Seems the school system is forever diluting what kids are asked to remember. Who needs a base of knowledge when everything can be loked up online? But:

"Being able to compress a lot of experiences and summarize them well is part of the very nature of human intelligence, said Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid."

"It's about finding the essence of things," he said. "It's not about restoring everything. It's about reducing things in complexity until they're manageable and understandable.""

CNN