Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but the way you get there is by focused work for years and years, not memorizing a list of definitions.
How do you get to the years and years of focused work? Vocabularies are the building blocks and mapping points of our knowledge stores. I think the suggestion is that emphasis on awareness and, at least some symbolic reverence to the concepts in grade school may offer a better path that what is traditional now. Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derai…
> Memorizing state capitals won’t make anybody Governer, but skipping that step early on can be a major derailment from path.
“Major derailment”? You can’t be serious. Nobody at my school ever memorized state capitals, and as far as I can tell they’re all doing about as well as you would expect (a couple decades later) in their various careers, including careers as lawyers, activists, policy analysts, journalists, politicians, scholars of political science, ...
Anyone who does the real work (reading hundreds of topical books, keeping up with current events for decades, getting involved in political activism, engaging with peers in years of university seminars about related topics, ...) is going to end up having a reasonable grasp of the names of most states and their capitals, but being able to rattle off a list is mostly useless, except as a stunt.
> Knowing the names encourages curiosity and inspires asking questions that otherwise could not be asked.
Memorizing lists of random trivia engenders boredom and makes kids think school is bullshit. The questions they ask are things like “why are we doing this pointless busywork?” and “why doesn’t my teacher respect kids’ intelligence?”