<p>It's not just here - it's also all across the Internet. You see all of these interesting discussions on academic blogs, on academic websites, and all sorts of books of an academic content have been released - yet absolutely no one from one's high school has them.</p>
<p>I'm not saying that everything on the Internet is academic- all I'm saying is that the Internet exposes you to an audience far more intelligent than the audience in high school - and that you can find that audience if you choose to do so. In fact, it gives the impression that there is a large and active community that is able to sustain itself even though it only manages to capture a very very small percentage of the population. But yet if you take all academic communities together - you still find that none of your fellow HS students have ever engaged them. It's frustrating.</p>
<p>And no, I was never homeschooled. It's just that I argue for it since public schooling really killed my imagination for a number of years (an imagination I was only recently allowed to develop). I never had the imagination to pursue textbooks on my own time since I thought that I was among the smartest people in the school - and was discouraged from pursuing anything more theoretical. Sad thing is that I also thought I was so unique and special as well. But a wider exploration of the Internet killed such conceptions of mine. I just went to college early and recently went for low course loads and I finally developed an academic and philosophical maturity that I never developed in the past (by reading and writing a lot). So I'm still angry and resentful towards public education (don't know how long the anger will last).</p>
<p>I'm not pure science. I appreciate sociology, psychology (especially cognitive psychology), neurobiology, economics, and the other social sciences. In fact, my anger towards school is some sort of a product of the fact that I never had the imagination to self-educate myself in those fields until last year (though if I stayed in HS I would have done AP Psych self-study - actually I did do that - take a few APs in college :p). And guess what? NO ONE in my school appreciated these fields to any remote extent. Not even the kids who did CTY Talent Search. None of them appreciate anything in academic research - or academic discussions for that matter. Yet those discussions abound on various Internet websites.</p>
<p>Sure, college gives them some time to "explore". But that's very little time, and there are so many fields. And then there comes the mentality of "you can only learn if you take a course in the subject material". It doesn't help that people rarely check out library books - I've managed to pretty much check out every library book related to some areas, and keep them for months on end because no one was interested in them. People are so amazingly ignorant of other fields. </p>
<p>Of course school doesn't coerce the student towards forcing oneself to not self-educate onrself. Nonetheless, indirect psychological influences can still be as far as direct ones. We're raised to seek only grades - and to "have fun" when we get straight A's. And kids are very impressionable. </p>
<p>And interest in science is generally correlated with interest in anything theoretical/academic. Sure, students of all kinds do read literature - but that does not indicate an interest in anything more theoretical than that. People read literature - but there is little incentive to contribute anything new on such literature. Moreover, I think there is little disagreement that literature does not equate with research.</p>
<p>==
Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences: well, the fact is, only a couple of those intelligences are even relevant to the information age. And those are the intelligences that we have always spoken about.</p>