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We stopped making students memorize anything and called it enlightenment
We have spent decades treating memorization as a mild form of abuse, and the result is students who cannot recite a single poem, place a river on a map, or give a date without reaching for a device. Memory is not the enemy of understanding. It is the raw material of it. One cannot think carefully about a subject that must be looked up before every sentence, any more than one can argue about a book one has not read. The pendulum will swing back, as pendulums do. It will simply cost US a generation of very confident, very empty essays first.5