It wasn't "learn these theories" or "learn these facts."
It was structured as given a few facts, what's a good theory to handle them?
Now, here are more facts, more data. Does our theory work? Can it be saved reasonably? What handles the facts? Got a new or revised theory that works now? Wonderful.
Here are more data. How does your wonderful theory work? Can you save it? Fix it? Replace it? Got a brand new wonderful theory? Stupendous.
Here are more data. (Surprise, it's the midterm!) Fix your theory. (Yes, it's your midterm grade.)
There was protest, and he read them the opening paragraph of the syllabus: It was to teach them how to take data and develop conceptual structures for understanding them and making testable predictions. So this entire theorize/find data/theorize cycle continued through the rest of the fall semester. Before the final it was pure rebellion. Students, almost all the undergrads, demanded that the final *not* be like the midterm. Just test them over what was taught. The professor guaranteed that's what the final would be. He would test them just over what was taught.
Students were mostly shell-shocked when they walked in. "Here's a 1 page summary of where our theory stood last day of class. #1. Here are data. Fix the theory. #2. Okay, here are *more* data--revise your theory or say why you don't need to." Etc. (Most of the grad students smiled. Some laughed--schadenfreude.)
They said he lied. He said he didn't. He wasn't there to teach them data. He wasn't there to teach them a theory.
He was there to teach them how to think, produce testable hypotheses, test hypotheses, revise hypotheses, and decide when to chuck hypotheses and start over. He'd trashed theories that handled any data and weren't falsifiable; he trashed theories that got ever more elaborate and complicated, with exceptions and all kinds of tricks to handle additional data; he trashed theories that simply said the data must be wrong or there must be other data that makes it all okay.
Next term there was one class of 20 or 25 instead of two classes of 60. With 20% of the students he could finally really get down to brass tacks--no headwinds, he could teach.
Relevance? In February and March people devised a hypothesis on how to stop this plague in the US. It was elevated to the status of absolute truth.
People now know about the prevalence of asymptomatic (and presymptomatic) transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It pretty much either required herculean efforts and conditions that the US would not have accepted in mid *January* or it demolishes the hypothesis that was formed a couple of months ago.
People now hold two incompatible, self-contradictory views: Look how it spreads! From elsewhere, we know it was circulating in January. And, even though it spreads this way and makes these containment methods impossible, we are sufficiently faithful to our catechism (because we need to believe) that had the US done these things in mid-late February we would be safe now--and not only would none of us be sick, but somehow the rest of the world would have been safe.
Given new data, they can't go back and figure out that their hypothesis even needs fixing, much less bring themselves to fix it.
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