The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.
I don't particularly care about English literature or any <subject x> for the sake of building a well rounded education. The more important thing is retaining what you learned and building on that.
The real tragedy is that many educational programs emphasize the kind of rote learning you seem to want everyone to aspire to instead of critical thinking faculties which, properly instilled, will assert themselves for a lifetime.
To think memorization is bad is incredibly short sighted and stupid. Would you like to look up a book every time you do programming? No. You remember certain methods and certain part of the standard library so that you don't have to spend 10 minutes googling method x to accomplish result y.
Principles is nice and all, but what make you an efficient problem solver is because you have access to an inner world of factoids and knowledge.
Sure, memorization for the sake of memorization is useless. That's why you learn critical thinking skills that you love so much so that memorization will be useful.
I disagree that what makes people efficient problem solvers is having an "inner world of factoids". Knowledge isn't irrelevant, but knowing where to look is key. Sometimes the knowledge is internal, but the CS whiz who jumps into coding his own libraries for everything without having the wisdom to browse the standard documentation first is surely not a model of efficiency.
Of course it does matter, because latency of lookup matters. He could spent it one hour googling things up or he can spend one minute remembering something and using it. That requires memorization.
The wisdom part to use the standard library instead of implementing something something from scratch is just extra efficiency.
Of course, deep learning is difficult to teach and assess on a large scale, so it is easier to test for knowledge of facts and procedural skills and teach children to perform well on these kind of tests.
This property of brain to forget less use facts to make room for what you use more often has been acquired over a very long period of evolution. I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.
It's possible, if you practice.
I don't know what schools can do to make sure that the students NEVER FORGET what they learn in a class. And imo to expect that is completely unreasonable.
You can't do this, but adults could take some time out of their days to practice what they learned. That way, they will keep retaining what they learned over decades, and the amount of practices should keep going down.
This process works well enough, there's little that you've learned a long time ago that you can't pick up again in a relatively short amount of time.
Those residual knowledge help make practicing and maintenance of our existing knowledge much easier. We could take advantage of it.
Anyway, if you want to retain everything you learned, you should take a look into spaced repetition which is a learning technique that help make knowledge maintenance an efficient process.
All that is left is our educational system to recognize that knowledge maintenance is important.
Well, don't let five years go by without touching the subject. Occasionally practice the things you once learned, integrate them into your larger body of knowledge, and you'll never forget how red-black trees and quickselect work --- even if you never implemented them from scratch.
The greatest problem with our educational system is to neglect the fact that students begin to forget immediately after graduation. All these years in k-12 education gradually turns to dust until only reading, writing, and some basic agelbra are left, and some career related knowledge.
Trignometry? Biology? Chemistry? These are subjects that all adults once know in their high school years, now all forgotten.
Instead of documentaries assuming we know chemistry, or trignometery, or biology, they introduced "DNA" as if we never been in a biology class. They only skims the top of the scientific knowledge cake because they never assume everybody knows.
Imagine the complexity and increased believablity of fiction and non-fiction if they have to wrestle with an audience that know those things by heart, even if they only took a chemistry class that single semester?
Alas, we forgotten and our educational dollars disappeared in a puff of smoke.