Long G+ comment y'all might enjoy

Not mine, source linked at bottom

I think this point is important...and many people have misunderstood the way I worded it in the article...if you know a better way to convey it, I'd love to hear it. I am NOT saying that one can't pick up new competencies at any age. I have never said or even thought that.

What I am saying is that changing from a completely passive, consuming-not-creating, non-inquisitive mindset to being one of the top producers in any area of development or engineering just doesn't happen much after puberty.

"Top producer" or "top engineer" is a very fuzzy term, but most of us out there fixing deep problems in some area of infrastructure -- physical, software, or any other kind -- tend to have an intuitive grasp of approximately what it means that is "good enough" for this particular conversation. The best boundary I can provide relative to software is: the kind of person who is not just capable, but routinely capable of solving the sort of abstract root-cause problem that tends to baffle everyone else for a decade or so and make PhDs stare at me confusedly and either insist that I'm lying about having made that analysis myself, or about not having any degree.

Here's why this is important:

Here in the US at least, we desperately need more of these people if we are to keep from collapsing like ancient Rome did. Our social, technological, and other infrastructure depend on such people existing in increasing number. Yet, our current educational system is set up to actively punish active inquisition and improvisation by young people. We are stamping out these valuable traits in many young people who naturally tend toward them...and then trying to somehow artificially generate them in some subset of adults when we don't have enough adults capable of this type of thought. It doesn't work.

It's the broader context around "teach her to play with dolls and make-up and that all her value is in her appearance, then suddenly drag her to a LUG meeting at 25". Boys are taught to be passive today, too, though by different means.

My mom is a second grade teacher at a public school. A parent came to her with tears in her eyes after the first week this year. This parent said that, before my mom's class, her son had always hated school...because he got punished for asking too many questions! My mother was the first teacher he ever had who thought that inquisitiveness was not impertinence, but a sign of intelligence, an active mind at work.

It's not just one kid. When I was growing up, I was most often punished in school for three things: talking too much, reading books during class, and bringing in or talking about projects I was working on in my spare time that were "too advanced for my age". Some of us have strong enough personalities to resist this, but some don't. More kids than not are subjected to intense pressure to be passive and not ask too many questions or try too many weird things. Play on a team, fit in, and for goodness sake, don't take that apart!

It's not good for society as a whole.

Imagine if the person destined to cure cancer has been born and raised in the US three times over by now but never did it because he or she was punished for asking too many questions and learned not to ask how everything they looked at works.

(Source: https://plus.google.com/u/0/107942175615993706558/posts/RJXvjj3rsRb)