While anyone with a (good) STEM education knows this to be obviously true, its frightening how many people go through 16+ years of formal schooling where they mostly do rote memorization and regurgitation.
We measure students with tests, but all we get are people good at taking tests and rote memorization.
Maybe if we had a better way to access actual learning but are teachers even paid enough to truly care?
In many other disciplines applying what students learned to things they’ve never seen before isn’t really possible.
For example, you can teach students what factors were needed to start the Industrial Revolution and why, but then, to answer “why didn’t the Industrial Revolution start in the 1750s in South America?” students would have to know about South America in the 1750s. If they don’t, all they can answer is “it must be because not all of the prerequisites foo, bar, baz, … were available, but I wouldn’t know which one(s)”.
Because of that, that question isn’t better than the dull “why did the Industrial Revolution start where and when it started?”, the answer to which can be learned by rote learning.
There's no incentive to pay teachers more; system is working as designed. Those students aren't giving short-term quarterly gains.
That's how most education is structure, though. Unless your point is simply that, though it reads as if you're blaming the student.
Of course any non-STEM field has geniuses, but our impressions—like the parent’s—are formed from averages, and STEM majors are smarter on avg.