I haven't even finished reading Lockhart, and I am already unspeakably glad that I was homeschooled by a mom who cared about what math really was.

To add something of substance to the conversation: coming at math from an understanding of the game of it instead of the rote work, I've noticed that I'm better at applying it than most of my classmates in my (well-regarded state university) engineering school. I can't say how much of that is "innate" "talent", with all the sarcasm that the quotation marks imply, but I can't help but see how little of the rubbish that Lockhart describes was inflicted upon me and wonder if there's a correlation.

compared to what? evidence?

Scott Aaronson writes about A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul [Lockhart].

The Lockhart piece is great and deserves to be much better known. The only bad thing about it is that it pisses the reader off.

Thanks for the link to Aaronson's commentary; I hadn't seen it.