(Snaffled from a friend on FB.)
When I was a middle school science teacher all of the life science texts available to us included a “Lab Manual.” Without fail, every lab manual from major science text publishers walked teachers and students through how to follow a recipe to reword a weak hypothesis, how to follow a poorly written experiment that never accounted for all of the variables, and then how to write vague conclusion built on conjecture from a rubric that told the student how to regurgitate unsupported science verbatim in order to get the most points for the assignment.
As a teacher, I was aware that none of our classroom experiments taught my students how to ask hard questions or how to consider known and unknown variables, or how to isolate those variables. I had a gut feeling that I was really not teaching anything but how to follow the leader. I wrote my own cognitive dissonance off by assuming that these were the in-depth studies that my students would take on later, in more advanced biology classrooms.
As it turns out, biology students by and large never experience any more advanced labs that require them to test the foundational experiments upon which modern biology and medical science are built.
Rockefeller was an incredibly clever bastard.