I agree. Most conventional schools stifle curiosity. And educators ought to know that kids are curious. According to the Google commercial I'm sure you've seen, the average child asks 144 questions a day. Even if some of those questions are "When's dinner?" and "Are we there yet?", that statistic ought to tell educators something.
I imagine some teachers, especially high school teachers, are intimidated by students they suspect are smarter than they are. Especially given that those students may also be smart-asses. If they were required to have majored in whatever they're teaching, their odds might improve a bit. But not knowing the answer to a kid's question isn't the end of the world. The teacher could simply say: "I don't know, but let's find out together," and turn it into a learning experience for the whole class.
Learning how to learn is one thing that ought to be emphasized in the classroom, and clearly isn't. I know they teach "good study habits" and the like, but that isn't what I mean. Kids need to be taught how to think critically, and how to do research properly. That seems to be more important than ever. Even in my day, understanding what "research" really was came late. It wasn't till my sophomore or junior year in college that I got it. I was taking a 16th century English history course from a visiting professor from the U.K. I'd had a thing for the Tudors for a long time, and was disappointed to find the course was mostly about enclosure controversies, not Henry VIII and his wives. Eventually the professor assigned a term paper. Someone asked a question about "her research", and he said bluntly, "You will not be doing research. You will be doing reading." And that, I think, was when I first realized what primary research actually was.
Most secondary school, and even college, students won't be doing primary research, but they badly need to learn how to evaluate sources. Wikipedia doesn't count. And in many fields, especially in the humanities, you'll need to know what the authoritative sources are, and go to a library to read them. It's okay to form your own opinions, but you have to understand what you're disagreeing with before you do that.
And then you have to put it all together in a way that makes sense. Once in a grad school seminar, a classmate gave a rather bad report. At some point she made a particularly outlandish proposal, and the teacher asked, "Whatever gave you that idea?" She replied, "I read it in a book." Everyone stared at her. Nowadays, I gather, the situation is much worse. They think everything they may read on the Internet is of equal value and has equal authority, allowing them to pick and choose whatever theory they may find appealing.
The New Math came along after I'd graduated from high school, never mind grade school, so I was spared. But math was taught without context. We leaned addition one year, subtraction the next, and so on. That was idiotic. Then in fifth or sixth grade we got to somewhat more complex stuff. God I hated questions like the one with the beer mugs you describe. The boat travels 52 miles upstream at 7 knots per hour. It then travels 33 miles downstream at 5 knots per hour. When's the captain's birthday? UGH.
Learning basic computation involves a lot of memorization, and it's boring. But surely the rest could be made more interesting. As for taking things apart, I'm one of those people who ends up with a few pieces that don't seem to fit anywhere…
I suppose modern technology might come in handy there. You could take photos at each step. That would work.
Maybe.
