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Yes, student curiosity can be cultivated
Curiosity did, in fact, kill the cat, yet it is an invaluable skill; one that can be inculcated from birth. But what exactly is it, and what's its purpose?
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Your reference to the encouragement of curiosity prompts me to draw attention to my book recently published by Cambridge University Press, ‘Cognitive Motivation: From curiosity to identity, purpose and meaning’, by David Beswick, Professor Emeritus, Centre for Positive Psychology, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne, Vic., Australia. Curiosity is the starting point for understanding learning processes in which the basic concepts of cognition and motivation are brought together in recent scholarship. The key concept in my general theory of cognitive motivation is the idea of an incomplete gestalt in which people seek to complete incomplete images of the world and of themselves, both in particular situations and in their long term view of their lives and their own identities.