Analogy vs First principles
First, I'd like to break down my own understanding of the two opposing ideas.
Using analogy typically involves drawing a comparison between two things, for the ultimate purpose of easy explanation and establishing clarity.
Using first principles, however, basically entails boiling a subject matter down to its most basic and or fundamental truths. All assumptions go out the window when going down this route and one seeks to point out only the facts.
Elon Musk
One individual who undeniably epitomizes first principle thinking is Elon Musk. He actually talked about it in an interview. he applied this principle when coming up with Tesla and SpaceX. Before Tesla, the common assumption was that EVs(Electronic Vehicles) were not feasible as production vehicles owing to the high costs of batteries. Musk challenged this assumption by boiling it down to the fundamental truths behind high battery costs. The material constituents of the said batteries were significantly cheaper. As such, he figured, if you buy the components, and assemble the battery yourself, you will have effectively made an EV battery cost up to 7x less than the initial cost.
Analogous Teaching
One experience I had myself was in my freshman year of University. I'm a Computer Science major. As such, a programming fundamentals course was one of my first units. The professor, knowledgeable as he was, had a very abstract method of teaching. The one analogy he used that I can vividly recall was a cup. He used a physical cup while explaining to us, clueless freshmen, what a variable is. He said, "A variable is like this cup. It stores a value." Then he dropped a coin into the cup, to represent the aforementioned value. Everyone in the class seems to have "grasped" the concept, and we moved on with the lecture.
This method of teaching serves one purpose. Memorization. I will be the first to admit, that it is a good analogy. You will remember it in the exam room. When asked to define a variable, you will probably get the question right. But this all begs the question, "to what end?". It is unfortunate that learning has been reduced to a process of facilitating passing a couple of tests. This degradation of the learning process has killed curiosity and by extension, creativity in young learners (I'll explain).
I feel that analogy should be a secondary teaching method such that it should only mildly supplement the fundamental knowledge being transferred. For instance, the professor should have first gone into depth in explaining what a variable is. "It is a memory location used to store a value of a specified data type(integer, character, string, e.t.c). During the compilation of the program, the computer memory(RAM) reserves a sizable location for the storage of the declared variable." This would effectively spark the students' curiosity as to how a low-level program manages to achieve this. As a freshman, one would be motivated to understand all the inner workings of a computer as opposed to how to frame one's answer in the semester's final exams.
I believe analogy establishes poor foundations, which make innovation seem so arduous, that it is almost considered a miracle. With fundamental knowledge in the technological sphere, we will definitely see more innovative ideas, breakthroughs in research, and better-quality programmers (not just framework junkies). It is important to understand what goes on under the hood of any technology. Only then will we be able to improve the said technology or come up with better solutions.
Thanks for reading.