One other issue with math and science courses is that they constantly build on previous material. You get these long chains of courses in calculus and differential equations and who knows what else where if you didn't master the first one, you're going to have trouble with everything after it.
Getting a D in "British Civil Wars and Revolutions, 1639-1651" won't haunt you for the rest of college. A mastery of lower level European history courses might help you do well in that class, but you aren't in a position where forgetting old material means you don't even know how to start a single exam question.
I question the value of memory-based education. Application of historical theory is a lot like coding, and requires some memory retention, but classes that test on historical detail seem to me to have missed the point.
I agree. If a student with an eidetic memory could ace the class without trying, the class is set up wrong. Unfortunately, many of my university classes were set up exactly to favor memory instruction.
I wouldn't go so far as writing off all of history as rote memorization. Being able to write an intelligent analysis of the political climate leading up to WWI is a very different thing from knowing what year Ferdinand was assassinated.
And yet having that level of understanding won't do you much good in a class about the American civil rights movement. But if you can't remember the product rule or how to do integration by parts, it'll keep coming back to screw you for years.
Getting a D in "British Civil Wars and Revolutions, 1639-1651" won't haunt you for the rest of college. A mastery of lower level European history courses might help you do well in that class, but you aren't in a position where forgetting old material means you don't even know how to start a single exam question.