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> Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated this seems like a bizarre conclusion. In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact self m

> Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated this seems like a bizarre conclusion. In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact self motivated. You won't see that if you have a very narrow definition of what is it that they're supposed to be learning kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong). I appreciated hearing this echoed by Conrad Wolfram in a recent PIMA episode: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-still-teach-people-to-calculate/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-still-teach-peopl...

sillysaurusx 2y ago
I think it might be worth considering whether you’ve had a privileged upbringing. Thinking back on it, the majority of people probably would have been content to play games all day. You could argue that that’s learning, but unfortunately it’s not the kind of learning that society tends to reward. I’ve heard that kids in upper middle class circles are totally different in this regard though. Maybe they want to do more on average.
- pigscantfly 2y ago
  I think this perspective is belied by the vast over-subscription of free public education in places where it has previously been paid only[1] (at this point, mainly in Africa). It does seem like there is strong evidence that most children and parents recognize the value of education and are self-motivated to pursue it where it is accessible to them. I believe it follows that lowering cost and barriers to quality education will improve outcomes without a need to otherwise coerce participation. [1] See, most recently, Zambia
  - geodel 2y ago
    Not really. In my experience it is mostly effect of socio-legal pressure that kids can't be anywhere but school. In primary schools most kids are bored or miserable as hell while in school. And further parents keep pushing it because apparently education is key to future success / great career. For higher education there is charade of education to get jobs. So for office manager job where grade 8 would be enough, we have MBAs now because we all need advanced education to survive in global economy blah..blah.
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > For higher education there is charade of education to get jobs. So for office manager job where grade 8 would be enough, we have MBAs now because we all need advanced education to survive in global economy blah..blah. This would actually be a good business opportunity: hire such "grade 8 educated" people as office managers, but pay them much less than MBAs. If they are nearly as good as MBAs, you save a lot of money on this group of employees, and thus your company has a strong economic advantage.
      - lmm 2y ago
        > hire such "grade 8 educated" people as office managers, but pay them much less than MBAs. The trouble is it's performance all the way up and down. In the first place you're only going to get the weirdos / extreme gamblers, and then you'll struggle to attract investors, your clients/suppliers will wonder why your business development folks missed their classical references...
        aleph_minus_one 2y ago
        > In the first place you're only going to get the weirdos You will (hopefully) nevertheless check whether an applicant has the necessary traits to be a decent office manager. On the other hand, I wouldn't claim that weirdos are necessarily bad office managers.
moffkalast 2y ago
Yeah if anything, current education system is so garbage that it manages to completely demotivate curious kids who want to genuinely learn. It's designed around adults that need to run the place, runs at the wrong pace for most students and focuses on PTSD-inducing high anxiety testing constantly because it's easy to do for the teachers. Not to mention piles of pointless busywork as homework that's been proven to not help with learning at all.
endisneigh 2y ago
I’m curious - have you ever taught in a public school?
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
> kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong). Most kid athletes are also not self-motivated to run laps, or do boring repetitive drills, when they know from experience that these activities help them win games within the next few months. Usually need a coach to force them to do them. Same for young music players. Practicing scales endlessly does make you a better musician. But they won't do it till forced. The primary reason kids don't like running laps or playing scales or doing math drills is because they are boring.
- nsagent 2y ago
  Reminds me of a recent podcast with Staša Gejo [1], a top competition climber. She basically says the same thing. At times she hated being told to do drills growing up, but really valued that later because as a kid she sometimes didn't feel like doing the hard work necessary for the outcomes she desired. [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hg4jPdMnPyE&t=995 https://youtube.com/watch?v=hg4jPdMnPyE&t=995
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  > Practicing scales endlessly does make you a better musician. But they won't do it till forced. The value of such exercises, or any other drill-based curriculum, must be measured with its opportunity cost. If you practise scales for an hour a day, you can indeed reliably expect to be better at your musical instrument, but it could very well be that the same hour spent on improving another skill (sight-reading, articulation etc.) would make you considerably better still at your instrument. I think it might be more generally useful to say that, in order to develop well-rounded competency in a given field, one should expect to sometimes have to perform boring drills.
choppaface 2y ago
Feedback is a critical part of education as well as motivation for learning. But the act of giving feedback is very hard to scale, even for virtual learning. Enter an LLM chatbot, which is imperfect but can fill a lot of gaps in expectation. Chatbots certainly aren’t for everybody, but the large gains in accuracy in years past make them on average more effective.
ugh123 2y ago
>kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong). I think you are partially right in that the dryness of much of math teaching hides a lot of the underlying material's applicability to life. I think one thing AI could do is help design rich situational lessons that could are prompted, vetted, and updated by teachers and then taught to the class. It could be trivial to create incremental difficulty of problem materials tailored to each student's progress and goal.
MarcScott 2y ago
> In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact self motivated. In your experience? The world over? Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for a long time. I've worked in the UK, the USA, PNG, and Kenya. The vast majority of kids in the developed world don't really care about education. A few do, and they get great grades. Most care more about social status, their cliques, or just surviving the jungle that is school. School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority. You can't get that at home, in front of a screen. Learning stuff is secondary. I'm sure there are plenty of people here that are not working in whatever they majored at.
- afarviral 2y ago
  I mean ... many people went to school as students for a good 12 years. That's likely tainted experience, less objective perhaps, but nontheless valid experience.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    Those same people will say "I wish school taught me <X> (things like how to fill out a check book etc" It did. You didn't pay attention. You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?". My school taught us how to interpret a "source", how to write well defended arguments (even if I don't always rise to that level), how to calculate mortgage interest rates and payments etc etc etc. But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important" because they didn't pay attention to what was taught! The primary problem with education in america today is that a huge proportion of parents do not give a fuck about education, see school as just a thing you have to do instead of a constant opportunity. When a kid sees their parent complaining about education being "Liberal brain washing" every other day, why would they pay attention in class? Education requires emotional and ideological buy in from parents and students for best results.
    - lmm 2y ago
      > It did. You didn't pay attention. It didn't. I specifically remember the hole where my class should've explained what a court case actually determines, how the process runs, because I noticed things were missing / being swept under the carpet (we did some mock jury stuff but without the right context for it to teach us anything). > You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?" Nope. I specifically remember watching movie "making of" videos and my teacher saying "write this down!" about irrelevant technical details that distracted from the more important stuff the director was saying. > But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important" > because they didn't pay attention to what was taught! Nope. I was an engaged, attentive student (indeed a kind of star pupil). I still learnt more in spite of school than because of it. Indeed some of the stuff that's most important for my education and career is stuff I was actively punished for doing at school (poking at the computers to see how they worked). Schools, at least the standard-ish state school that I went to (which had good official ratings) teach the wrong things and teach them badly.
TrainedMonkey 2y ago
> the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong The real real answer is that it probably does, but on a much longer timescale that we generally consider and it is really hard to explain why. Something like better math skills lead to better life outcomes. Maybe due to a better model of the world and sharper thinking, but I am just guessing.
- elliotbnvl 2y ago
  I would tend to agree with your last (speculative) point. The breakdown lies in communicating this to students and ensuring that each student receives adequate support at their own pace and style of learning.
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    What is a disproportionate amount of people are claiming to require a slower pace and visual-only learning style?
    - elliotbnvl 2y ago
      They very well may! Unfortunately, since our approach to teaching how to learn is flawed to the core, it results in peoples' ability to learn being compromised from the very beginning, requiring them to build their knowledge base and learning approach on shaky foundations. The way to correct this is by imbuing students with the confidence and skills required to learn (according to their style of learning) correctly from the very beginning, so that they build on solid foundations instead.
      - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
        I guess what I’m saying is that the whole learning styles stuff seems to be bunk.
koonsolo 2y ago
> In my experience So you are a teacher?
skhunted 2y ago
There is evidence that a person’s ability to understand and succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or not they can do arithmetic with fractions. Number sense is important in my opinion. Relying always on the calculator or a CAS leaves students confused and befuddled. I see this all the time in calc classes that I teach. The CAS loving students just don’t understand as well.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > There is evidence that a person’s ability to understand and succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or not they can do arithmetic with fractions. Number sense is important in my opinion. My opinion differs a lot here. I would not say that I have a good number sense (I guess that people who have to do "numeric calculations" or "back-of-the-envelope calculations" as daily part of their job have a much better number sense than me). On the other hand, I find it rather easy to learn really abstract algebraic concepts (think Grothendieck-style algebraic geometry or similarly abstract mathematical topics), which many people (most of them with much better number sense than me) tend to find insanely difficult.
  - skhunted 2y ago
    The number sense I talk of is not being able to do numerical calculations easily or in your head but rather understanding how to operate with numbers and their different representations. A person who can understand algebraic geometry doesn’t have trouble understanding things like simplifying x + 5/3 x. People workout any number sense have a hard time with this. Knowing that 8/3 is just a different way of writing 1+5/3 is confusing to them.
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      Textbooks about "abstract nonsense" rarely require you to do such routine calculations/simplifications - they rather require you to be capable of making sense of definitions that are (at a first glance) insanely far removed from anything you have seen in your real life: I would rather liken it to taking strong, dangerous hallucinogenic drugs, and making sense of the world that you now see (which is something that only some people are capable of); by the way: I don't understand why hallucinogenic drugs are illegal, but textbooks about very abstract math are not. :-D On the other hand, textbooks about, say, analysis and mathematical physics (both in a broader sense) - which can also be very complicated - have a tendency to demand a lot of (also long, tedious) "routine" calculations from the reader (often to do by his own). For these areas of mathematics your argument surely makes sense.
trod123 2y ago
There are quite a number of experts who would disagree with your conclusion. Upon reaching a certain threshold of technological dependence, the need for rational thought (which includes calculation) is tied to the need for food. The actual yield may be low based on other factors, but it is absolutely necessary for survival. The alternative you suggest, is where technology no longer advances. Logically then, population growth hits a malthusian trap, the old crowd out the young since they have the most influence, and then a depopulation occurs as the old naturally die off, and replacement births cannot sustain those dependent systems used to feed the masses. You get a dragon-king event where everyone its a free for all over food and bare necessities, farming no longer becomes possible (because of looters), and the world order collapses to pre-agrarian levels, assuming the environment isn't destroyed in the chaos (i.e. MAD and Nuclear Fallout). There are much better ways to calculate than are currently taught in schools, Trachtenberg System and Vedic Maths have worked well in many places. Mental math has been around for quite some time, and the principles of math are all about finding uncommon knowledge or information that is not immediately apparent (though it becomes so via various mathematical transformations). The current pedagogy of math is all about sieving and exclusion, and rote-authority based teaching, since it is a requirement for any specialized area of science (and is only taught in relation to mathematical concepts, instead of intuitive approaches). This is why they adopted a burn-the-bridge strategy right around trigonometry at the grade school level (intended to cause PTSD/suffering/torture), to safeguard against disruptive innovators at the source. Algebra -> Geometry -> Trig 1 -> 2 -> 3 What do you suppose happens when the passing grading criteria in 1 is changed from just following the process (but not correct answer) to 2 (separate unrelated material which is passed) to 3 (correct process and correct answer). If they fail Trig, and the problems are from Algebra (not something a teacher paid bupkiss will bother to look at), how do they go back if they passed Geometry? The students not knowing why they are failing are simply told, well you maybe you are just not good at math and should consider other paths if you can't do it. This structure is called burning the bridge because it makes it so you can't go back from a progression standpoint. Ironically, this structure was adopted at the request of representatives from the National Teachers Union in the late 80s/90s, and largely remains the same today. There are several other progression sieves embedded in academia intended to make it almost impossible for us as a society to develop a large number of creative people who reach einstein-level achievements in math and science (outside-self study, or specific environments/private schools). This broad push largely started in the 1970s in publishing, and expanded from there.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

sillysaurusx 2y ago

I think it might be worth considering whether you’ve had a privileged upbringing. Thinking back on it, the majority of people probably would have been content to play games all day. You could argue that that’s learning, but unfortunately it’s not the kind of learning that society tends to reward. I’ve heard that kids in upper middle class circles are totally different in this regard though. Maybe they want to do more on average.

pigscantfly 2y ago
I think this perspective is belied by the vast over-subscription of free public education in places where it has previously been paid only[1] (at this point, mainly in Africa). It does seem like there is strong evidence that most children and parents recognize the value of education and are self-motivated to pursue it where it is accessible to them. I believe it follows that lowering cost and barriers to quality education will improve outcomes without a need to otherwise coerce participation. [1] See, most recently, Zambia
- geodel 2y ago
  Not really. In my experience it is mostly effect of socio-legal pressure that kids can't be anywhere but school. In primary schools most kids are bored or miserable as hell while in school. And further parents keep pushing it because apparently education is key to future success / great career. For higher education there is charade of education to get jobs. So for office manager job where grade 8 would be enough, we have MBAs now because we all need advanced education to survive in global economy blah..blah.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > For higher education there is charade of education to get jobs. So for office manager job where grade 8 would be enough, we have MBAs now because we all need advanced education to survive in global economy blah..blah. This would actually be a good business opportunity: hire such "grade 8 educated" people as office managers, but pay them much less than MBAs. If they are nearly as good as MBAs, you save a lot of money on this group of employees, and thus your company has a strong economic advantage.
    - lmm 2y ago
      > hire such "grade 8 educated" people as office managers, but pay them much less than MBAs. The trouble is it's performance all the way up and down. In the first place you're only going to get the weirdos / extreme gamblers, and then you'll struggle to attract investors, your clients/suppliers will wonder why your business development folks missed their classical references...
      - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
        > In the first place you're only going to get the weirdos You will (hopefully) nevertheless check whether an applicant has the necessary traits to be a decent office manager. On the other hand, I wouldn't claim that weirdos are necessarily bad office managers.

moffkalast 2y ago

Yeah if anything, current education system is so garbage that it manages to completely demotivate curious kids who want to genuinely learn. It's designed around adults that need to run the place, runs at the wrong pace for most students and focuses on PTSD-inducing high anxiety testing constantly because it's easy to do for the teachers. Not to mention piles of pointless busywork as homework that's been proven to not help with learning at all.

endisneigh 2y ago

I’m curious - have you ever taught in a public school?

abdullahkhalids 2y ago

> kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong). Most kid athletes are also not self-motivated to run laps, or do boring repetitive drills, when they know from experience that these activities help them win games within the next few months. Usually need a coach to force them to do them. Same for young music players. Practicing scales endlessly does make you a better musician. But they won't do it till forced. The primary reason kids don't like running laps or playing scales or doing math drills is because they are boring.

nsagent 2y ago
Reminds me of a recent podcast with Staša Gejo [1], a top competition climber. She basically says the same thing. At times she hated being told to do drills growing up, but really valued that later because as a kid she sometimes didn't feel like doing the hard work necessary for the outcomes she desired. [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hg4jPdMnPyE&t=995 https://youtube.com/watch?v=hg4jPdMnPyE&t=995
seabass-labrax 2y ago
> Practicing scales endlessly does make you a better musician. But they won't do it till forced. The value of such exercises, or any other drill-based curriculum, must be measured with its opportunity cost. If you practise scales for an hour a day, you can indeed reliably expect to be better at your musical instrument, but it could very well be that the same hour spent on improving another skill (sight-reading, articulation etc.) would make you considerably better still at your instrument. I think it might be more generally useful to say that, in order to develop well-rounded competency in a given field, one should expect to sometimes have to perform boring drills.

choppaface 2y ago

Feedback is a critical part of education as well as motivation for learning. But the act of giving feedback is very hard to scale, even for virtual learning. Enter an LLM chatbot, which is imperfect but can fill a lot of gaps in expectation. Chatbots certainly aren’t for everybody, but the large gains in accuracy in years past make them on average more effective.

ugh123 2y ago

>kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong). I think you are partially right in that the dryness of much of math teaching hides a lot of the underlying material's applicability to life. I think one thing AI could do is help design rich situational lessons that could are prompted, vetted, and updated by teachers and then taught to the class. It could be trivial to create incremental difficulty of problem materials tailored to each student's progress and goal.

MarcScott 2y ago

> In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact self motivated. In your experience? The world over? Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for a long time. I've worked in the UK, the USA, PNG, and Kenya. The vast majority of kids in the developed world don't really care about education. A few do, and they get great grades. Most care more about social status, their cliques, or just surviving the jungle that is school. School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority. You can't get that at home, in front of a screen. Learning stuff is secondary. I'm sure there are plenty of people here that are not working in whatever they majored at.

afarviral 2y ago
I mean ... many people went to school as students for a good 12 years. That's likely tainted experience, less objective perhaps, but nontheless valid experience.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Those same people will say "I wish school taught me <X> (things like how to fill out a check book etc" It did. You didn't pay attention. You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?". My school taught us how to interpret a "source", how to write well defended arguments (even if I don't always rise to that level), how to calculate mortgage interest rates and payments etc etc etc. But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important" because they didn't pay attention to what was taught! The primary problem with education in america today is that a huge proportion of parents do not give a fuck about education, see school as just a thing you have to do instead of a constant opportunity. When a kid sees their parent complaining about education being "Liberal brain washing" every other day, why would they pay attention in class? Education requires emotional and ideological buy in from parents and students for best results.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > It did. You didn't pay attention. It didn't. I specifically remember the hole where my class should've explained what a court case actually determines, how the process runs, because I noticed things were missing / being swept under the carpet (we did some mock jury stuff but without the right context for it to teach us anything). > You want school to teach media literacy? It did, but you complained the whole time "when are we going to use this?" Nope. I specifically remember watching movie "making of" videos and my teacher saying "write this down!" about irrelevant technical details that distracted from the more important stuff the director was saying. > But people will swear up and down "school doesn't teach anything important" > because they didn't pay attention to what was taught! Nope. I was an engaged, attentive student (indeed a kind of star pupil). I still learnt more in spite of school than because of it. Indeed some of the stuff that's most important for my education and career is stuff I was actively punished for doing at school (poking at the computers to see how they worked). Schools, at least the standard-ish state school that I went to (which had good official ratings) teach the wrong things and teach them badly.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

> the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong The real real answer is that it probably does, but on a much longer timescale that we generally consider and it is really hard to explain why. Something like better math skills lead to better life outcomes. Maybe due to a better model of the world and sharper thinking, but I am just guessing.

elliotbnvl 2y ago
I would tend to agree with your last (speculative) point. The breakdown lies in communicating this to students and ensuring that each student receives adequate support at their own pace and style of learning.
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  What is a disproportionate amount of people are claiming to require a slower pace and visual-only learning style?
  - elliotbnvl 2y ago
    They very well may! Unfortunately, since our approach to teaching how to learn is flawed to the core, it results in peoples' ability to learn being compromised from the very beginning, requiring them to build their knowledge base and learning approach on shaky foundations. The way to correct this is by imbuing students with the confidence and skills required to learn (according to their style of learning) correctly from the very beginning, so that they build on solid foundations instead.
    - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
      I guess what I’m saying is that the whole learning styles stuff seems to be bunk.

koonsolo 2y ago

> In my experience So you are a teacher?

skhunted 2y ago

There is evidence that a person’s ability to understand and succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or not they can do arithmetic with fractions. Number sense is important in my opinion. Relying always on the calculator or a CAS leaves students confused and befuddled. I see this all the time in calc classes that I teach. The CAS loving students just don’t understand as well.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> There is evidence that a person’s ability to understand and succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or not they can do arithmetic with fractions. Number sense is important in my opinion. My opinion differs a lot here. I would not say that I have a good number sense (I guess that people who have to do "numeric calculations" or "back-of-the-envelope calculations" as daily part of their job have a much better number sense than me). On the other hand, I find it rather easy to learn really abstract algebraic concepts (think Grothendieck-style algebraic geometry or similarly abstract mathematical topics), which many people (most of them with much better number sense than me) tend to find insanely difficult.
- skhunted 2y ago
  The number sense I talk of is not being able to do numerical calculations easily or in your head but rather understanding how to operate with numbers and their different representations. A person who can understand algebraic geometry doesn’t have trouble understanding things like simplifying x + 5/3 x. People workout any number sense have a hard time with this. Knowing that 8/3 is just a different way of writing 1+5/3 is confusing to them.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    Textbooks about "abstract nonsense" rarely require you to do such routine calculations/simplifications - they rather require you to be capable of making sense of definitions that are (at a first glance) insanely far removed from anything you have seen in your real life: I would rather liken it to taking strong, dangerous hallucinogenic drugs, and making sense of the world that you now see (which is something that only some people are capable of); by the way: I don't understand why hallucinogenic drugs are illegal, but textbooks about very abstract math are not. :-D On the other hand, textbooks about, say, analysis and mathematical physics (both in a broader sense) - which can also be very complicated - have a tendency to demand a lot of (also long, tedious) "routine" calculations from the reader (often to do by his own). For these areas of mathematics your argument surely makes sense.

trod123 2y ago

There are quite a number of experts who would disagree with your conclusion. Upon reaching a certain threshold of technological dependence, the need for rational thought (which includes calculation) is tied to the need for food. The actual yield may be low based on other factors, but it is absolutely necessary for survival. The alternative you suggest, is where technology no longer advances. Logically then, population growth hits a malthusian trap, the old crowd out the young since they have the most influence, and then a depopulation occurs as the old naturally die off, and replacement births cannot sustain those dependent systems used to feed the masses. You get a dragon-king event where everyone its a free for all over food and bare necessities, farming no longer becomes possible (because of looters), and the world order collapses to pre-agrarian levels, assuming the environment isn't destroyed in the chaos (i.e. MAD and Nuclear Fallout). There are much better ways to calculate than are currently taught in schools, Trachtenberg System and Vedic Maths have worked well in many places. Mental math has been around for quite some time, and the principles of math are all about finding uncommon knowledge or information that is not immediately apparent (though it becomes so via various mathematical transformations). The current pedagogy of math is all about sieving and exclusion, and rote-authority based teaching, since it is a requirement for any specialized area of science (and is only taught in relation to mathematical concepts, instead of intuitive approaches). This is why they adopted a burn-the-bridge strategy right around trigonometry at the grade school level (intended to cause PTSD/suffering/torture), to safeguard against disruptive innovators at the source. Algebra -> Geometry -> Trig 1 -> 2 -> 3 What do you suppose happens when the passing grading criteria in 1 is changed from just following the process (but not correct answer) to 2 (separate unrelated material which is passed) to 3 (correct process and correct answer). If they fail Trig, and the problems are from Algebra (not something a teacher paid bupkiss will bother to look at), how do they go back if they passed Geometry? The students not knowing why they are failing are simply told, well you maybe you are just not good at math and should consider other paths if you can't do it. This structure is called burning the bridge because it makes it so you can't go back from a progression standpoint. Ironically, this structure was adopted at the request of representatives from the National Teachers Union in the late 80s/90s, and largely remains the same today. There are several other progression sieves embedded in academia intended to make it almost impossible for us as a society to develop a large number of creative people who reach einstein-level achievements in math and science (outside-self study, or specific environments/private schools). This broad push largely started in the 1970s in publishing, and expanded from there.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]