I like the idea that "If you can master these topics, imagine what other topics you could master if you put your mind to it" — again, for the empowerment. It's

I like the idea that "If you can master these topics, imagine what other topics you could master if you put your mind to it" — again, for the empowerment. It's not about a thing being hard. Walking is hard to a paraplegic. It's about overcoming a thing and feeling good about it (instead of external rewards, like a piece of candy or good grades). The real problem with school is that it replaces empowerment with gamification externalized rewards. You're not learning calc for the sake of understanding the world, you're doing it for a line item on a checklist. That doesn't come with empowerment. With the mere framing of "you can do [hard thing] to prove you can do hard things" is a bad framing because it could be anything — from doing calc, to bungee jumping, to drinking a gallon of milk (please don't). This framing doesn't actually lead to empowerment (and then self-improvement).