If memorization is so useless, explain to me how one studies history without memorizing thousands of facts. Or a foreign language without memorizing thousands of words. Or math without hundreds of rules and conventions.

Yes, you do want to progress further and learn the way those different things you memorized work together, but you can't put things together in your mind if they are not in your mind to put together.

Education is fundamentally voluntary and a student can memorize all this stuff just to pass a test, and not care about it later. If you want to argue this is why we shouldn't mandate school, fine.

But as long as we're mandating students go to school, we may as well check that their schools provided the opportunity to learn something.

Most people memorize the times tables. I discovered that there was a rule to them, which was much less work to learn.

At Caltech, tests were open book and open note. Memorizing facts and strategies would do you no good at all.

I didn't see any point to those methods, anyway, as I went to college to learn the material, and when I learned it, I did well on the tests.