Comment by kace91

I think there’s a balance to be had. My country (Spain) is the very opposite, with everything from university access to civil service exams being memory focused.

The result is usually bottom of the barrel in the subjects that don’t fit that model well, mostly languages and math - the latter being the main issue as it becomes a bottleneck for teaching many other subjects.

It also creates a tendency for people to take what they learn as truth, which becomes an issue when they use less reputable sources later in life - think for example a person taking a homeopathy course.

Lots of parroting and cargo culting paired with limited cultural exposition due to monolingualism is a bad combination.