m not going to pretend a blog post will manage it either. But you can chip away at it. A few things have worked for me.
Ask the dumb question on purpose. Not to perform, but to break the reflex that keeps your hand pinned to the desk. Most of the time the “dumb” question turns out to be the one three other people were too well-trained to ask.
Chase a curiosity that pays you nothing. Learn the knife skill, the language, the useless corner of history. Travel does this to me faster than anything, which is half the reason I keep flying back to cities that make no sense to me and writing about them afterwards. Curiosity with no return on investment is the first muscle we let waste away.
Give other people the room you wish you’d been given. If you manage anyone, parent anyone, or you’re just sat across from a nervous friend at dinner, treat the odd idea as the start of something rather than a thing to correct. You’ll be astonished at what people were quietly sitting on.
And clock your own internal supervisor. That little voice that says don’t, not here, not now, who do you think you are. It does a very convincing impression of wisdom. Really it’s just an old teacher who forgot to clock off, still marking your work decades after the bell rang.
The something that’s wrong
Tyson’s line ends on four words that do all the heavy lifting: “There’s something wrong there.”
He doesn’t tell us how to fix it, which I’ve come to respect. The point was never a five-step plan. The point is to notice the swap that happened to us without anyone ever asking, the quiet trade of a curious kid for a well-behaved adult.
You were the one they clapped for when you learned to walk.
Nobody actually said you had to sit back down for good.
