Yes this is because of stupidity in the education system.
An age ago, someone (John Dewey) decided that the principle of "Faculty Psychology" was false. He was right, of course; but he experienced a common psychological flaw most people fall victim to with extrapolation.
To illustrate, consider: Adolf Hitler was also right. According to Mein Kampf, democratic socialism was destroying Germany; it was being pushed by the major media; and the major media was run by Jews. These are all correct assessments of the situation in Germany pre-World-War-II. Hitler's thought process derailed into the assumption that Jews were unique in precisely a manner supporting all of this: by removing the Jews, he'd remove corruption from humankind. The fault in this thinking requires no explanation.
John Dewey recognized that the brain is *not* a muscle. By Faculty Psychology, it was believed that the act of learning strengthens the brain--that memorizing facts, studying Latin and Greek, and performing difficult mathematics would exercise the brain and make it more complex and capable. In fact, this doesn't happen at all: the brain doesn't get stronger, and in fact becomes slower when habituated to one method of thinking and then thrown into another. Stretching and bench-pressing with your mental faculties doesn't make your brain more powerful.
Modern science classrooms are built around John Dewey's experiential learning. Rather than memorization--seen now as a harmful exercise--and study of a broad base of structured information, students study biology, for example, by planting seeds and watching them grow. This was the form of progressive education headed by John Dewey's efforts, and was largely a mistake.
Certain extremely conservative educationalists--myself included--want to take a huge step backwards, which is the only correct course of action when you've made a huge mistake: you *go* *back* and do it again, this time the right way. We want to solidify facts and systems in learning--emphasize memory, re-introduce Latin and Greek, and, in my case, take a short cut bypassing the reversal of mathematics and simply jump across to a proven strategy used in modern times on the other side of the planet.
Education is too light and fluffy. Rather than simply growing and experiencing--using "child centric education" and "experiential learning" to expose children to things rather than teach them--we should leverage structure and develop education as a powerful tool. Memorization should be taught as a skill, with mnemonics taught early in the classroom. Arts such as poetry and music would expand and improve the basis for internal systems of memory, while experiential science--growing plants and burning things--would provide meaning to scientific theory. Latin and Greek--and German--should be taught as a foundation for English and other European languages. We shouldn't be rolling children in experiences with no facts; we should be building their support base for facts and skills useful to their further education.
Modern education actually predicates on an ideal of memorization being harmful; but education requires memorization. How can you claim education on American history if you can't remember when the Civil War happened, whether African Americans and Women gained the right to vote at the same time or by different amendments, and so on? For that matter, could you gain a lawyer's education without remembering which statutes were constitutional, federal, state, and regulatory--or what those statutes might be? Of course you can only learn what you can remember.
Making things meaningful makes things memorable. Give them structure, organization, and relation to something you already know. The skill of learning and retaining as much basic knowledge as possible is the skill of being able to acquire and apply any new knowledge rapidly--and thus of being a genius.
We must radically reverse this broken education system into an earlier form, and then bring it up-to-speed with modern math and sciences.
