> why schools don’t teach systematic debugging. It’s one of the most fundamental skills
And herein lies Dan Luu's fundamental misconception: that universities see themselves as places where students come to learn skills, i.e. as places of certification producing skilled workers for industry. Most universities see themselves as academic places of learning for the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake, which only incidentally graduates people whom industry happens to find their knowledge at least somewhat useful. If the university professor never needed to debug, use version control, or write clean designs in order to succeed in academia - why should he consider it worthy of being taught? If the university professor never benefitted from remedial review on his academic path towards becoming a professor, why should he consider it worth his time? Of course he's going to dismiss the notion to the tone of "some people just can't hack it in engineering." It's academic survival bias.
People talk about the STEM pipeline like some kind of demigod figure designed it from on high specifically with the intent of producing skilled technical workers, albeit with various flaws related to sexism and skill relevance etc. Of course, this is a ridiculous way of looking at the STEM pipeline, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that different actors in the pipeline have contrary motivations.
I respectfully disagree with your argument in relation to this article.
Dan Luu is describing a method that would help people achieve a better success in their exams and classes, he's not even pointing their usefulness in the workplace. Therefore, your point about him thinking that universities are here to produce skilled workers is a strawman.
His point is that university is here to produce/teach knowledge. Skills should be learned elsewhere, e.g. in schools prior to that. The university's official language is also a skill that is very important to the student's success, but the university is not responsible to teach this language skill. You must have it to enter university.
Then I bieleve the argument still stands. Universities would teach knowledge better if they spent a comparatively tiny amount of time teaching appropriate skills, as it would get students ready to learn.
The author demonstrated this point by showing how his classes could help students learn better.
We can then debate about whether having successful students is a positive thing to have for universities, but Dan Luu clearly seems to think it is.
That's a valid additional point. I'd also say that they should at least offer optional courses with skills. That also applies to language. While universities don't offer a major in English speaking/writing, many have opportunities for second language learners to improve their English skills.
Debugging is useful even from a merely academic perspective if engineering is an academic discipline (I think it is). Reality pushes up against you, so you figure out what it's doing by looking at what happens and guessing at what might have caused it. You aren't circumscribed by your model (as you are in a purely mathematical simplification; consider the inutility of Navier-Stokes for many engineering applications) when the 'bug' is smacking you in the face. This isn't just Popperian falsifiability; it's also just (more fundamentally) abduction.
The article doesn't press this point very hard, but I take the central argument to be in favor of 'systematically approach[ing] problems [of the sort that debugging instantiates]' which is just as much 'academy' as 'industry'.
And herein lies Dan Luu's fundamental misconception: that universities see themselves as places where students come to learn skills, i.e. as places of certification producing skilled workers for industry. Most universities see themselves as academic places of learning for the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake, which only incidentally graduates people whom industry happens to find their knowledge at least somewhat useful. If the university professor never needed to debug, use version control, or write clean designs in order to succeed in academia - why should he consider it worthy of being taught? If the university professor never benefitted from remedial review on his academic path towards becoming a professor, why should he consider it worth his time? Of course he's going to dismiss the notion to the tone of "some people just can't hack it in engineering." It's academic survival bias.
People talk about the STEM pipeline like some kind of demigod figure designed it from on high specifically with the intent of producing skilled technical workers, albeit with various flaws related to sexism and skill relevance etc. Of course, this is a ridiculous way of looking at the STEM pipeline, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that different actors in the pipeline have contrary motivations.