We see something that works, and then we understand it

Most of the things we see have already been understood by someone. I share the author's frustration with academia, but on the other end of the spectrum the industry also has a bias towards building theoretical foundations from scratch, for things that already have them.

The version I was always taught was that science is a mix of the two approaches: first seeing, then understanding; and first understanding, then seeing. So for example, a lot of the discovery of electricity was hands-on, and the understanding and theory came later, but on the other hand relativity was pure Gedankenexperiment and mathematical theory that only later turned out to make sense of physical observations.

In my experience, this is true at work as well. Sometimes I just need to try stuff out to understand a problem - thinking too hard at the start will not produce better results, and I'll end up with a lot of junk that I then need to forget or delete. But other times, if I stop before trying to implement something and build out the theory first, then the result will be a lot simpler than if I just start writing.

An example of the letter case from work: we recently wanted to give the user the ability to revert their work back to any previous point in the undo history and continue from there, even if that point was no longer reachable by using the "undo"/"redo" keys (essentially a kind of branching history system). The three of us working on this all had slightly different mental models of how this should work, and all were flawed in different ways - either too complicated, or missing edge cases, or both. Then we stood at a whiteboard for a few hours arguing about the different approaches and drawing different cases out and analysing them, and in the end we were able to build a version that was simpler than anything we'd previously thought of, but also much more robust.

So "thinkism" can definitely work when used at the right times, even if it's not the only approach.

(Also, I'm fairly sure, pedagogically, exams should include questions that push the student to apply knowledge in new, previously unseen contexts, or use combine it with knowledge they should have from elsewhere - that's the "synthesis"/"creation" end of Bloom's taxonomy of understanding. That said, I've not studied pedagogy myself, I'm just remembering what teacher friends have told me before.)

A little tangential, but this for some reason reminded me of Pirsig's description of how science really works in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

As a teacher, I can tell you that students get really angry if you put a question on an exam that requires a concept not explicitly covered in class.

I suspect OP might be a deeply unreasonable person.