That's a very good question, and one I think everyone needs to be asking.

I can't claim to be an expert on education, but we can all speak from experience. Being currently in the educational system, I honestly think it's about inspiration vs. motivation. The current system is fairly good at motivating students, but this is on a superficial level - grades, getting into a good college/job, or the threat of failure. In general, though, I can't say that I've really been inspired to learn, apart from a few teachers whom I deeply respect. The crucial difference between the 2 - motivation only works as long as the motivator is there, and people have no problem with cheating. Inspiration is what drives people, and what education is missing.

So where does inspiration come from? Both internally and externally - the intrinsic value or joy of learning, and being able to apply what we learn to life. I think there are 2 places where real improvement could be seen:

TL;DR - In short, I think we need to develop internal inspiration when students are young, and then tie that into external inspiration as we get older.

1. Childhood education - Learning is something that really needs to be made fun, and internalized. I think that this is where most people gain an initial passion for learning. There is an intrinsic joy to truly learning something or solving a problem, but we need to teach perseverance - there was some study which showed that, given an impossible problem, U.S. students spent far less time on it than some students from other countries. Anecdotally, though, we tend to give up too easily; most of the rewards are from completion, but we never get there in the first place. We need to show our kids both the value in challenging yourself and also the value in the end result. I think a large part of this comes from parents and your home environment, rather than formalized education.

2. Middle/HS - Most of us have that one teacher that really inspired us. I think we need to look for teachers that may not be great at teaching, but rather are visionaries and are able to inspire. In the end, all of us learn in different ways, and arguably a lot of it is done outside of the classroom. Especially given the problem of limited time, teachers need to in inspire students first, and teach second - if a student wants to learn, they will, regardless of their resources or environment. Granted, that's hyperbole, but think about the lengths you go to if you really want to do something. The best teachers are the ones that are truly passionate about what they teach, and are able to impart that on the students. We need to show students that what they are learning has real value, and can be applied to whatever the student is interested in.

You make what you measure, and usually, you can only measure a few things often enough to really make a difference. So, you need to be damn certain you pick the right metrics ahead of time, otherwise you will end up with nothing near what you want.

So, what are our metrics. As a few examples:

1. The graduation rate of the student body. 2. Standardized test scores. 3. Rates of subsequent employment after graduation. 4. Salary of subsequent employment. 5. The relative prestige of the employing companies.

What we are measuring here is the rate by which people default, and with the expressed goal that we maximize these. What we actually want to end up maximizing is a meta-level or two up from these metrics, but what we've come up with so far is measuring a set of consequences that might kind of indicate that we are maximizing what we actually want. Of course, we forget that these implications only go one way. What we may end up maximizing might have the same symptoms as our goal.

The other question really becomes how you develop a metric to gauge "curiosity". It's really quite subjective, but it is something we would have to do if we'd want to maximize it to any appreciable degree.

Here's my thoughts about this. In the large, it just isn't possible. Psychological motivation is not a multiple-choice test. In order to know someone is curious, you have to expose them to situations that will bring that sort of curiosity out. What you'd need to do is observe and interact with someone, and gauge their reaction to stimuli that would bring about curiosity.

But even then, once you start measuring it, how do you maximize it within a collective? Is it even possible to change the frame of mind of a collective of people? There are 25 of them with a frame of mind they come into the school system with from their parents, and there is one of you telling them that their collective sense of reality isn't the only perspective available. False consciousness is hard enough to overcome one-on-one.

I really think it has to be a grassroots process, if it is going to work at all. You need to convince your friends who don't already believe it that it is worth having faith in continuous learning as a net benefit to one's life. Then they can pass this frame of mind down to their children, who will hopefully become numerous enough eventually that the positive feedback loop starts.

How to do that is left as an exercise to the reader; I've made a difference in the perspectives of a few people, but I have no idea which argument or combination of arguments I made worked. I don't think I could know, to be honest.

No, but for far more general reasons than you're explicating. Large-scale systems, like education, are borne of incentives, not single decisions here or there. No matter what little initiatives you try to foist upon them, they reach a new dynamic equilibrium that's just as bad in some other way, because they are incentivized to do so in some way.

According to Robin Hanson, the incentives the school system has are to make children more obedient to non-empathetic authority (people who haven't personally proved themselves as being worth following, but rather just hold positions of power), and to teach self-control: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/functions-of-school.ht...

Both of these functions have been "absorbed" into the education system, not through any explicitly-stated goals, but rather by setting the incentives. Teachers must grade; children must pass. Therefore, children will be compared by their grades, and learn to feel like they can be, on the whole, quantified and valuated—in other words, objectivized.

One thing that would help is if people like the author in this article looked at this a chance to mentor or tutor students who weren't getting it rather than perpetuating the problem by doing their work for them.