[iamatworknow]

>I think we have a larger problem where our education system is laser focused on "knowledge" and often abjectly refuses to teach anything that can be called a "skill".

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, especially in the context of news media. As an American public school millennial I distinctly remember covering the term "yellow journalism" in social studies classes in multiple years. But the moral I always took from those lessons was "Back in the past, like at the time of the Spanish-American war, the news media fudged the facts to push their own agenda". Yellow journalism was just a vocabulary term used for something that happened a long time ago. We weren't taught to apply the lessons to our modern lives, which would've been infinitely more valuable than memorizing flash cards. I can't help but think that the whole fake news thing would've been much less of a surprise to people of my generation had a bit more time been spent on learning applicable lessons using history as a context, and not just remembering trivia.

Likewise when we had research projects or essays to write, it was just as you said -- a fill in the blanks exercise. If you found a book in the library that had something relevant you could reference, well, it was a book in the library, so it was obviously true, right? You're going through the motions but you're not thinking for yourself. I didn't get a real introduction into how to actually do research until my first year of college.