science

I had wildly different experiences with teachers within my own schools growing up. There was legitimately no standard that valued this kind of nuanced exploration of the world. Just a focus on standardized tests. It was almost entirely on the individual teachers to spend more of their time and effort to go any further than that.

I had some great teachers that made everything interesting and taught us more like the classes I eventually had in college, but I definitely have had more that were like this one math teacher I remember who, when I asked about why we had to do a math problem in a specific way we were learning about, answer something along the lines of “because I say so.”

Maybe I went to bad schools, maybe my country has a dysfunctional education system, but I suspect the matter is widespread because it's way easier to teach factual information rather than dive into the nuances of how confident we are about our explanations.

Some reductive examples: Pluto is / is not a planet, wings work because the path air takes is longer than on the other side, the cause for this war was xyz, you can't subtract below 0 (that's at a very early age of course), this philosopher thought X.

Oh I guess a CRUCIAL one is how most teachers are horribly unfit to answer "Why should I care about this?", but that's beside the point, in a way.