>I don't know how you think that school systems, especially in the west, place more emphasis on "how" than "why".

I've taught people at college level, and have seen way too many cases of people knowing how to perform the steps to, say, solve an equation, find a derivative or take an integral without understanding what the operations actually mean, or why bother with all this stuff in the first place.

It's not the students' fault; the concerns I am trying to voice have been articulated by many over the recent years, and are best summed up here: https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....