"School is about the advanced stuff, not the basics" is the call of good students, often ones who learnt the basics from their parents. It's also kind of popula

"School is about the advanced stuff, not the basics" is the call of good students, often ones who learnt the basics from their parents. It's also kind of popular with bad students, who think that they might suck at the basics but have untapped powers if they were doing something else. It's nice, vague, and populist. Everything thinks they know how to do critical thinking. Everyone thinks they know how it could be taught. I suspect most people think that they have above average critical thinking skills. As long as they don't have to agree on how or what critical thinking is, everyone can agree it's a good thing. The other one that's dumb is "you learn best when you teach yourself". Sure, if you are really super-interested in something then you learn better, and tend to teach yourself a bit, but correlation is not causation.