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Comment by hrideshmg | Hacker News Reader

It's really interesting how the education system works, you walk into a room of 7-year olds and you'd be amazed at the level of curiosity and interest those kids have for everything around them, you can literally see it in their eyes.

Fast forward a few years and all of that is gone, in teenage classrooms. There is no "awe", it has meticulously been sucked out of them.

I really love maker spaces exactly for this reason, it helps keep that spark alive.

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By that same logic, you could compare a room full of 7-year-olds to a room full of teenagers and claim that the school system gives people sexual libidos.

It's true that adolescents are very behaviorally different from younger kids, but it isn't clear how much of that is natural biological development, how much is parenting, how much is culture, and how much is the school system.

To be fair: this was a parent stepping up to offer the students something unique. Doing so with children is easier than it is with teenagers, but I think that has more to do with the values we instill than it does with the nature of schooling. While children are still interested in how the world works, while teenagers are more interested in popular culture.

The reason why I say that is because most children seem to be curious about non-school stuff, but even the little ones can lack curiosity about the things they learn in school. Math is the classic example. While you will always have a few who are intensely curious about it, I have to mentally prepare myself to present how amazing math is anytime I say the word in front of children. (In my case, it's not that hard since I grew up fascinated by math-adjacent subjects. For most people though, that would be difficult.)

Being interested in popular culture is being interested in how the world works. It's an interest in how influence and power and money make things move in the rooms that aren't factories, and how to navigate your way into and out of them safely.

We've designed a world where math mostly doesn't hurt you when you're not thinking about it, but boy, oh boy, can your community, social circle, or people you don't even know hurt you if you haven't paid attention to and aligned yourself with the common sentiment.

> We've designed a world where math mostly doesn't hurt you when you're not thinking about it, but boy, oh boy, can your community, social circle, or people you don't even know hurt you if you haven't paid attention to and aligned yourself with the common sentiment.

This isn't the result of anyone's design. In human communities hundreds of thousands of years ago, your community, social circle, or people you don't even know (because they are foreigners from a different 100-person hunter-gatherer band than your 100-person hunter-gatherer band) could absolutely hurt you; and these are the conditions that human beings evolved our social skills in. Understanding math came much later in the history of humanity.

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