[sitkack]

> Beginners often lack the experience to appreciate "critical thinking" based learning.

I don't think that is it. _Beginners_ being the critical word.

Most learning is part of a negative feedback loop, if we only ever succeeded we wouldn't know why we succeeded, failure has such bad connotations in our society that it blinds students from deeply understanding a subject. Maybe replace it with experience?

Back to the subject of _Beginners_, we really should be teaching students from a very young age, philosophy, cognitive science, and epistemology. They should embrace experience, it shouldn't be up to the database schema instructor to teach both data modeling and learning by failure. Students should be fully versed in how to care and feed their brains by the time they arrive in the GPs class.

[dspillett]

Generally yes, the general learning and problem solving mindset is going to help more than teaching "do this to do that" by rote.

But in any specific subject you need a certain level a basic knowledge taught that way before you can be expected to use the tools available (and potentially discover more) to problem solve.

[sitkack]

I should have been more clear. My conjecture is that if we trained students on learning theory specifically and directly, they would understand the "suffering and pointlessness" of duplicating failed solutions. They would more openly embrace experience (failure) as necessary didactic tool.

Destigmatize not #winning and embracing experiential learning.