What I want is for people to be able to learn whatever they want, efficiently, without wasting years on it.
I was never a top student
Genuinely never. Though I wanted to be, like the friends who got into the selective schools and the scholarship classes and came top of the year.
At secondary school I was regarded as fairly difficult, because I would not copy things down. If a lesson did not interest me, I got out the work for a subject I did like and did that instead.
That refusal was not because I disliked studying, or disliked the teacher. It was because the activity in front of me genuinely did not work, and the time spent on it was largely wasted.
But I understand what learning can do
I understand very clearly how learning can rearrange somebody's entire life.
And I understand equally clearly that knowledge sitting in your head does nothing at all. It has to be usable, applied to help someone, before it creates any value or changes anything.
It is not a choice between two things
Learning has to aim at understanding something properly and being able to apply it. Not one or the other.
One camp says doing is what counts and the theory is unnecessary. Another says you need the theory solid before you can apply anything.
Why not have both?