To be fair, rote memorization is one of the most improtant and transferable cognitive skills you can develop.

Also, even if I agree that history classes often go overboard, having some notion of the years and even dates that some things happened is important to having a general understanding of history. If you know the who, what, why of WW II but have only a vague idea of when it started and when it ended, or when some of the major events within took place, you'll have a very hard time correlating with other events. It matters for example that WW II happened only 20 years after WW I, not 5 years after, not a century after. You won't get a decent picture of the sequence of events if you don't know some rough dates at least - especially for events happening in different parts of the world, with more indirect linking.