The Indigestion of the Soul: Why Coercion Kills Curiosity

Curiosity is an appetite. But what happens when you force-feed a child who isn't hungry? This essay explores the classroom as a site of "cognitive indigestion," arguing that by providing answers before students have formulated questions, we are effectively destroying the biological instinct to learn.

I. The Census of Resistance:

It begins with a simple question. Whenever I ask a student an honest question: "Do you actually like coming to school?" The immediate answer is almost always a "No."

Occasionally, a few students will say "Yes." But when I dig a little deeper and ask them why they like it, the truth comes out. They do not come for the Computer Science lab or the English literature. They come to meet their friends. They come for the lunch break and the free time in between periods.

If you observe closely, you will see a strange contradiction. In a class of 30 students, they enjoy the setting of the school, but they hate the process of the school. They are happy in the corridors, but they shut down the moment they cross the classroom door. To them, the classroom is just a "waiting room" that they must endure to get to the fun part, that is socialising with their friends. They are physically present because they have to come to school, but mentally, they are absent.

II. The Force-Feeding Mechanism:

The school bell rings, and the laughter stops. The "learning" begins.

This is where the fundamental error occurs. It is not about how long the period is, or how flexible the syllabus might be. The error is that we view education as a Data Transfer rather than a Biological Process.

We operate on the assumption that if a teacher speaks a concept, the student’s brain will automatically record it, like saving a file to a hard drive. But the human brain is not a hard drive; it is a digestive system. It accepts information only when it is ready to consume it.

Imagine a child being forced to eat a heavy meal when they are not hungry. It doesn't matter if you give them 40 minutes or 4 hours to eat it; if the appetite is missing, the act of eating is torture.

That is exactly what is happening with information. The teacher stands at the whiteboard explaining the complex logic of Python Loops or Database Types. But the student’s mind has not "opened." They have no context, no curiosity, and no hunger for this solution.

So, the teacher is essentially pouring code into a closed container. The student is forced to swallow the syntax without digesting the logic. The result is "Passive Reception." The student sits there, bloated with definitions they cannot visualise and algorithms they cannot apply. They stop trying to understand the why; they just memorise the what to survive the day. They are not eating to get nutrition; they are being stuffed just to pass an inspection.

III. The Death of the Question (The Curiosity Gap):

The greatest tragedy of this force-feeding is that it kills the most important human instinct: Curiosity.

Curiosity is nothing but the brain asking a question. It is a mental itch that demands to be scratched. When a student plays a video game and asks, "How do the graphics appear on the screen?" or "How does my WhatsApp message reach my friend?", that is hunger. If you give them the answer then, they will remember it forever.

But in our classrooms, we do the opposite. We give the "Answer" before the student has even asked the "Question."

We force them to memorise the syntax of a “For Loop” before they have ever felt the need to repeat a task. We force them to learn the definition of "HTML Tags" before they have ever wondered how a website is built. We teach them the solution (Code) before they even understand the problem.

When you constantly give answers to questions that nobody asked, the answers feel like garbage. They feel like noise. Over time, the student stops asking "How does this work?" because they know there is no time for it. Their natural curiosity dies from suffocation. They replace the question "What is the logic behind this?" with the only question that matters for survival: "Sir, will this program come in the practical exam?"

IV. The Backlog of the Brain:

Because curiosity is dead, learning becomes a burden. This leads to the Cognitive Debt (or what we call "weak basics").

Computer Science, more than any other subject, is like a chain. If one link is broken, the whole chain fails. You cannot understand Python Functions in Class 12 if you did not understand Variables in Class 9.

But because our system prioritises "finishing the portion" over "building the logic," students are pushed forward even if they are not ready. A student might struggle with basic “if-else” logic. Instead of stopping to fix this, the system pushes him to the next chapter on Arrays and Strings.

Now, the gap is wider. The new code looks like alien language because the basic grammar is missing. The student stops trying because he feels helpless. The system looks at him and says, "He is lazy" or "He is not coding." But the truth is simpler: He is full. His brain has a backlog of unsolved errors, and we are trying to force more complex algorithms on top of it.

V. The Bored Cook (The Teacher’s Tragedy):

The tragedy is not limited to the student. This system destroys the teacher as well.

In my experience, a teacher needs a "Return Signal" to teach well. When I explain a logic, I look for a spark in the student's eyes—that "Aha!" moment when the code finally runs in their head. That signal tells me, "Keep going, we are with you."

But when you face students who view the lab period as a burden, there is no return signal. There are only blank stares. The teacher tries to explain the logic once, maybe twice. But eventually, the teacher gives up.

Instead of cooking a fresh, interesting meal (writing live code and experimenting), the teacher switches to serving pre-packaged food (dictating programs from the board). The teacher stops trying to make the students think and focuses on the only thing the students care about: "Just write the code on the board so we can copy it into our files."

The lab becomes a hollow place. The teacher pretends to teach by typing, the students pretend to learn by typing, and the real logic dies in the silence of the keystrokes.