From A Compact History of ?*, by David Foster Wallace

The trouble with college math classes - which classes consist almost entirely in the rhythmic ingestion and regurgitation of abstract information, and are paced in such a way as to maximise this reciprocal data-flow - is that their sheer surface-level difficulty can fool us into thinking we really know something when all we really 'know' is abstract formulas and rules for their deployment. Rarely do math classes ever tell us whether a certain formula is truly significant, or why, or where it came from, or what was at stake. There's clearly a difference between beign able to use a formula correctly and really knowing how to solve a provlem, knowing why a problem is an actual mathematical problem and not just an exercise

* this is an infinity sign, but blogger does not like it.