That’s not education. Most of it is simple memorization.
My response to that would be "for real critical thinking, you need memorization as a starting point. You can't think critically about the politics of the Middle East until you can point to Israel and Gaza on a map!"
Who's right? Are memorization and critical thinking complements, or substitutes?
This might have different answers in different fields. Like in maths, can you learn more advanced maths without a deep intuitive familiarity with numbers, the kind you get from being able to do arithmetic in your head? What about history? Can you get by without dates?
Not true IMHO. You can map it to a some sort of neighbouring countries graph and a few other facts.
So the opposite of irrelevant. You need 10 minutes before you can start to think about the question that was likely a premise for a larger argument.
"To be a surgeon, knowing surgery techniques from memory is irrelevant. When called upon to do surgery, I can simply leave, attend medical school, then come back and do the surgery. What's really important is knowing where the medical school is located."
The claim was "you need memorization as a starting point". And that's the part I disagree with. Ability - it's irrelevant. Speed of doing it in specific cases - relevant.
Today I can tell you that 7 x 7 = 49 but back then I'd have just gone 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49 quickly and said "49" for the same answer but a slight delay.
Parents who were taught times tables and didn't do much later mathematics are often confused by the way we teach kids today, because they expect we'd try to cram the tables in there, but that's not actually useful, what's useful is seeing the pattern and we'd prefer a child who maybe doesn't know off by heart what 9x8 is but sees the pattern, and whose first question when the teacher finally explains exponentiation and shows how it relates to multiplication, is, "Does this keep going forever?" which yes, it does, there are more hyperoperations and they do keep going like this forever. That child understood the pattern, 9x8 is a problem a calculator can solve, understanding the pattern is something else.
Dates are only important as they relate to each other, their specifics are almost always meaningless.
There's a difference between rote memorization and committing to memory through practice.
I mean, there is still some rote memorization needed at times, but you want to minimize it as much as possible.
The mathematics is simple. The rest of it is stuff that is simple to Google. There’s a little bit of interpretation, but none of this is about problem solving or any kind of serious analysis.
Perhaps I am out of the loop, but are kids allowed to Google stuff during tests nowadays? In my days we were not allowed to bring any books or notes to a test, and up until the last two years of high school no calculators either.
All this besides the obvious that Google wasn't available back then. I guess many schools didn't even have a comprehensive library, let alone enough copies of a particular book to have many kids borrow them at the same time.
Perhaps ironically, the ability to appreciate this point is not something you can achieve with Google (or by looking it up in a book). You have to think about the meaning of your experience of using your mind as you have gone through your life.
At one time I memorized 1132 digits of pi. There was no point to doing this other than to experience the process of memorization and recall, itself, in a relatively pure form. I've lost most of those digits now. But the insight I gained-- which is not about retrieval but about a way of seeing and interpreting the world, stayed with me.
THAT is education: the mind I've created and my process of creating it.
Funnily enough we're always carrying a calculator and (access to) Google in our pockets. Not that I share his view, I do think knowing facts and figures is necessary.
Have you ever seen anyone under the age of 30 try to "google" something? It's bizarre and disturbing. I've seen it for myself, but on r/teachers they have horror stories. To hear them tell it, most kids fail not by cheating, but by being unable to google anything with which to cheat. Even if we dial it down to balance the exaggeration...
Inability to search with more than one keyword. Inability to decide which words are unimportant in a sentence to leave them out of the search terms. Inability to add extra words to give the search engine enough context (funny story about a high school chemistry teacher telling them "reaction" doesn't work for that unless they also include "chemistry" or "chemical"). And on and on and on.
So memorisation was necessity.