Maintaining memorized information only as long as it is required to achieve a real goal is a feature, not a bug. That almost everything taught in school is forgotten shortly after is an indictment of a system determined to embed largely useless info, not of students' character.
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I think school gets way with "We're teaching you *how* to think!" far more often than is warranted, but to the extent one models working memory as amenable to exercise: "Be able to free-associate over these X,000 pages for a few months" not a thing working world values at zero.
My claim isn't that "be able to free-associate over these X,000 pages for a few months" (or years) is valueless; it's that it's not something that can be *taught,* and that it has *less* (though non-zero) value in the internet age relative to what a non-amenable brain could do.
