I remember sitting a science exam and being presented with a partially labelled diagram of a blast furnace.

The first task was to fill in the rest of the labels, the second task was to write an explanation.

This was easy, because I had been presented this exact fucking diagram barely a month ago and told exactly what it was and how it worked. I was told everything about it.

I didn't have to understand anything. All I had to do was remember what I'd been told. A real science education would not have drilled the workings of this particular style of furnace into me. A real science education would have drilled into me the essential physical properties of the materials going into it. If I had known this, I could have answered this question for any design of furnace, not just this one that I'd been familiarized with.

The result is that I have a basic, shallow understanding of how a blast furnace works, but I don't really know the melting point of iron, the energy density of coal, or anything else that would give a me a deeper understanding of what is truly going on.