I think this is a side-effect of the way our educational system is structured. We rely on big, standard tests to evaluate schools and their students. It would

I think this is a side-effect of the way our educational system is structured. We rely on big, standard tests to evaluate schools and their students. It would be too expensive, and somewhat subjective, to evaluate students' reasoning abilities, their conceptual knowledge. Can you imagine if these tests were evaluated by rooms full of people reading proofs, rather than by bubble-sheet scanners? So we test what we can test, which is procedural knowledge, and we teach that at the expense of deeper understanding. And because the best way of measuring procedural knowledge is to measure how many procedures you know, we race students forward to as much calculus as they can memorize.