Hard-wiring the fundamentals is also the way Korean go players (go is an oriental board game, you maybe saw it in "A beautiful mind", "Pi" and some other movies, or read about it in Kawabata's "The Master of Go") develop their skills. And they have passed from "amateurs" to dominate the pro levels. Now China and Japan are starting to teach in the same way to their prodigies.
There's a book currently on my wish-list called "Why Children Hate School", about a cognitive psychologist's take on education. He strongly stresses how important it is to drill fundamentals. The human brain is terrible at doing things it hasn't practised, and tends to avoid doing things that it doesn't know how to do. That's why people switch off when you talk about statistical significance - their brains don't remember statistics so they go to sleep instead of thinking. The path of least resistance is always ignoring things, unless you already know 80% (made up number) of what's being said.
DI is better than more appetising methods (i.e. ones that teachers think they would enjoy learning in), because it drills fundamentals, but I think that better methods could be built using cognitive principles.
Musicians stress practising scales, martial artists practice basic techniques, programmers practice Fizzbuzz every damn time someone links to that article, and everyone practices speaking in front of the mirror. But school-kids don't practice learning.
People tend to be pretty good at this anyway, especially if your education system has enough drill work in class that you can reduce the amount of homework kids do.
Creative, open-ended homework is a huge time-sink.
>That's why people switch off when you talk about statistical significance - their brains don't remember statistics so they go to sleep instead of thinking.
That's why it's important to know something of whom you address¹. "Do you follow me?", then give a review, simplification or expansion based on the response.
Your previous description of DI sounds like brain washing intended to wipe out individual identity and sounds as if it makes no effort to consider individual abilities or characters at all?
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1 - that's probably bad grammar, I was never taught grammar
As a guitar learner, I can't stress enough how boring scales are... But they are fundamentals. Unless you know them better than your hand, you can't play safely.
