I've related this story here before. I was a first year in physics grad school, and my professor told me he heard rumours of students telling each other memorising formulae was a waste of time, and that as a physicist one should just be good at deriving results. The professor scoffed at that and sardonically surmised that may be the person who said that was intentionally trying to stiffle their competition in the class. Memorisation while limited in some ways is a part of the whole in addition to creative and critical thinking. Without facts and ideas in your mind, you have nothing to think criticall about.

I grew up being told by my peers in school that memorising things was a waste of time and critical thinking was all that mattered. Now I use Anki to literally memorize programming language syntax and ideas and facts that are relevant to my job (like data structures and algorithms). I wish I'd valued memorization when I was in school, because it's such a foundational thing to have knowledge upon which to build everything else.

The way of getting those facts and ideas into your head can be very different, though.

You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.

Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.

The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.

I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.

After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.

And creativity is often putting seemingly unrelated things together. If you don't have the required things floating around in your mind at the same time, it is not possible.