I, and members of the faculty at my school, have been following the Thought Questions vs. Spit Back (aka Memory) Debate with interest and I think that those who argue in favor of memorization have argued well but have yet to explain how memorizing vast amounts of text factors in to the Constructivist method of education.
Before I weigh in with my $0.02, I beg forgiveness of the audience with the length of my post, but offer the following personal vignette as a caveat to my opinion.
Attending the Yeshiva of Flatbush HS in the 80's, I was required to memorize psukim from chumash and navi, nivim, and a plethora of other passages on a weekly or biweekly basis. But there was a catch, I cannot memorize. (This often comes as a shock to people who discuss Torah, halacha, and educational matters with me because I often quote chapter and verse, though not verbatim. I will reference this later) No matter what method I tried I could not succeed and time after time was handed back a paper with a big zero on it and another communication home to my parents. What I quickly learned was that I could cheat if I learned the teachers' styles of testing. I would spend the first three weeks of the term learning the style and then prepare the instrument of deception that I needed to succeed. In college I prevailed upon professors to allow me to learn the passages rather than memorize them. By then, I found that if I studied the linguistic aspects of the text, and formed meaning from it, I was able to recall most of it, though not verbatim (hence my earlier parenthetical reference).
For centuries, mastery of learning was demonstrated by memory. For years, Chumash, Mishna, and Talmud were mastered by shinun, with a select few developing the skills to take their memorized passages into the next realm of understanding and higher order thinking skills. Think of Rabbi Meir uprooting mountains and crushing to dust. The reason was that this was always the method of Talmud instruction because Talmud or Chumash, or Mishna, were taught by those who had mastered the subject through the same method. But that method evolved for a self selected group, not the nation as a whole or even a larger more heterogeneous group.
But reacting to years of disaffected students and the advances in technology including but not limited to such programs as Bonayich or Gemara berura, has made learning Gemara, learning, and not simply memorizing vocabulary and shakla v'tarya to be spit back at a faher.
While those who can memorize will have an advantage, memory is not really a skill to be honed in school. Educational research is focused on meaning. As mechanchim, meaning and value are the keys to developing lifelong learners. And even in the study of vocabulary, memory is not the mode of learning.
Look at most vocabulary books. Back when, students were given a list of words and were expected to memorize them. At some levels students were expected to spit them back with definitions and at the more advanced level they were expected to have a sentence that demonstrated their knowledge of the usage of the word. But in our modern day, words are given with many of their nuanced meanings, and pages of exercises that develop an appreciation for the different uses of the word are offered. Then the more creative teachers assign writing exercises that promote further long term learning of the vocabulary list. That is learning. For the majority of students, the words are organically learned and stored in long-term memory. Any memorization for a test or quiz is minor and is simply review of a set of information already learned and assigned storage with value.
Studying lists of gemara vocabulary will not make a student learn more Gemara or Chumash or Navi. Meaning and comprehension allow for more text study. In my Talmud classes, I had the students construct phrases with the vocabulary and had a nonsensical exercise where they inserted the appropriate Talmud term into an English sentence. I found that using techniques similar to the vocabulary exercises increased my students' appreciation for Talmud and helped them retain the vocabulary for later learning.
Learning that results in long term memory is organic and simply memorizing is artificial (unless it comes naturally).
