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And you still need to have memorised things like what America is or who Hitler was.

Maybe you knew those things already before you started the class, which is nice, but no doubt there's a lot of other facts out there which you could have memorised which would help you in piecing together the historical narrative.

People criticise the rote-learning approach to things, but I think it's possible to go too far in the other direction. If, for instance, you teach your eight-year-old kids to memorise the capital cities of all the countries in the world, then that's not a huge deal of information right there, but at least you can guarantee that they've heard of every country on Earth, which puts them ahead of most adults.

Furthermore, they'll have noticed a bunch of patterns, like all the places starting with "San" or all the places ending with "-town" which can help them piece together things like which countries were Spanish or British colonies, which leads to an understanding of the history and culture of these countries, and so forth.