A fifth-grade science class on a winter morning: the Sun is low, as is the teacher’s voice, and you’re just beginning to warm up. The teacher dances around a chart of the solar system, pointing now at this brightly coloured disc, now at that one. Yellow light begins to seep in through the windows – the Sun has finally climbed high enough to reach your classroom. As the morning class proceeds, so does the Sun. You notice you are warming up on one side; the contrast sends a shiver down your spine. And then it hits you, like a revelation: the Sun is a sun. It is not simply ‘the Sun’, that taken-for-granted presence, but a sun, one of trillions of such objects in the Universe. And somehow, this burning ball of gas, millions of miles away, is pleasantly warming your skin as you circle it on ‘your’ planet. You are filled with a wonder that bathes everything in its glow, even those concerns of the classroom that the Sun could never reach. In a moment your whole view of the world and yourself is transformed. A connection is made.
‘Concentrate!’ snaps the teacher, to you or someone else, and you slowly return to ‘normal’ – but not entirely. Some of this wonder lingers, like a scent or a soft tone in the background. A veil has been pierced, and it hasn’t yet sealed up again.
What did you learn in this example? What knowledge did you gain? You already knew that the Sun was a sun; you’d heard and read that many times. You knew that Earth is a planet, you knew its distance from the Sun it circles is, on average, about 93 million miles. In fact, all this knowledge was necessary for you to experience that moment of wonder. So again, what did you learn? Wonder is a nice emotional supplement to education, perhaps, but from a strictly pedagogical perspective, it hardly seems necessary.
That is wrong. In fact, wonder epitomises what education is about: opening up the world. Any educators interested in – or devoted to – opening up the world to their students should consider wonder essential to the task, and will do their utmost to foster students’ sense of wonder.
It is worth noting that, in doing so, a teacher will have to swim against the stream. One battle is against regimes of standardised testing and performance accountability, international comparisons and competitiveness. As governments anxiously monitor other nations’ economic and technological development, they can think of only one thing for the education system to do: to churn out the greatest possible number of economically productive and ‘innovative’ employees and entrepreneurs, usually in business or science. To assess how one’s country is doing, test scores are compared internationally. The result, as the professor of education policy Dave Trotman has noted in the British context, ‘is that those aspects of the curriculum that are least amenable to routine testing, by default, come to occupy the least privileged positions in the curriculum’. Thus, an educational climate is created that is inhospitable to instigating a sense of wonder in students.
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