The equivalent of the science class in the article would be a team that relentlessly trained basic skills -- doing movement drills, layup drills, passing drills

The equivalent of the science class in the article would be a team that relentlessly trained basic skills -- doing movement drills, layup drills, passing drills, shooting drills, and free-throw drills all day -- without ever talking about teamwork or doing 5-on-5 scrimmages. (Kids trained that way would beat the hell out of kids who had a well-rounded theoretical background in Xs and Os but who never spent hours in the gym shooting baskets.) In other words, the science class in the article taught basic mechanical skills but didn't teach the higher-order thinking required to apply them. The dippy liberal (i.e., orthodox) approach is to try to teach kids the higher-order thinking needed to apply the basic skills without actually teaching them the basic skills. Between the two, I prefer erring on the side of basic mechanical skills. Shallow, mechanical understanding is easier and comes first. You can't do higher-order thinking on concepts that you never understood in the first place. Plus, I'm pretty sure that higher-order thinking is best developed by application to lower-level problems. Higher-order thinking is thinking about lower-level problems -- abstracting ideas from them and applying abstract ideas to them. Without any lower-level problems or skills, you can't actually practice higher-level thinking. You can only talk about it, which isn't the same thing. And actually, when I said the science class in the article didn't teach the higher-order thinking required to apply the basic skills, I wasn't being fair. Standardized tests have come a long way, and they do require kids to analyze problems, decide what physical principles and equations to apply, and apply them successfully. Teaching to the test isn't nearly as bad as it used to be. The tests are designed to make "teaching to the test" as similar as possible to ideal teaching, without allowing slick-talking idiots to BS their way through. The conservative approach (I hate to call it that, but credit where credit is due) may produce overconfident kids with narrow skills, but the liberal approach gives you kids who are demoralized by their inability to solve simple test problems and who don't really believe (or worse, do believe) their teachers' reassurances that they have a deep, ineffable, unmeasurable understanding of subjects that they can't pass basic tests in.