> education as an area is incredibly cargo cult-filled
The terrifying thing is that nearly every field (including, eg, medicine) is like this. Once there's a system in place that mostly kinda works, people are extremely reluctant to make any serious changes.
Since the future of people is at stake I find healthy to be "extremely reluctant to make any serious changes".
Making small changes over the years is the right thing to do unless you want to play the mad scientist with other people's lives. Of course do not change anything at all is bad, but the "serious change" approach is frightening, or at least should be.
The terrifying thing is that nearly every field (including, eg, medicine) is like this. Once there's a system in place that mostly kinda works, people are extremely reluctant to make any serious changes.