Information technology has taken over the role of the family in giving values to many children. Mathematicians and scientists are fearless in the search for truth, as distinct from the obedience to custom, dogma and habit. Parents and teachers who do not possess a mathematical and scientific value system cannot be expected to transmit same to children. Children are born mathematicians and scientists. Their parents and teachers kill their natural inborn curiosity.
Children enter the world alive with questions on every thing imaginable.
They differ from scientists only in not having the language skills to formulate hypotheses, and the knowledge of how to set up tests and experiments to falsify them. Our schools have failed more than eighty percent of children who aught to have been assisted by their teachers to acquire basic scientific skills. Children develop a dislike for mathematics and science because their teachers are handicapped by ignorance and incompetence. This reinforces the antiscientific and alogical thinking skills some of the children bring from home. Every normal child, not suffering from brain damage comes to school with a spontaneous curiosity about numbers.