Who Decides What Is Worth Knowing? Rethinking Knowledge, Curiosity and Learner Agency

I have been thinking a great deal about knowledge in education and about a distinction that I do not think we make often enough.

The issue is not that schools expect children and young people to acquire knowledge. Knowledge matters enormously. Rich vocabulary, mathematical understanding, scientific concepts, historical knowledge, literature, culture and an understanding of the wider world all give us something with which to think. What we already know also influences how we understand new information and make connections between ideas (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

What concerns me is not knowledge itself, but the way children are sometimes expected to acquire it.

There is an important difference between encountering knowledge in ways that invite curiosity, connection and questioning, and experiencing knowledge as something predetermined that simply has to be learned because an adult, curriculum or assessment system has decided that it should be.

Children and young people ask entirely reasonable questions about their learning. They want to know why something matters, where it connects with what they already understand and what they might do with it. Too often, however, the response can become some version of because you have to.

That may secure compliance, but I am not convinced it necessarily creates a meaningful relationship with knowledge.

For me, learning should involve more than successfully receiving information. It should provide opportunities to make connections, test ideas, encounter uncertainty, reconsider assumptions and develop the confidence to question what is not yet understood. The acquisition of knowledge matters, but so does the learner's relationship with that knowledge.

This is not an argument for abandoning curriculum, direct teaching or subject knowledge, nor is it an argument for leaving children to discover everything for themselves. Research has raised important concerns about minimally guided instruction, particularly for novice learners who do not yet possess the background knowledge required to navigate unfamiliar areas independently (Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, 2006). Educators therefore remain essential, but recognising the importance of adult guidance does not require us to equate guidance with control.

There is a significant pedagogical space between telling children exactly what to think and leaving them entirely alone to work everything out for themselves. It is within that space that I believe some of the most meaningful learning can occur.

This is one of the reasons Froebelian pedagogy remains so relevant to me. Froebel challenged approaches to education that positioned children as passive recipients of adult knowledge. His educational philosophy emphasised activity, relationships, play and the active participation of the learner in their own development (Froebel, 1887). Contemporary Froebelian thinking continues this through principles including self-activity and reflection, unity and connectedness, the central importance of play, and what is often described as freedom with guidance (Tovey, 2020; Bruce, 2021).

Freedom with guidance is particularly important because it avoids a false choice between adult-led teaching and children's agency. In a Froebelian approach, freedom does not mean that adults withdraw or that children simply do whatever they choose. The educator brings knowledge, experience, careful observation and responsibility, but uses these to open possibilities rather than unnecessarily restrict them. Tovey (2020) describes the adult as a sensitive guide who supports children in developing autonomy within a framework of responsibility and respect.

That distinction matters when we think about knowledge.

When knowledge is provided without sufficient space for inquiry, it can become something children learn primarily to reproduce rather than understand. A learner may remember enough information to complete a task, answer an examination question or satisfy an assessment requirement, yet successful recall is not necessarily the same as developing curiosity, understanding or a sense of intellectual ownership.

We frequently describe children as naturally curious, yet formal education can sometimes narrow the opportunities through which that curiosity is expressed. Curriculum content necessarily has to be organised. Schools operate within timetables. Assessment has a legitimate purpose, and education needs structure. The difficulty arises when the structures surrounding learning leave so little room for agency that knowledge begins to feel like something being done to the learner rather than something with which they are actively engaging.

Self-determination theory provides a useful perspective on this. Ryan and Deci (2000) identify autonomy, competence and relatedness as fundamental psychological needs and demonstrate how motivation is influenced by the social environments in which people learn and act. Their work does not suggest that learners should only engage with subjects that already interest them. Rather, it draws attention to the importance of conditions that support a sense of agency and meaningful engagement rather than relying solely upon external control.

This matters because education should never be restricted to what children already know, enjoy or find immediately relevant.

One of the great responsibilities of education is precisely the opposite. Educators introduce children and young people to ideas, histories, concepts, cultures, literature, science and ways of thinking that extend far beyond their existing experience. Sometimes a learner cannot know that something will fascinate them until somebody introduces them to it. Knowledge can open doors to worlds children did not previously know existed.

Yet opening that door is different from deciding exactly where the learner must stand once they walk through it.

The challenge is to introduce important knowledge while preserving enough intellectual space for learners to develop their own relationship with it. This means allowing questions to matter, recognising that misunderstanding and reconsideration are part of learning, enabling connections between new knowledge and previous experience, and remaining open to the possibility that the learner may notice something different from what the educator originally expected.

Froebelian pedagogy illustrates this particularly well in early childhood. Within meaningful play, children can encounter mathematical, linguistic, scientific, creative and social ideas while remaining active participants in the experience. The role of the knowledgeable educator is not diminished. Adults observe, offer language, provide rich environments and resources, recognise possibilities, support relationships and extend thinking. What is significant is that this guidance does not have to remove children's ownership of the experience (Tovey, 2020; Bruce, 2021).

The knowledge involved is no less valuable because the child has agency.

Consider a child constructing with blocks. Through sustained engagement they may encounter ideas involving number, shape, balance, force, symmetry, spatial reasoning, negotiation and problem-solving. A knowledgeable educator can deepen those encounters considerably by recognising what is happening and knowing when and how to intervene. There is, however, an important difference between enriching an exploration and turning every experience into an adult-directed lesson with a predetermined outcome.

The important question is therefore not simply whether knowledge is present, but how the learner comes to know, understand and make meaning from it.

I do not believe that this principle should disappear when children leave the early years.

In fact, one of the questions I increasingly return to is why some of the principles we value so strongly in early childhood can become harder to recognise as children progress through formal education. In early childhood we often celebrate curiosity, observe children's interests, recognise the importance of relationships and acknowledge the value of meaningful experiences. We talk confidently about agency and understand that learning involves more than the transmission of information.

As children get older, the demands of curriculum coverage, qualifications and assessment understandably change the educational landscape. Yet I wonder whether we sometimes surrender too much in that transition.

A child who once asked endless questions can gradually learn that the most useful question is the one likely to appear on the assessment. Knowledge can shift from being something that helps a young person understand the world towards something accumulated in preparation for the next examination, qualification or stage of education.

I do not believe this is inevitable, and it would be unfair to suggest that this describes all schools or all teaching. Excellent teachers create space for curiosity within highly structured curricula every day. Direct teaching and learner agency are not mutually exclusive, and strong subject knowledge can expand rather than restrict children's capacity to think. The more we know, the greater the range of connections, questions and possibilities available to us (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).

What I am questioning is the assumption that educational structure must come at the expense of agency.

I see this particularly clearly in my own work with Foundation Apprentices.

The young people I work with have chosen to undertake the programme, and I think that choice makes an important difference to their relationship with learning. There is still a curriculum. There are standards they must meet, concepts they need to understand and evidence they have to produce. Learner choice does not remove rigour, nor does it remove my responsibility to teach.

What it can provide is a more visible sense of purpose.

The work placement element is particularly valuable because young people are able to connect what they are learning with real practice. Concepts that might initially appear abstract can acquire greater meaning when encountered within a workplace. Learners can begin to see why particular knowledge matters, consider how theory relates to practice and encounter situations that prompt further questions.

I find that relationship between knowledge and practice particularly powerful because it reminds me that relevance does not have to mean making everything entertaining or immediately useful.

Learning can and should sometimes be difficult. It can demand concentration, repetition and sustained effort. Some knowledge may only reveal its significance much later, and there will always be valuable areas of learning that a child or young person would not initially have selected for themselves.

Relevance is more complex than simply liking something.

It can mean understanding why knowledge matters, recognising its connection to other ideas, experiencing how it operates in practice or discovering that something new has altered your understanding of what you thought you already knew. That represents a very different relationship with learning from simply being told that information must be remembered because it will appear in an assessment.

Ultimately, this leaves me thinking about the kind of relationship with knowledge that education should help children and young people develop.

I do not want education simply to produce learners who become highly skilled at receiving information and reproducing it at the appropriate moment. I want knowledge to become something they can think with: something that allows them to develop deeper understanding, recognise connections and uncertainty, formulate considered questions, examine ideas critically and continue learning when the teacher is no longer standing beside them.

None of this diminishes knowledge. In many ways, it asks us to take knowledge more seriously.

Curiosity without sufficient knowledge can struggle to progress beyond speculation, because meaningful questioning often depends upon having something substantial to think about. Equally, knowledge that is never connected, examined or applied can become detached from meaningful understanding. The educational challenge, therefore, is not to choose between knowledge and curiosity, but to create conditions in which each strengthens the other.

This is why I continue to return to Froebel's principle of freedom with guidance. It offers something more nuanced than a simple opposition between teacher-led and child-led education. The educator retains knowledge, expertise and responsibility while recognising the learner as an active participant in making sense of what is being learned. Froebelian principles similarly connect freedom with self-activity, reflection, relationships and community, reminding us that learning does not take place in isolation (Tovey, 2020; Bruce, 2021).

Perhaps these ideas deserve greater attention throughout education rather than being associated predominantly with the early years.

Our responsibility is undoubtedly to introduce children and young people to knowledge that matters. We should broaden their horizons, challenge assumptions and give them access to ideas they could not reasonably discover without knowledgeable educators.

But our responsibility may also be to protect something that is easier to lose than it is to restore: the curiosity that makes a person want to keep learning.

If education becomes primarily concerned with deciding what learners should know, there is a danger that we neglect the equally important question of how they come to care about knowing it.

At its best, education should do both. It should give children and young people knowledge that expands their understanding while also enabling them to experience themselves as thinkers, questioners and participants in the process of learning.

Perhaps, then, the question is not simply who decides what is worth knowing?

It is also whether, in deciding what children need to know, we leave enough space for them to discover why knowing is worth pursuing at all.