Most kids nowadays can't even do basic single digit multiplication in their heads. Because they never memorized tables.
How they're going to work through complex higher math problems efficiently, when every multiplication (and therefore every division) is a trip to the calculator, is beyond me.
And furthermore, I can't believe all that memorization happened without changes in brain structure, especially at those ages.
IMHO, we need to re-evaluate what we're having them memorize, and probably reduce the amount in favor of more critical thinking, but there's still a requirement for it.
If nothing else, so that you're prepared for higher education, where one of the goals is to cram the fundamental information for your profession into imediate recall.
For example, I took a history exam where it asked “which of these books was not important to the civil rights movement?” listing three books explicitly mentioned in one sentence of the text and one that wasn’t. That’s the kind of memorization we need to get rid of- we need to be teaching people how to analyze concepts as a whole rather than simply being able to regurgitate the text.
Grade school needs to be rethought entirely. It's completely broken for the Information Age; no one needs to bother with memorizing minutia anymore, we need to focus on critical thinking.