Content vs. process

“Give a person a fish, and you feed them for a day.
Teach a person to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime.”

Could this Chinese proverb be adapted for our own purposes?

Teach a person content and they’ll learn whatever you want them to learn.
Give a person the skills and they’ll learn whatever they want to learn (across their lifetime).

Or put another way:

“If you give me an idea, I’ll think about it today. If you give me a platform for ideas, I’ll create my own ideas throughout my life.”

In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire critically referred to education as akin to banking: the students are empty vessels just waiting for deposits from their teachers. What do you make of this idea? How much of what you have formally learned has been content-based vs skill-based? Can you become self-motivated and self-reliant, learning independently and autonomously? Would it be useful for you to explore the skills, the tools and the attributes that can help us to learn how to learn (for ourselves) rather than simply rely on existing content to do all the work?