Originally Posted by
John M Wilson
This gets to the heart of the matter: is your education about "training" (mastering specific skills that you can employ in your daily life) or "learning" (figuring out basic principles that can be applied in many, often unsuspected or unrelated ways)?
Long story: The college where I earned my undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering was 100% co-op. We went to school for half a semester, then went to work alongside engineers for half a semester. This cycle repeated for the entire 5 year program.
When I was a junior, I had a couple of years of working with engineers, and often asked them "When was the last time you used multivariate calculus?" and got the expected responses. This did not help my motivation in class, and my grades were terrible. One day the professor noticed the look of absolute disinterest on my face, and called me out in front of the whole class. He wanted to know why I wasn't doing my homework, wasn't paying attention, and appeared to be doing the bare minimum. Feeling bold, I told him of my investigations into the worthlessness of multivariate calculus to my future job, and its complete lack of practical application. He replied, quite forcefully, "Mr. Wilson... I am not trying to teach you your JOB, I am trying to teach you HOW TO THINK!"
This stuck with me. When I retired after 33 years of doing MY JOB, I got a masters in teaching, and began to teach High School science (mostly Physics). I stressed to my students early and often that most of them would not be expected to regurgitate Newton's Laws ever again, but that applying his principles to everyday life (like the proper way to smack a ketchup bottle to release the ketchup) would be very handy. I told them the ability to apply critical thinking to things as diverse as Multi-Level Marketing claims, Facebook "facts", or political promises was just icing on the cake.
TLDR: it's not about memorizing and later recalling arcane facts, it's about exposing your mind to logical problem solving and learning thinking skills that can be applied in a multitude of ways.