[OliverJones]

In my time as a biochem undergrad and grad student, I had to memorize and regurgitate the Krebs cycle no less than four times. None of those romps through it addressed the question of how TF did those scientists figure it out.

There's the science of Karl Popper, where no statement can be considered scientific unless it is possible to devise an experiment to disprove it. And there's the science of education, where we memorize and regurgitate stuff.

Those two are stunningly different from each other. Yet, it's not possible to get to the mysterious work of actually doing Popper-level science without memorizing what went before. The critiques of this paper still ring true half a century on. I wish more students of science from primary school on up would pester their teachers and each other with the question, "how do you know?"

[jessriedel]

I sort of agree, but compared to just learning the Krebs cycle it takes orders of magnitude more time to understand either (a) the actual historical discovery/justification or (b) a modern streamlined justification that would allow one in principle to reconstruct it. It's already very challenging to teach biology students as much as they need to know without justifications. For them to be able to justify all they know would dramatically reduce how much they could be taught. And indeed, the desire by teachers that their students should know the justifications has often led to the actual history being so grossly compressed and caricaturized that it's downright misleading -- worse than not knowing.

It seems the best we can hope for is to mostly just learn the known facts and, separately, the abstract way in which scientific theories are justified, augmented by a close analysis and understanding of a few case studies. Even that if of course rarely achieved in education.

Incidentally, folks in this thread may be interested in "Proofs and Refutations" by Imre Lakatos, where it's shown how this same issue is (surprisingly) found to exist almost as badly in academic mathematics, despite math being thought of as one of the few places where the experts learn how to the edifice is built from the ground up.