Choose to be inquisitive and grow your mind

By Nellie Curtiss …

My world has always been a classroom of lessons. I’ve been actively learning for a long time now.  When I was in elementary school at the Royal Oaks Elementary School outside Madrid, Spain, I cared most about handstands on the grassy knoll, jacks on the playground and hopscotch contests on the school’s sidewalk.  

I was not a lazy student, but I still had a lot to absorb about the logistics of learning. What I did in the classroom besides gazing out the classroom big picture window is a lost memory and a mystery now. However, tucked in my room afterschool, I did write some action whodunits and short stories about a Mighty Minnie Mouse—no relation to Disney’s female mouse or the Terrytoons Mighty (Super) Mouse hero from the 50s.

When my third-grade class traveled to the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and walked into the foyer of the museum, a startling picture—seemingly the size of a giant—greeted me.  In fact, the painting of Saturn Eating His Son by Francisco Goya caused such emotion and nausea in me that I upchucked my lunch of a “pb&j” (i.e. peanut butter and jelly) sandwich, corn chips and an apple.  The puke spewed across the shiny marble floor underneath the iconic mythological painting.  (See the painting here: museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/saturn/18110a75-b0e7-430c-bc73-2a4d55893bd6)

Despite that gross reaction, my trips to El Prado were filled with awe and yearning to learn more.  I always looked for the story.  I asked myself, “Why would Saturn eat his son?” Around the year1820 deaf and moved to create his series of “black paintings,” Goya brushed into life a myth of Saturn on his dining room wall.  Paranoid that his children would revolt and overthrow him, Saturn ate each of his children as soon as they were born – so the myth unfolds.  (As a 70-something, Goya had survived illnesses that had killed other Spaniards and was emotionally drained from the civil strife around the Spanish resisting Napoleon’s armies which soon unleashed the The Peninsular War.)

From that encounter with Goya’s dark side like death squads, ghosts, bull fights and El Coloso then his brighter images like the hunting spaniels or colorful royal family portraits found throughout the Prado, I became inquisitive about art, about metaphor, about allegories, and words that painted pictures. A desire to learn began to spread throughout my mind.

Later as a fifth grader in Wiesbaden, Germany, I saw a Gutenberg Bible and one of the actual Gutenberg presses.  Until that 1440 invention, monks copied with pen and ink the many texts that were read by those studying in monasteries; there was no such thing as “digital” or Amazon’s “Kindle.”  The History Channel’s The Vikings (2013-2020) showed monks in this laborious process.

That day in 1964, I appreciated the value of the written word, the printed word, and the many illuminated words and books that I later studied in graduate school.  With crayons, I drew and drew; with my mother’s ball point pen, I wrote one story and then another. 

Unfortunately, in our world today indifference does not yield insight or growth as a human being.  Many wise students admit their education is not a passive contest, nor does it come from a painter, or a printer; but a desire to learn comes from the heart and their own internal questioning of the planet around them.  Learning is all about choices, desires, about relishing the experience and hunting for meaning; it is not about hand-fed information like a Similac-mix of knowledge nor misinformation from Roger Stone or Alex Jones. 

Active learners do not rest in the back row of the class waiting for a thermos of science, sociology, math, English, or even tablespoons of empowered voice to be drizzled into their souls. Learning is all about that internal spark that seeds an inquisitive mind. 

Grow a mind today!

— Nelda Curtiss is a retired college educator and long-time local columnist. Reach her at http://www.columnsbynellie.com or email her at columnsbynellie@gmail.com