[wisty]

They were complaining about a weed-out class being a weed-out class. The students wanted to get into an extremely prestigious career. Weed-out courses exist because there's a limited number of prestigious spots, or because most students need the pressure to work harder. It would make sense if she then explained that we should make medicine less prestigious (letting far more students become doctors) but that wasn't the point.

The point was that learning the fundamentals was prioritised, instead of "deep learning". However there's a ton of research that suggests that in many cases, learning the fundamentals is one of the best ways to get students to start the process of deep learning. Obviously there's a point where overtraining the fundamentals is no longer a good thing (e.g. trying to memorise every possible edge case and combination) but that's a rare edge case. In most cases, simply getting the grips with the basics quickly, then thinking for yourself (e.g. looking at hard cases rather than asking how someone can teach you how to think at a higher level) is what works.

Education has a long-running holy war between implicit vs. explicit instruction (though "implicit instruction" has a lot of name changes as it always seems to lose credibility and need rebranding). Saying "we need to stop teaching students what to think, but how to think" isn't deep, it's a cliché, and it needs a lot more than vague criticisms of explicit instruction to be worth listening to.

Probably the worst thing about the "deep learning" crowd is that so many of them are in medicine, where it kind of works. You can teach medical students badly, and they'll figure things out. Giving them more independence and teaching badly (while pretending to be wise) can perversely work, in some ways, for medical students who've survived the weed-out classes. But then a few academic studies on how to teach medical students better (apparently they haven't yet learnt how to learn, or how to think critically?) is then used to convince politicians, education academics, and other people who understand little about teaching that it's the best way to teach reading in underprivileged elementary schools.

[CobaltFire]

In the military we train this as being “brilliant on the basics” with the follow on, as you said, that it is the way to train an adaptable and competent professional who works in high stress situations.