The article and the comments here make some good points but my question is whether rote memorization of facts is beneficial in other ways, e.g. it may strengthe

The article and the comments here make some good points but my question is whether rote memorization of facts is beneficial in other ways, e.g. it may strengthen critical thinking unrelated to the memorized facts. It's intuitive to think that remembering a list of countries, their GDPs and mortality rates would help you understand the correlation functions between those variables but it may also help your brain to form similar but not identical groupings and associations. I seem to remember reading that some educators are reemphasizing rote memorization because they found other beneficial side effects. Unfortunately, I didn't memorize it enough to make my point here, hmmm, time to Google...