"...take apart things to put them together but it doesn't surprise me why lots of people have all the creativity and curiosity purged from them from an early ag

"...take apart things to put them together but it doesn't surprise me why lots of people have all the creativity and curiosity purged from them from an early age." You're right, encouraging kids to explore the world at an early age is all important for their development. As a kid I was a past master at pulling all sorts of things apart and somewhat less successful at putting them back together again. And from that I learned a great amount about how stuff worked ('hands-on' at a very young age I reckon is essential to get the feel and measure of stuff). My parents never discouraged me from playing with all sorts of rather strange things—except perhaps in my preschool years when I started rummaging around amongst the inner workings of our large console radio set in the lounge room. At the age of about four or five my mother took exception after I discovered that touching the top cap [aka grid-1] of one of its valves (tubes) caused a very loud humming noise (she came bounding into the room somewhat alarmed to find No.-1 son arm-deep amongst the electrics). By that age I'd already become an inveterate collector of junk—everything from screws, nuts and bolts to discarded power pole wire and insulators. Once I found an old transformer out of a radio set that had green silk-like insulation on its windings (which I found fascinating) and in the evening when my parents told me to stop playing with it I disobeyed the order and hid it in my bed (I know, a very strange kid). Now, you can imagine the furore and trouble I was in when this large metal object came crashing to the floor in the early hours of the morning waking up the whole household. I cannot envisage how horrible my childhood would have been had my parents forbidden me from following my natural instincts (as strange and as odd as they may have seemed). I'm sure many other parents would have been much less tolerant of my strange predilections. In hindsight, I reckon my only saving grace was that my father was an engineer.