Allegedly (association) football coaches seventy years ago would make players train without the ball all week, on the grounds that they would be keener to actua

Allegedly (association) football coaches seventy years ago would make players train without the ball all week, on the grounds that they would be keener to actually play football come Saturday. Of course they ended up under-skilled. My point is that one should find the combination of training that gets best results. In my engineering career, successfully solving technical problems has generally consisted of working out what basic techniques solve an approximation of the problem and leaving it at that. I would say first-year undergrad level rather than 8th-grade, but definitely not the most complex mathematics I've ever looked at. Apparently being able to put together any sort of solution from scratch is relatively rare. I do think problem-solving could be better taught. And schoolkids should definitely learn more about finance and statistics. Going on, the OP's stance seems fairly objectionable, but it's hard to disagree that employers use success in maths-heavy degrees as a proxy for selecting who may be best at a technical job. It seems like a fairly good filter, but it probably leads to injustice in certain cases, and the credential-chasing and learning less-necessary things may be inefficient.