[strictfp]

I believe that this type of crisis ultimately hits everyone with an analytical mind, given the current school system. That is at least the conclusion that I've drawn from my similar experiences. The urge to understand is not catered for in school. Questions and discussions are not encouraged. Instead, you are supposed to succumb and absorb enourmous amounts of information as fact. First after doing this, you are allowed to form your own opinions. A clear bottom-up approach.

This does not work well for an analytical mind, and as I see it there are very few choices for us who prefer top-down. I feel that the hacker community is one place which caters for us, given the unrestricted access to information on all levels. But in school there is usually very little you can do except be quiet and take notes, like a robot.

The consequence is that top-down analytical minds have a tendency to skip studies and ultimately hit this crisis. And because bottom-up people eventually will start to draw conclusions from their fact bases and gain the ability to reason, you will be outsmarted.

The real fix for this in my mind is to start catering for the top-downs, with more focus on how disciplines interrelate, their background and history, and less focus on direct facts and methods.