Isn't that something we learn in K-12?

I was writing my husband an email this morning--I talk to him frequently about teaching issues--and was musing on the difficulty some of my students have had understanding certain elements of persuasive writing. In particular, it strikes me as funny that the information I am teaching is almost as new to me as it is to them, so I'm copying what I wrote him below (lightly tweaked, of course):

This demonstrates to me what an education truly does. In four years of private undergraduate education and two years of Ivy League schooling, not ONCE was I taught argumentative structures, or any kind of persuasive writing whatsoever. [In college I skipped out of freshman English because of AP credits, and in grad school I took only one course that required a final paper from me (all others were creative). Yet, I have a job teaching a course that I never took myself, and, in fact, never formally learned.]

In teaching this material to my students, I'm only a few days ahead of them--I read the textbook, learn the information myself, and teach it back within 48 hours. [And while that is a bit embarrassing to admit, the truth is that I know my shit, and believe I teach it well.]

Why does it work this way? Because those six years of education taught me how to learn. The specifics of the content of those six years are generally irrelevant, but because I went through it, I know how to be a student; I know how to read; I know how to interpret, analyze, synthesize, rephrase, and rethink. Which means I pick up just about any material 20 times faster than my sophomores.

Okay, perhaps my class prep is a bit reckless, and certainly I don't have this problem with courses I have taught more than once. But otherwise--don't we often complain that our students' problems are that they "don't know how to be students"? If only they understood that I don't assign them readings because the content will matter to them years down the road, but because the skills they acquire in doing the readings will matter, oh, FOREVER. It's not like we ever stop learning--even in the corporate world, there are certifications and training! The ability to learn seems a rather important idea that perhaps students never really realize..