I don't know that memorizing the facts will prove to be important, but I suspect that having been exposed to them at some point will be. In the article she tal

I don't know that memorizing the facts will prove to be important, but I suspect that having been exposed to them at some point will be. In the article she talks about early US settlement. Her daughter probably won't spend a lot of time as an adult working with those facts, but having context about where her society comes from will likely make her more capable in reading news and forming political opinions. Suppose that the point of her daughter seeing this in school isn't so that she'll know about shipping in Baltimore, but rather so that she'll have a gestalt sense of colonial America. Now suppose that teachers are required to test in some way that students were actually exposed to this material. Since we pretend our school system can measure students objectively, we have to pretend that some facts are the important facts and test recollection of those. Memorization might actually be a sign that 'real world' use of the facts isn't going to happen. If the facts were applicable in some way, you'd be able to test that children had actually been exposed to them by having them apply the material, not just regurgitate it. I dearly hope that one of you guys is working on the next great startup that has a solution to this. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few ways you might be able to 'test' that a child was exposed to the material: - tests where you write down n things you remember about the topic - spend five minutes talking to a teacher about what your favourite part of the reading was - prepare a short presentation, web page, essay, video, poster, whatever about your favourite part of the reading If we can do that and make it take less teacher time, it might have a chance.