I think his point is that we need to work hard to avoid discouraging curiosity. Often it is replaced with rote memorization or knowing things because an authority figure says it is so.
Math is a weird topic. It can be completely wrong when teachers don't understand maths, and even with teachers that do convey the goal and added values of math, it's still off to me. The algorithms are too complex and learned without any real clues (you basically program pupils as biological Turing Machines / Arithmetic Units.. very sad).