[mncharity]

This is a widespread tradeoff. I'd a conversation with a first-tier college biology professor, about a way to give a more integrated, transferable understanding of a topic. He liked it, but observed, my students will shortly be taking the MCAT (high-stakes medical school entrance exam), and our time together is limited, and the MCAT doesn't test for understanding of the topic, only for something superficial and memorizable, so, I would be doing my students a disservice if I reallocated time to understanding.

Perhaps early primary school is an opportunity to escape this tension. With weaker test constraints, and more years of payoffs over which to amortize the costs of better understanding.

[kiba]

My understanding of learning is that it both takes a longer time to actually learn something useful and that we're inefficient in learning or retaining anything because we rushed from one topic to another in our courses.