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No offense intended towards people with learning disabilities, I went with moron instead of a dumbfuck, please read it as whatever you find most insulting to the average person, but not insulting to people of the class I unintentionally insulted.
This is where those extra grammar and communication classes would have helped me.
The point was to distinguish between rote learning versus reasoning. In an extreme rote-learning world a person would only understand those things that they have seen before and through repeated personal experience know the answers to any problem that might arise.
A person with reasoning can apply assumptions to situations they have not encountered before and can arrive at the same solutions without exhaustive personal experience. They can also manipulate these sets of assumptions to come up with new assumptions that are logically consistent with the set, so they can project their knowledge to situations that they have not even encountered yet.
Higher math teaches people to think at a level where rote-learning becomes less and less practical. You cannot memorize every possible long division, so you learn the process of dividing the problem into a subset that is solvable. You learn to prove something so you can solve entire classes of problems without having to perform a manual test on all inputs (I deal with problems that are too large to test all possibilities, so if I didn't use mathematical processes to verify my work I'd be out of luck).
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