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.
This remained true whether the test was multiple choice, fill in the blank, or open ended.
The question is what “learned the material” actually means, and if designing the class around a definition that can be accurately captured on a test is a worthwhile goal. Again though, I want to make it clear that I’m not arguing against assessing what and how students are learning, but specifically against standardized testing.
We can’t spend decades hurfing and blurfing over “failing schools” and then refuse to consider change when what we’ve been doing clearly isn’t working.
Without standardized testing, the techniques of teaching cannot evolve beyond "Phil said this works for him."
“Some sort” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Some kind of assessment - yes, of course. But for example, consider a portfolio of work & a written evaluation vs a multiple choice exam. The latter is definitely easier, faster, and gives you a metric to print, but which is more valuable for the student? Which better demonstrates what you’ve learned?
NB: obviously this is to an extent domain specific. I’m not talking about med school, and I don’t care about your evolving perspective on whether 2+2 equals 4, I just need to know whether you can add.