I once heard someone say that children come into our lives as exclamation points…
…but too often leave us as periods.
The more I have worked in education, parenting, grandparenting, and life itself, the more I believe that may be painfully true.
Children arrive in this world full of wonder.
Full of noise. Full of imagination. Full of questions. Full of life.
They are tiny human exclamation points.
“Why is the sky blue?”
“Can fish get thirsty?”
“Why do worms wiggle?”
“What happens if I plant a potato chip?”
“Do ants sleep?”
“Who made God?”
“What if dinosaurs were still alive?”
A five-year-old can ask hundreds of questions a day without realizing they are doing it. They are not embarrassed by curiosity. They chase it.
There was a time in my life when I could still get all the way down on the floor with PreK and Kindergarten students… and more importantly, get back up again without sounding like an old farmhouse creaking in the wind.
I remember watching children become absolutely mesmerized by ordinary things adults walk past every single day. An ant carrying a crumb three times its size. A worm twisting and flipping on warm pavement after a rainstorm. A line of caterpillars moving across a sidewalk like they were late for a union meeting.
Those children would crouch down in awe. They would stare. Point. Question. Wonder.
“How does the ant know where home is?”
“Does the worm have eyes?”
“Can bugs talk to each other?”
“Why does it move like that?”
And for a few sacred moments, the world slowed down enough for them to notice creation.
You do not see enough adults doing that anymore. Truthfully, you do not see enough middle schoolers doing it either. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, wonder often gets replaced with distraction.
Not curiosity. Distraction.
We live in a world filled with noise. Screens in restaurants. Screens in shopping carts. Screens in waiting rooms. Screens mounted on the back of car seats. Streaming services babysitting children while exhausted adults scroll their own phones five feet away. No wonder the MO State General Assembly has legislation to limit the hours of screen time, at least in schools!
And before anybody gets defensive, yes — I understand life is exhausting. Parents are tired. Teachers are tired. Everybody is juggling more than they can carry.
I sometimes wonder if we are unintentionally teaching children to consume entertainment instead of discover amazement. One is passive. The other changes you forever.
That same tension exists in education today. Somewhere along the way, schools stopped nurturing question marks and started manufacturing periods. We take children who arrive bursting with exclamation marks — excitement, curiosity, imagination, possibility — and slowly train them to become quiet, contained, measurable.
Sit down. Fill in the blank. Bubble the correct answer. Stay on pace. Memorize this long enough to pass the assessment. Do not color outside the lines. And heaven forbid you ask a question that slows down the curriculum map. Education today often confuses compliance for learning.
A student who quietly memorizes information long enough to pass a test is labeled successful. Meanwhile, the child asking difficult questions… the one challenging assumptions… the one connecting ideas beyond the worksheet… is often labeled:
“Distracted.”
“Off task.”
“Too much.”
“Needs redirection.”
Funny how many innovators throughout history probably would have earned behavior referrals.
Now let me be very clear: This is not an attack on teachers. Most teachers I know absolutely love exclamation points. Teachers live for the spark in a child’s eyes when something suddenly clicks. They love curiosity. Discovery. Creativity. Wonder.
Many educators today are trapped inside systems obsessed with rankings, data walls, benchmark scores, pacing guides, and standardized testing. Some schools have quietly become educational assembly lines. Input standards. Output scores. Repeat. The irony is hard to ignore.
We tell students:
“Think critically.”
Then hand them assignments requiring memorization over imagination.
We say:
“Be creative.”
Then grade them with rubrics so rigid there is barely room for originality.
We encourage:
“Lifelong learning.”
Then unintentionally teach them that learning is mostly about surviving quizzes.
And little by little, the exclamation point fades. Not all at once. Just gradually.
A little less wonder in elementary school. A little more anxiety in middle school. A little more fear of being wrong in high school. A little more performance over passion. Until eventually many students stop asking questions altogether because they have learned school rewards correct answers more than curiosity.
I learned this lesson the hard way myself. We have a young man in our lives named Luke. Our families have broken bread together almost weekly for years. His parents are physicians with the BJC/Washington University system, and from an early age Luke was… relentless.
Not disrespectful. Curious. Painfully curious.
Luke would ask:
“Why?”
And after you answered:
“But why?”
And after that:
“Okay… but how do you KNOW?”
He never accepted superficial answers at face value. He wanted something deeper. Something tangible. Something he could see, feel, smell, test, challenge, or debate. And debate he would. Ad nauseam.
Honestly, there were moments when you walked away mentally exhausted wondering if this child had secretly been trained by a panel of attorneys and investigative journalists. But over time, something became obvious: Luke was not being difficult. Luke was learning. He absorbed knowledge like a human sponge.
This past winter, Luke accomplished something almost statistically absurd: He earned a perfect 36 on the ACT. A perfect score. The kind of score that makes counselors blink twice and double-check paperwork. Approximately 3000 test takers in a group of 1.37 million in 2026, earned a perfect ACT score.
The score itself was not the most impressive part. The impressive part was the years of curiosity behind it. That achievement did not begin with test prep books. It began with questions. With conversations. With adults who allowed a child to remain curious instead of shutting him down for asking too much.
Luke taught me an important lesson as a father, grandfather, and educator: Children do not need adults who have every answer. They need adults willing to nurture wonder. Let kids be kids for as long as they can be.
Let them chase worms. Study ants. Ask impossible questions. Take apart broken radios.
Challenge assumptions. Say “why” until you are mentally drafting your resignation letter.
Because curiosity is not a classroom distraction. It is the engine of learning itself. The world has never been changed by people who simply memorized the answer key. The world changes because of people who kept asking: “What if?”
Scientists asked it.
Inventors asked it.
Saints asked it.
Teachers asked it.
Writers asked it.
Parents asked it.
Dreamers asked it.
Every advancement in human history began because somebody refused to stop wondering.
Maybe education’s real purpose is not producing students who can merely pass tests.
Maybe it is protecting the wonder children already possess.
Maybe the goal is not turning exclamation points into periods… but helping children become adults who still believe the world is worth exploring. Once curiosity dies, learning becomes little more than information storage. Children were never meant to become hard drives. They were meant to become explorers.
So perhaps the question every parent, teacher, administrator, policymaker, grandparent, and exhausted adult scrolling their phone should ask is this: Are we creating environments where children become more alive… or simply more compliant?
Because the child who walks into kindergarten as an exclamation point deserves to leave school still believing the world is miraculous.
Comments
Post a Comment