A song by Jakob Dylan includes the following lines:

Cupid, don’t draw back your bow

Sam Cooke didn’t know what I know

…note that in order to understand these two simple lines, you’d have to know several things:

1)You need to know that, in mythology, Cupid symbolizes love

2)And that Cupid’s chosen instrument is the bow and arrow

3)Also that there was a singer/songwriter named Sam Cooke

4)And that he had a song called “Cupid, draw back your bow.”

“Progressive” educators insist that students should be taught “thinking skills” as opposed to memorization, and the advent of LLMs has further driven such thinking But consider: If it’s not possible to understand a couple of lines from a popular song without knowing by heart the references to which it alludes–without memorizing them–what chance is there for understanding medieval history, or modern physics, without having a ready grasp of the topics which these disciplines reference?

And also consider: what’s important is not just what you need to know to appreciate the song. It’s what Dylan needed to know to create it in the first place. At least in theory someone who heard the song and didn’t understand the allusions could have spent 5 minutes googling and figured them out, although this approach wouldn’t be exactly conducive to aesthetic appreciation. But had Dylan not already had the reference points–Cupid, the bow and arrow, the Sam Cooke song–in his head, there’s no way he would have been able to create his own lines. The idea that he could have just “looked them up,” which educators often suggest is the way to deal with factual knowledge, would be ludicrous in this context. And it would also be ludicrous in the context of creating new ideas about history or physics. To use a computer analogy, the things you know aren’t just data–they’re part of the program.

These days, higher education is a taxpayer funded babysitting service for overgrown children that has a side gig of impressing Leftist indoctrination upon them.