A lot of people hope there is a magical way of making learning fun. The argument generally goes "young kids love exploring nature, experimenting, etc, so we are

A lot of people hope there is a magical way of making learning fun. The argument generally goes "young kids love exploring nature, experimenting, etc, so we are all inborn scientists. If only school did not extinguish the fire from us". A huge problem is that giants of education such as Jean Piaget and Seymour Papert make a strong case for this. Unfortunately they generalized their own experience as kids to all others. They did not understand that they were exceptional cases, and what applies to them does not necessarily apply to 99.999% of the rest of the world. But their message was so cool, somewhat similar to "we can all love each others", or "world peace", that it was embraced with abandon. I was fortunate to have a great math educator in college (i.e. a guy who was teaching us, math majors, how to tech moth to kids). He told us bluntly "math is hard". I think education would progress if one simply accepted this truth "math is hard". Stop the delusion that there is a way to make all math fun. Still, once you accept that math is hard, you realize that the mission is the same: try to find ways so that learning math is less hard and more fun. But accept that the default state is that math is hard. There is no "royal road" to math. Aristotle was onto something. And by the way, the fact that "math is hard" is not all bad news. The goal in school is not only to learn math, but also to learn how to work hard. There are kids for whom math feels like swimming for a dolphin. Up to a point. There will inevitably be a point where they will hit the phase of "math is hard". And it's going to come as a rude shock. It's better for this realization to come a bit early in life and a bit less shocking.