If you want to define the debate in that way then sure, memory plus considered analytical skills is better than memory without analytical skills, but I don't think anyone was questioning that. People are more likely to question the importance of memorising things (because it's "boring") than of considered analytical skills.
One question that pops into my mind: can considered analytical skills actually be taught? I'm not sure they really can, they might be just plain old innate, in which case perhaps classes should focus on the thing that can be taught, which is stuff.
And you still need to have memorised things like what America is or who Hitler was.
Maybe you knew those things already before you started the class, which is nice, but no doubt there's a lot of other facts out there which you could have memorised which would help you in piecing together the historical narrative.
People criticise the rote-learning approach to things, but I think it's possible to go too far in the other direction. If, for instance, you teach your eight-year-old kids to memorise the capital cities of all the countries in the world, then that's not a huge deal of information right there, but at least you can guarantee that they've heard of every country on Earth, which puts them ahead of most adults.
Furthermore, they'll have noticed a bunch of patterns, like all the places starting with "San" or all the places ending with "-town" which can help them piece together things like which countries were Spanish or British colonies, which leads to an understanding of the history and culture of these countries, and so forth.
One maths class we were only warned that we had to use Euclidean paper.
I did great in exams with cheat sheets, but poorly in the few truly "open book" exams, because I didn't know how to properly prepare for an open book exam. My silly undergrad brain thought "Woohoo, open book, I guess I don't have to study all this stuff, I can just look it up when I get there" which led to two hours of feverishly flipping back and forth in the book.
Yeah, big mistake thinking open book means one doesn't have to study. I know only one guy (Hal Finney) who could learn the material during an exam :-) As I wrote elsewhere, Hal was one scary smart dude.
>I stated that if one has less money than someone else, they are much more likely to have to deal with things like being assaulted or killed or going without enough to eat etc.
So just to clarify, there's a lot of Harvard and Dartmouth graduates (in non-economics) going without enough to eat, are there?
Well, if you read the article, you would have read about two students, 1 went to Dartmouth and the other went to Yale. The former worked at a bar, if I remember correctly and the latter worked at the airport. Neither graduated with economic degrees. ;)
All jokes aside, indeed when you live in a country that hands our very severe punishments(just look up the murder rate in less expensive neighborhoods etc) for having less money than someone else. Real estate is directly tied to the amount of money you have compared to others so could explain how that analogy is that far off?
If someone lived in New York City, they might have to trade quite a bit of safety in neighborhood for having a less profitable degree than someone who graduated with an economics degree. So indeed US society hands out a weighted lottery about getting murdered based upon how much money you make, even at middle class levels.
I'd also suggest that one of the reasons people perceive the study of human behaviour as unscientific is that it so frequently is.
Studies of human behaviour are inextricably bound up in politics. Many studies are designed, whether consciously or unconsciously on the part of the authors, to advance the authors' own political or social agenda.
Even if you avoid that problem, many studies are just plain statistically lousy, and employ deeply non-random samples.
And finally you've got the annoying problem that people know they're being studied and may modify their behaviour accordingly.
One question that pops into my mind: can considered analytical skills actually be taught? I'm not sure they really can, they might be just plain old innate, in which case perhaps classes should focus on the thing that can be taught, which is stuff.