> What a delightful fantasy world you live in.
I can really certify that this was my lived experience. In the math degree course, basically everyone who was not incredibly passionate about mathematics (NB: "passionate" does not necessary imply "great academic achievements") changed their major or decided for a different kind of tertiary education.
Former co-students who attended the same university and degree course had the same experience.
I guess the reason was that it was a decent university in a "boring" town where learning for your studies was one of the more exciting things that you could do.
Another factor might just be that math pretty much is the extra depth behind a bunch of STEM fields, so people studying math specifically are more likely to be interested in that depth.
That said I generally think the take that it's somehow privileged to find school interesting to be sad. Over the last couple decades one could do pretty well with pretty much any STEM degree. Is the majority feeling among people studying engineering that they just have no interest in any facet of how the world around them works? They have no desire to understand how to create (and alter to their liking) the things they see? No interest in the fundamentals of how the universe works? How different materials come to act the way they do? How living beings work? Nothing?
1. I don’t think there’s a direct correlation between curiosity and finding school interesting. I’m endlessly curious about how the world works and always reading three books at a time, and school was often dull as paint.
2. I would optimize hiring people who display the kind of curiosity described, but if my goal was to create an education system to generate educated workers to grow an economy, I wouldn’t optimize for it. I don’t think curiosity is a privilege, it’s an undervalued right.