You're using [pre-fetching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetching): looking up information that you expect may be needed in advance. And it's also reasonable to retain such cached information over the term in which you expect it to be reasonably in-demand.

By contrast, the critique of rote-memorization in education is that students have their time/effort/educational-opportunity squandered in courses that ask them to memorize information incongruent with expected utility. For example, kids had been asked to remember elements of a fictional narrative, or specific dates or factoids about historical trivia.

It's more of an issue of (cache/memory)-management and when/what information ought to be retained rather than an issue of memorization always being good/bad.

Generally, the critique of education is that students ought to be learning how to think and operate rather than memorizing trivia. Of course, learning to operate effectively can involve memorization at times, e.g. retaining an appropriately-tuned working-cache of relevant information, though exams that basically force students to waste their time/effort/opportunity memorizing trivia seem counter-productive.

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Hard to explain this, but it's important, so...

I think one of the worst parts of rote-memorization in education is that it messes up the mind's internal prioritization scheme, which I think makes people stupid.

For example, when someone's doing a math-problem, they need to remember the numbers that they're working with; such things ought to be retained in the term in which they're used, as required to do a math-problem.

For another example, when someone's studying a historical-happening, they need to remember dates, names, and so forth, well enough to piece it together. Though like with math, they ought to be able to write such things down or look them up, as appropriate; there's no value to memorization that goes beyond its utility in caching.

So, when a teacher asks their students to memorize dates, it's not that they're wrong in the notion that a good-student ought to, at some point, have memorized the very things they're asking the students to memorize. Instead, the teacher's big screw-up is that they're asking students to elevate such minutia from cache-trivia to deliverables. Alternatively, they're asking students to treat their mental-cache AS a deliverable.

And that's what I fear would make people stupid, because that's not how a healthy mind would seem to operate. This is, a healthy mind ought to have an efficient, tuned cache-management system; it's a mental-sickness to try to train one's cache to reliably operate over the course of days or weeks, as students had sometimes been asked to to regurgitate trivia on an exam.

Instead, a healthy mind ought to have an internal feel for when/how trivia is useful, then retain it accordingly. And a healthy mind shouldn't be obsessed with a fear of failing an exam for forgetting something; that'd be like designing a CPU around the ideal that a cache-miss is a critical-error.

In short, I'm trying to stress that it's not as simple an issue as memorization always being good/bad, but rather it's an issue of rote-memorization training students to engage in poor mental-hygiene practices, messing up their ability to think efficiently. (Obviously, this is in addition to the normal objection that students end up missing out on a real education.)