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I've thought about this for a long time, but have been dwelling on it more lately. You are absolutely right that no one bothers to teach kids to understand stuff. Back when I was teaching in university, many many experiences (often via my own attempts to teach the students to understand stuff) made that abundantly clear.
However, I am somewhat sympathetic to their plight. In many cases, you don't know how far along you can take the student. Often times, you have a known end point to a program, at which point, the vast majority of your students will simply not continue further. So you have to pick your battles.
Like, for example, I get why the intro calc classes for undergrad engineers do what they do. You've only got them for so long; many of them really only need so much; you have other things to get to. Of course, for me, it all seemed so absurd in retrospect. Why couldn't you have just started me off with Baby Rubin? It's really not that hard of an on-ramp; it begins with friggin' sequences! But it does take some time and growth, and let's be honest, the vast majority of the engineering students who go through the college will stop with a bachelors, and when you think of all the types, the chemical engineers, civil engineers, hell, the industrial engineers, etc., they'll probably get by without really understanding.
I never did any nuclear stuff, so believe it or not, I'm going through an MIT OCW nuclear course right now. I haven't "taken a course" in a long time. Wowza is there a lot of stuff in there that makes me want to say, "Ya know, if you had just had your students take a full set of quantum classes already, you could have actually done this right, in a way such that they could really understand what's going on, rather than being a bit handwavy and saying 'this is just what happens because of quantum magic that we don't know yet'." ...but how long would the curriculum take to get there? These kids have basically just taken ordinary differential equations! I honestly kinda wonder to what extent they get what proportion of their undergrads to really grok it within the four years, or if they still have plenty of clean-up to do in grad school.
As much as I often hate on the unis, I am sympathetic to their constraints here. I don't know what to really do to fix much of it, because I do think one of the roots may be the utterly disastrous K-12 situation from a long legacy of terrible public control with the primary mission of babysitting and only secondarily happening to have any learning going on (perhaps due in part to their own, must-take-all-comers constraint).
Humans are not meant to read; we learn through doing a lot of the time. Most of their education will occur outside the university system because the university system is not meant to teach (which is something nobody will really teach you, and if you're one of those people who do learn this it'll also destroy your patience with it, and that's not something you can afford to lose at that stage of your life: this is why your early twenties should not be spent in education).
Judging by the quality of the instruction I've received from the average university professor, not even the professors actually get it. The ones that do understand it tend not to be academic-types.
No, what they've taken is a week of differential equations and three months of that being obfuscated by algebra for credential reasons.
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IDK, now I'm getting flashbacks to Calc 2 and how useless it was to ask the instructor anything in the interest of understanding. Then sequences and increasingly absurd integrals came along without explnation of the utility ... and that's how I got the worst grade in Calc2. F? OK, retake it. C? Eh ... maybe that's more poor study strats than lack of understanding. But D? They wouldn't let me retake the class and I had absolutely no business moving on because I learned ... hmm, as I remeber, I learned the professor's opinions on Liebnez Vs Newton, and there was something involving a log cabin pun.
Dude's office was right by the CS departments's offices. I frequently heard far more enthusiastic convos coming from there on my way to see a CS prof. Maybe the secret wasn't showing an interest in the subject, but to be a perky flirtatious student? It's been 19 years; just be glad you remember any calculus and hit comment ... ☹️
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