It turns out that there is a "double-edged sword" to pedagogy: explicit instruction makes children less likely to engage in spontaneous exploration and discovery. A new compared the behavior of children given a novel toy under four different conditions, finding that children expressly taught one of its functions played with the toy for less time and discovered fewer things to do with it than children in the other three scenarios.

Source: Don't show, don't tell? Direct instruction can thwart independent exploration