> hearing the lesson and blabbing it back until one has memorized it fully is a pretty engaging and even "gamified" activity, especially wrt. the most marginalized and disadvantaged students
There are many kinds of marginalized and disadvantaged people and many require the opposite approach. I was very smart but had severe ADHD, was noticeably autistic, and my parents were poor at the time. Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers, no critical thought or deeper understanding of the concepts was expected. That was not engaging. That style of "education" had me failing classes and hating every waking moment of school. It was only the last year of HS that I started to shine after hitting AP classes with more interesting topics that required some deeper understanding and mastery. If I hadn't experienced non-rote classes my last year I might be a janitor now.
> Most of my normal public school classes were nothing more than repetition, rote memorization, and parroting back answers
Doesn't that directly support my point? The school system ends up relying on rote memorization even when it pretends to be all about having the students learn by themselves and exert critical thinking and open inquiry, as advocated for by the most "Progressive" educators! Isn't it then worth it to just get the rote learning part done with in the easiest, quickest and most effective way, by employing the structured approaches that are ignored by most teachers today?
I actually can't learn from rote memorization, as I cannot commit something to memory that I don't sufficiently understand. I just can't get those things to stick. I need to comprehend it and be able to employ its utility.
I also have a very poor working memory that hinders my ability to solve certain problems that most would find to be trivial. I think I would have done quite badly in the environment you're describing.
> I actually can't learn from rote memorization, as I cannot commit something to memory that I don't sufficiently understand.
I apologize but I don't believe these things to be literally true. You can clearly speak at least one natural language with native-speaker fluency, and that inherently involves committing a large amount of raw data to memory that may never be "fully understood" in a complete sense. More generally, memorizing stuff effectively that one does not clearly understand happens all the time in all sorts of education, and my view is that genuinely effective methods can indeed make this roughly as easy as memorizing the lexicon of one's native language.
(The success of spaced-repetition software is at least an existence proof that such methods are in fact possible, though the context is not exactly the same as classroom instruction.)
Of course whenever "sufficient understanding" happens to be feasible it should be included; I have never said otherwise. What "Progressive" education means when it pushes "open inquiry" and "students learning by themselves" is something radically different, that in practice amounts to letting the students 'sink or swim' with no effective support whatsoever.