I disagree. The biggest thing that can help you learn something complex is by introducing it as it was discovered, and making someone feel like they could have come up with it on their own.
As a concrete example, if someone asks “how do we know the Earth is round” or “how do we know the planets orbit the sun”, one could go through ways to figure this out with math and minimal technology. But one could also point out that we have spaceships and probes and have actual pictures! You can see the Earth from a satellite or the ISS or the moon, and you can see the planets from space!
I agree that a process of rediscovery can be a useful teaching technique, but that doesn’t mean that rediscovering something the way it was first known to have been discovered is the right approach.
It would be trivial to skip the historical story and just "yo here's a FET transistor, a solar cell, and a vacuum tube, and the math just works, so get used to it" but nobody is ever taught that way.
Would be interesting for someone to attempt to write a non-historical physics textbook.
On the other hand, in IT, this style of learning is considered normal. "This is how the kool kids do things today. The past does not matter and probably didn't exist anyway. The end."
I recall some prominent physicist saying they've never read Einstein's original papers on relativity; and they don't have any real desire to, since we understand it much better now, and have better examples, notations, etc.
* “here’s what the computer came up with” doesn’t really build as much intuition as doing the equations out by hand
* there’s enough material in “how to plug it into a computer and make it run quickly” for a whole degree
And yet nand2tetris is one of the most common suggestions for people who actually want to figure out how computers work. Because you actually are posed with problems that real world engineers used to struggle with, and are allowed to play with the problem before finding out the answer. It builds a much deeper understanding than "it works like this because it is"
The history is useful there, I think. First off, it is motivating — that’s a pretty big question, really shows what math can accomplish without much hardware. Second, it provides some sort of useful constraints if you are trying to work out the computation yourself. In a textbook the problems are always a bit artificial, some info will be given, some hidden. “Anything an Ancient Greek would have” is a bit more real-world, you can see where the constraints come from.
He's also famous for the sieve of Erastosthenes for finding prime numbers and figuring out the earth's axial tilt.
But in philosophy, students do read everyone from Plato to Rawls in the original. There are (lots of) supplementary texts, of course, but they're companions.
I think that shows an interesting divide that the way we actually think about philosophy is not just a catalogue of arguments and positions one could take, but that the famous works are things worth reading unto themselves. There are a few math papers like that ("God Created the Integers" tries to anthologize them) but they are the exception rather than the rule.
But maybe there's another explanation?
1. Being able to tease apart language from ideas can't be 'taught' you have to do it
2. People disagree much more in philosophy than math
To know this gives us some perspective on our own biases/limitations and not take things as gospel.
This is sometimes prescribed in such form as: "Fraction X of your reading should be of authors writing at least 100 years ago."
Similar: In defense of the reading of old books by C.S. Lewis ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFHQDIE7CSw
"All contemporary writers [of any period] share, to some extent, the contemporary outlook."
While calculus is actually easy to develop and motivate, the way we "discover" it today is nowhere close to how it was originally discovered.
In my opinion, calculus is most easily motivated via physical examples. Here is a curve, it represents some information, and what are some things we'd like to know about this curve and thus the information it represents? What are some things we can do with that information? Such motivation can be more abstract and not rely on physical examples, but I think the physical examples help tie it to the so-called real world and somewhat mirrors, in spirit, how and why calculus was originally developed.