[aqsalose]

> I guess it's referencing the fact that education today is largely about having textbooks shoved in front of you until you're able to recite enough of it.

I would argue contrariwise, the education today is bad because the textbooks are devoid of content and nobody can recite any of the little they have. For my parents' generation it was not unexceptional for people to cite poems from memory. I have bunch of their middle school books, and it appears they read more and longer texts for middle school than some university students today. During my grandfather's time kids were expected to recite a chapters of textbooks aloud in front of class, and he also remembered good bunch chunks from the Bible.

Compared to that, fill-in textbooks we used when I was in school seem a bit underwhelming -- and I am in my 30s. Kids today use e-learning environment (makes direct comparisons difficult).

Today, very few people appear to read anything, let alone books, even fewer remembers anything. Thus conversations about anything factual seem often pointless. But it is not like one can blame anyone for that, it only makes sense: Why truly should I remember anything when I can flip out a smartphone and hit query to a search engine? But people reading the same Wikipedia article or repeating the same news cycle talking points at each other makes for a boring conversation.