I hope I’m answering the question. I guess what I think I “get,” or what I seem to explain all the time to people who don’t really understand what I mean— is:

Much education is about the process and not the content.

By that I mean, I’m always asked why my students study Jane Austen, or what good writing papers on Shakespeare or Huxley does for anyone’s future career. What is English literature for in the workplace? My answer is that, just as we don’t lift barbells in a gym so that we can someday lift barbells in the street, the skills are often what count. My students are learning to think about complex human ideas, reason out theories and explanations, and communicate them to others. The literature is important (and some will become teachers of it), but much of it is a means to an end.

I think about this whenever I encounter people online snarking and griping about how useless taking trigonometry was in high school. A few people do use trigonometry. But largely, you were learning a rigor and discipline—to reason out difficult abstract relationships with numbers and concepts. I wish I’d seen that and valued that more when I was taking math then.