I'd dare to say that by that point, the system had already killed any remnants of intellectual curiosity the students might had, and replaced it for the obsession with marks and passing exams that predates the system.
I don’t believe this is the reason. I think people in general don’t want to go through the intellectual pain required to understand. I think the system in k-12 is as it is because it maximizes the outcome of getting the most people to the point of having some understanding. The obsession with marks is the thing that leads to this outcome. Most certainly won’t go through the pain of learning without some gamifying the process.
I don't think we three necessarily disagree; we are alleging that the system causes people to be afraid of intellectual pain by virtue of its structure. Students feel the pain of schooling, in the form of shame and suffering, and assume that that is what intellectual development feels like, and that smart people are simply people who can endure more of it. Compare impersonal mass calisthenics to team sports workouts; both are painful, but the calisthenics are also mind-numbing.
As a college instructor at a community college, you're teaching math to people who likely have spent their whole lives watching other kids easily ace exams that they struggled with, who have never spent any of their genuinely free time doing math, and who just want to be let out of school. They are products of the system.
