Excellent post Virgil.
When I was a kid in art classes I desperately wanted to learn how to do things like how to make objects appear three dimensional, draw figures according to the standard formulas, etc. but when I expressed such desires the teachers would always try to talk me out of such approach to such as "constraining" approach to art. (And probably an approach that would actually require that they be more than babysitters with mops.) I managed to figure out a few things on my own (like that eyes are in the middle of the head and that red and yellow make orange) but I eventually became frustrated with the grief from the "teachers" about my supposed anal retentive nature and the painfully slow process of trying to invent every technique from scratch, and I abandoned efforts at getting any better (aside from the occasional caricature of a boring teacher or bit of decoration anyway). It's too bad I couldn't have borrowed one of your teachers back then.
For what it's worth, I had a similar experience with all of the humanities in school. I rarely saw anything I liked in literature, philosophy, or music appreciation classes etc. and when I did, I was always reprimanded for being horribly backward and out of step with the times. After several such attempts at sniffing around those areas, I just concluded that it was all useless and insane and I focused instead on the more sane and practical worlds of math, science, and engineering. It wasn't until I left grad school and had the time to explore the humanities on my own that I discovered how much wonderful stuff there is out there that had been hidden away by academia. Kids would be much better off if they had none of that stuff in school than getting what they get today. At least they would be merely ignorant rather than skeptical of the existence goodness in the arts and humanities.
-- Brian
