When telling us that we’d have to memorise portions of the periodic table for exams in uni, my professor also pointed out that there is not a single chemistry lab in the world that doesn’t have a periodic table somewhere on the wall and testing us this way was a waste of time.

my physics profs hated memorization, and gave us extensive formula sheets for exams, plus let us bring a sheet with whatever we wanted on it

hot take: using a calculator to look up 5+8 is a waste

Unless you’re really drunk, then it’s ok

idk, I think a lot of anti-communist padding in popular non-fiction comes from ‘I’m sure I heard this somewhere’.

A lot of traditionally “good” students will complain about open book exams though, since the questions generally tend to require you to go beyond the rote text book ones.

For instance, in 1st year phys the final tutorial question was open book, gave you an extra possible 5% above 100% and was simply “calculate the total power output per year of Wolf 359.” A full third of the class complained it was an unfair question.

to grind you down for a life time of "because i said so"s at work.

I think it’s probably because recall is often a demonstration of proficiency - think how consuming/reading language is easier than producing/writing it. Not the only sign of proficiency, but one of them.

On the other hand, we benefit more from current technology by being proficient with references, and proficiency over an entire field is now inefficient and/or unattainable. Even in languages - native languages at that - most of us only become proficient at producing contemporary styles, whereas it often takes specialists to decypher old texts with appropriate linguistic and historical context. But now chatbots can fill in for the specialist by acting as a more widely available and in-depth reference, I guess.

Related to liberal philosophy and psychology, I think, the whole “rational actors” perspective of the human being. That we are machines that take some input and spit out an output in reliable and accurate ways. The ones who don’t are ignored as part of humanity to maintain the definition.

Another way to look at education is that it is a factory line to output workers to exploit for labor. The defects are discarded, and the ones who make it out are the ones who somehow take any input and reliably accurate and exploitable output (labor)

Which is why graduates of most fields have no experience and function on cultivated instincts like memorization. Only when a worker works with their actual hands, so to speak, do they learn real knowledge of their labor. This is how education used to be, an apprenticeship sort of model, which you still see in certain trades and fields like the medical field.

Memorization predates capitalism. So I’d look for reasons in pre-capital societies

As I understand it we imported it from China because it was a system that allowed education at greater scale than Europes previous system of having a conversation with the examiner. It lets lots of people sit the same exam at once

to say capitalism strives for greater efficiency is false it strives for greater scale

Now we stick with it because we’ve been doing it 200 years and people are used to it

It’s much easier to make and grade an exam that’s based on memorisation than on understanding. Such exams are also less prone to biased grading.

This but unironically, double checking prevents errors and you make more mental connections when you look things up.

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This is a very Mao thing, he hated people being too obsessed with reading and quoting rather than understanding and exploring. I don’t think it’s especially representative of modern China though, which has moved back towards the bourgeois memorization fetishism

Nowadays, no. GaoKao is basically all memorizing except for essays part of the exam. Even then, you have memorization to do to for the essays (structure, arguement, etc.)