You are correct however, but it's more understanable than you make out.
Rather, the education system is designed to impart the skill of information recall -- which was essential to actually acquiring the target skills (ie., you needed to remember lots about chemistry before doing any). Remembering sentences about a skill has no relationship to being able to do it, only, that as you're learning to do it, those will be an aid.
That hasnt been true for less than 20 years, perhaps 10 with the prevalence of smart phones in 2007.
The whole system is set up to impart the skill of recall and grade according to your ability to recall. There is a implicit general awareness that you're actually not aquiring the target skills.
eg., after 5-7 years of french in the UK, no 18 year old can speak french. And so on for every subject.
The same is true all the way up until PhD. It's our historical model of what education was for: giving you the library up-front.
The skills were to be obtained in employment, and with any self-motivated practice.
Today that is painfully ridiculous, and there's really almost no value in it. Leaving the warehousing, grading and certifying functions of educational institutions their only apparent use.
PS. There's an argument to say education hasn't needed to be this way since the advent of public libraries, cheap books, which is still late 20th C. This is plausible enough too. Our template of education is still basically a mix of medieval and Victorian, with the presumption that books are hard to obtain or difficult to survey oneself.
note that primary/elementary schooling isnt set up this way: it is deliberately skilling. This makes it very effective and very important.
