Exactly right! Great article! People forget that generalization/abstraction is the end goal and should never be the first step. Unless and until you are suffic

Exactly right! Great article! People forget that generalization/abstraction is the end goal and should never be the first step. Unless and until you are sufficiently intellectually mature you should never start with general principles. Always start with a concrete example, motivate the arguments and slowly build/use the tools of Mathematics to work towards a solution. This is how Humans have learnt and developed for millennia but with the explosion of knowledge in the 19th/20th century we seem to have forgotten it and taken a completely wrong turn in the teaching of Mathematics. The result is that we have a lot of educated people (see in mirror :-) without any proper understanding.