Yeah, that's sad. Here's a positive example from my school, which was in Russia. At some point in our "advanced" math classes we learned the concept of open and closed sets. The idea grew in my young mind and eventually I asked our physics teacher whether actual physical objects were more like closed sets (i.e. include points on their boundary), or more like open sets. That led to an amazingly deep discussion of what happens at the boundary of a physical object. My school was nice =)