What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function.
Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.
Lots and lots of stuff that just has to be memorized. It becomes easier the more experiences one gets over time using those, merely memorizing the words alone ofc. is useless and also very inefficient, without other knowledge to create a network the brain will throw pure sentence-memorization out. So you still start the lessons with some memorization, then deepen it by using it in class. But in the end you will still remember those many little "facts".
I say this as someone you drank the "no memorization" koolaid. Now I always start new things with memorization first and I learn so much faster.
There are some subjects where the emphasis on memorization that some places have is detrimental, but that doesn't make memorization bad in general.
As a kid, and probably still now, I was very reluctant to memorise things, for some reason I never understood but that may be connected with distrust of authority. I still remember how long and hard I fought my parents and grandparents who tried to make sure I would eventually memorise multiplication tables. Instead, I had to develop many tricks to be able to retrieve the proper results without memorisation, effectively discovering patterns to retrieve quickly all the tables from very few memorised numbers. Years later, I remember having done a similar thing in history classes, refusing to learn any dates, so instead finding tricks to tell which events must have occurred before or after another, thus again getting more engaged with the material as a result.
Sure, some material do require pure memorisation, like language learning (that I still hate with a passion), but overall I believe memorisation gets the bad rep it deserves.
I said memorization wasn't important...
I find it frustrating people argue against points that were never made.