So there is definitely a subtlety here, which is not that memorization is bad in and of itself, but that learning things by memorizing them is a very short term

So there is definitely a subtlety here, which is not that memorization is bad in and of itself, but that learning things by memorizing them is a very short term strategy for actual understanding. For example I use math on an almost daily basis working as a quant, and so yes I happen to have memorized a great deal of math. But that memorization did not happen by sitting and explicitly memorizing things, memorizing formulas, memorizing rules or procedures or theorems. The memorization came over time and through repeated usage naturally. But the way math is taught at school, students are kind of pushed into a corner where if they want to do well on the test, the quiz, the exams then the path of least resistance is to memorize a narrow set of specific "material" that will be tested and then hyper fixating on that material by employing memorization.