Aaq, just to be fair, rabbi yoshe ber would have been beyond my pedagogical abilities by age 8 – he was a veritable genius, all other considerations aside. I do appreciate the thought experiment though; very original!
I could relate more to being given the opportunity to be a melamen for my grandfather. He grew up in the 1910s, and learned in 2 yeshivos of note. He eventually went to the University of Berlin and came out….well, “nisht arein gein”. If I were learning gemara with him I would relate halacha to mussar, hashkofa, politics etc the way some of my rebbeim did; show him the breitkeit, the breadth of Torah and how applicable it is to every situation. Perhaps if he were satisfied in his knowledge that “hafuch boh vehafuch boh dekula boh”, and wanted only to use secular studies to understand Torah, not as a “complement” or as something independently important, it would dissuade him from following the mad dash off the cliff.
When I learn with my kids, I try to show them what learning can do for them, how enveloping and encompassing it is..we have a game where they try to find something in the world that has no connection to Torah, and each time I show them how everything is in the Torah. Once I took some of my boys on a laser tag trip – they said… that’s it, there’s no way you can find a Torah lesson in laser tag. I told them that laser tag teaches us that you can do something which seems to have no effect whatsoever…you don’t feel or see the laser coming out of the gun, but it definitely has a result!