I am not convinced by that. Kids tend to learn problem solving (and other) skills if given a chance. i do not think encourage huge amounts of rote learning is an optimal, or even, useful say of doing that.

My experience (with myself and my kids) has been the opposite.

We used to have these questions about "What are the advantages and disadvantages of X?"

I used to think I was outsmarting "the system" by only learning a few key facts about X and then twisting them around to get advantages and disadvantages, but little did I know that was the whole point of the course — to see the same thing from different perspectives and realize there are both advantages and disadvantages to X.