Memorisation still matters.
Educators tend to oversell “less memorisation, more understanding, critical thinking, and problem-solving.”
The irony is that the people who preach it, often have superb memory to begin with.
Without a baseline of memorised facts and fluent recall, there is
• nothing stable to understand
• nothing concrete to reason with
• no structure from which problem-solving can meaningfully begin.
If every single problem requires you to rebuild everything from first principles, then you are not truly thinking – you are constantly reinventing basics that should already be automatic.
In that sense, you are not that different from a child who still counts on fingers to compute 3 x 7 = 21. They quickly run out of fingers and toes, and learn that some degree of memory is needed for grown up problems.
Thinking does not replace memorisation – it depends on it. Fluency with core concepts is what makes higher-level reasoning possible in the first place.
The issue is not intelligence, but lack of fluency. When foundational facts are not internalised, higher-level reasoning becomes slow, painful, and fragile.
Strong problem-solving is not starting from zero every time – it is having enough mastery of fundamentals that higher-level thinking can actually begin.