I would argue otherwise. I think it's more important for surgeons to focus on understanding how different organs of the body work with and affect each other, so

I would argue otherwise. I think it's more important for surgeons to focus on understanding how different organs of the body work with and affect each other, so they can improvise when something goes off-track during a surgery, than on memorizing the name of every bone in the human body. When you understand something, it prepares you better for the situations you haven't faced before, since you can formulate results for the new set of conditions. Also, when you look up something frequently enough, it's going to get committed to your memory automatically. While I agree that the medical profession requires a higher degree of memorization, the context of my comment (and most others here I'm assuming) is more geared towards engineering. For example, if I was developing a course on programming, my focus wouldn't be on making the students memorize syntax and language quirks, since they can always look those up, and internalize them over time. My focus would be on developing their way of thinking, what's the right data structure to use for this problem, should I move this piece of code out as a reusable function, should I return the reference to this object or a copy, etc. This is based on my personal experience - I hardly remember anything from the 'plug-and-chug' classes which forced memorization. tldr: the focus of education should be to cultivate and encourage understanding concepts, not rote memorization of facts and figures. Some memorization is nice for that extra bit of efficiency, but that is going to happen automatically, so no point going out of your way to do it.