I don't think we three necessarily disagree; we are alleging that the system causes people to be afraid of intellectual pain by virtue of its structure. Student

I don't think we three necessarily disagree; we are alleging that the system causes people to be afraid of intellectual pain by virtue of its structure. Students feel the pain of schooling, in the form of shame and suffering, and assume that that is what intellectual development feels like, and that smart people are simply people who can endure more of it. Compare impersonal mass calisthenics to team sports workouts; both are painful, but the calisthenics are also mind-numbing. As a college instructor at a community college, you're teaching math to people who likely have spent their whole lives watching other kids easily ace exams that they struggled with, who have never spent any of their genuinely free time doing math, and who just want to be let out of school. They are products of the system.