Specifically, I think teaching k-12 is an occupation that requires a great deal of knowledge acquired via route memorization.
Anecdotally, my third grade teacher didn't understand long division, my eighth grade history teacher didn't know what an annotated bibliography was, and my 9th grade geometry teacher was debilitatingly dyslexic. While this didn't kill me, millions of Americans graduating college are crippled by debt - perhaps because they couldn't do the simple math required to make a budget and understand what would be required to pay it back?
My experience is that it's not a problem when a teacher doesn't know some particular fact from memory as long as he can say "I'll get back to you on that," and subsequently go and look it up.
I suspect the people falling into the college debt trap are by and large not doing so because they couldn't do the math. I suspect they are doing so because they didn't realize in the first place that they should make the decision with the part of their brain that does math calculations rather than the part that does social status calculations.
Anecdotally, my third grade teacher didn't understand long division, my eighth grade history teacher didn't know what an annotated bibliography was, and my 9th grade geometry teacher was debilitatingly dyslexic. While this didn't kill me, millions of Americans graduating college are crippled by debt - perhaps because they couldn't do the simple math required to make a budget and understand what would be required to pay it back?