I've followed all these debates about what we should focus on in education for a long time, and I agree that we should avoid teaching so extremely many specific techniques and instead should focus on broader understanding.

But the way statistics is treated in academia sadly doesn't really accomplish that. In the majority of courses there is not much understanding involved. It's a lot of "here's a formula and a couple technical terms" and nothing beyond that. I often get the feeling that the lecturers never learned to explain that either. Why is standard deviation the way it is? To most, there is no explanation, they are merely given a formula to memorise. That doesn't teach them anything for the long run. Formula goes in, test is written, formula is forgotten.

Weirdly, I've heard some philosophers (who usually suck at that sort of advice) make a much better point. And that is to put the core focus on communication and comprehension. A huge part of the daily struggles in education is that the students neither understand what is presented to them, nor can formulate what they do not understand. It's the communication skills that are lacking to advance any further. So from there on they cling to the portions that are easy to memorise without understanding their meaning, or they keep asking around/googling until they find an explanation that makes sense to them because they couldn't comprehend the original source.

Other than that, all subjects should look to develop a much stronger reference to practical application. We can all learn addition and subtraction because it's presented to us in a way that we can practically relate to. Higher maths like calculus suddenly becomes a lot more comprehensible as well when connected to something everyone can relate to, such as the relation of position, speed, and acceleration. But when it's just some garbled salad of variables and numbers with no meaning attached, only there to learn the techniques of calculus, nothing sticks with the students and is a largely wasted effort.