really nice thoughts, esp. about teaching and discoveries "marvinminsky said [...] that the best way to teach programming was to start by showing people good code"
that's in general one of three ways to learn: observe and immitate, trial and error, understand or repeat. That's the scientific method in a nutshell. Works small scale as well as bleeding edge. Understanding is kind of an elusive word for the exit condition of the recursion, tho. At some point where there is no way for repition, understanding means memorization of facts, sometimes insight is the epiphany that one went down the wrong road.