Carl Sagan Saw US Schools Were Ruining Kids Decades Ago: 'Something Terrible Has Happened'

My experience is, you go talk to kindergarten kids or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. And they ask deep questions. What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?' These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them. You go talk to 12th grade students and there's none of that. They've become leaden and incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade and it's not just puberty."