>"Generally, school doesn't teach practical things, it teaches the fundamentals for learning practical things later."
This is a common belief, but it unfortunately doesn't work that way. "Transfer of learning" as it is known in educational psychology, (similar to 'learning how to learn',) is basically a failure. People have been studying it for over 50 years, and it turns out that students are very bad at taking things they learn in one class, and applying it in another.[1]
I don't think parent comment was talking about transfer learning but prerequisite knowledge: arithmetic, algebra, series manipulation, logarithms, etc.
An example of transfer of learning would be where you learn some mathematical principle, then apply it in an adjacent field, such as finance or physics. The parent comment was relying on the assumption that this works (well), and it doesn't.
This is a common belief, but it unfortunately doesn't work that way. "Transfer of learning" as it is known in educational psychology, (similar to 'learning how to learn',) is basically a failure. People have been studying it for over 50 years, and it turns out that students are very bad at taking things they learn in one class, and applying it in another.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education