What is
education
for?
We learn to make a living.
Do we also learn how to live?
Curiosity School explores what education could be when curiosity, practical understanding, and knowing ourselves belong at its heart.
to sit with / 01
Are we teaching people to think,
or to perform thinking?
What if we have
made education
too small?
Learning to read, earn a living, and navigate the world matters deeply. But a life also contains fear, friendship, conflict, wonder, and the question of what is worth doing.
When marks and credentials become the purpose, what happens to the person behind them? And when we study the world outside us, where do we learn to understand ourselves?
Curiosity School begins here: with essays that examine these questions, and plans for learning resources that connect them to everyday life.
Meet the world.
Language, money, health, food, technology. Build the understanding to take part in life with independence and care.
Understand ourselves.
Make room to notice fear, comparison, attention, and the ideas of success we inherit.
Keep questioning.
Look closely. Ask for evidence. Make room for disagreement, and for changing our minds.
Thinking, out loud.
What is education actually for?
Before we redesign the classroom, perhaps we should ask what it is there to do. An inquiry into survival, independence, and the inner life.
Read the essayThe teacher, the student, and what we’ve forgotten to ask
What happens between a person who knows and a person who is learning? On curiosity, expertise, and the difference between guiding and commanding.
Read the essayThe work
taking shape.
The essays are the beginning. These are the directions I want to explore next through resources, conversations, and practical projects. Planned projects are not yet available.
01The education inquiry
Read now
The starting point: two essays asking what education is for and what happens in the relationship between teacher and student. Further writing will follow the questions, rather than a fixed doctrine.
A place to begin: Begin with the essays. Bring your own experience to the questions, and look for what the argument leaves out.
Read the two essays ↗02Financial literacy
Planned
What is money, and what place should it have in a life? A proposed series connecting everyday decisions to an understanding of earning, spending, saving, debt, risk, and value.
Proposed approach: Start with familiar situations and simple numbers. Help learners understand a decision before asking them to make one.
03Sex education, honestly
Planned
A proposed resource on bodies, consent, boundaries, relationships, and sexual health, approached with care and without shame.
Proposed approach: Develop age-appropriate material with qualified educators and health professionals, with clear sources and space for questions.
04History as a living inquiry
Planned
How did the world become this way? An idea for exploring history through evidence, competing accounts, and the connections between past decisions and present life.
Proposed approach: Begin with a real question. Read sources, locate events in time, and distinguish what we know from what we infer.
05Nature & everyday life
Exploring
Food, farming, cooking, ecology, and the ordinary skills that connect learning to the conditions of life.
Proposed approach: Explore practical activities such as growing food, preparing a meal, or observing a local ecosystem. Let experience lead to further questions.
06Understanding ourselves
Exploring
What can we learn by paying attention to fear, comparison, attention, and our relationships? An inquiry into the inner life alongside our study of the world.
Proposed approach: Make space for observation and open conversation, without prescribing what someone should feel or believe.
Stay with
the question.
Questions behind the writing still to come. Choose a thread, open a question, and take it into your own classroom, conversation, or quiet afternoon.
Why do we study a subject in the first place?
Think of something you learned because you wanted to understand it. What was different from studying only to pass? How might a teacher help a subject become a living question?
When a measure becomes the target, what happens to learning?
An exam can show something about learning. What does it miss? Could portfolios, conversations, practical demonstrations, or thoughtful feedback tell us something different?
Can a teacher guide without becoming a superior?
Expertise creates a difference in knowledge. Must it also create a hierarchy of human worth? Consider where a teacher’s responsibility is necessary and where authority closes inquiry.
Can AI help us stay with a question?
An instant answer can support an inquiry or bring it to a premature end. What should students attempt themselves? How might teachers use AI while preserving attention, judgement, and independent thought?
What does a child learn on a playing field?
Beyond physical development, consider cooperation, conflict, courage, exclusion, and the experience of losing. What conditions make sport a place to learn rather than another ranking system?
What do we ask of teachers beyond teaching?
When teachers are assigned other duties, what does the classroom lose? What would it mean for a society to protect the time, attention, and dignity that teaching requires?
How do we know whether something is true?
When a claim confirms what we already believe, do we question it less? Explore sources, evidence, uncertainty, misinformation, and the difference between scepticism and dismissing everything.
How did examinations become so central?
What were examinations originally meant to solve? How did systems of selection shape what schools teach? This inquiry needs a careful history before it can offer alternatives.
What did colonial education leave behind?
How did Macaulay’s Minute and subsequent policies shape language, access, and educational priorities in India? Read the historical documents while also asking what has changed since.
Can learning move beyond reward and punishment?
When does encouragement support a learner, and when does it turn the activity into a transaction? What happens to interest when an external reward disappears?
Is financial independence the whole of freedom?
A livelihood matters. Alongside it, what does it mean to understand our fears, choices, relationships, and ideas of success? Can education attend to both?
What do literacy numbers leave out?
Reading and writing are essential. What else should we notice about an education: agency, practical capability, judgement, care, or the ability to ask an unexpected question?
12 questions to explore
Hello, I’m Aman.
I want to understand what education could make possible in a human life.
Find me & the school online ↗I’m Aman Gupta, the person behind Curiosity School. This begins with my own questions about learning: why we study, what school prepares us for, and what it leaves unexplored.
Education gave me opportunities. It also left me asking what I wanted to do with my life. Working on these questions has become a way to bring my interest in education and my wish to help people together.
Jiddu Krishnamurti’s questions about education and life have been an important influence. I want to examine ideas on their merits, including the ideas I find most compelling.
Curiosity School is currently an independent writing and learning project. I’m starting with the essays, learning as I go, and inviting thoughtful disagreement along the way.
Bring a question.
Or a different way of seeing.
Teachers, students, parents, and curious people: share an experience, challenge an idea, or talk about building something together.
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Elsewhere, online.