"Before the 1950s, one of the ways students were tested on their core knowledge was through recitations. They might recite a long poem like Longfellow’s Hiawatha for literature, orally parse a compound-complex sentence, list a history timeline, chant a multiplication table, or sketch a continent and its main features. Students were expected to do this with just their brain as a reference tool. Somewhere along the way, professional education associations decided that facts could be looked up, and so there was no point in memorizing them. Critical thinking skills and experiential learning replaced memorization as the main focus of grammar school instruction."