This whole "memorization of facts" thing drives me crazy as well. Coming from a different country when I heard about testing in the US I was amazed - entire complex subjects reduced to streams of A to E multiple-choice (or is it multiple guess?) questions. This seems to be so prevalent now that I half-jokingly call the Gen Y and Millenials "Generation A to E", at least the context of education. No wonder there are serious people telling kids to just skip university altogether and focus on doing stuff.

My testing at school and university in the 70s and 80s was almost exclusively free format answers to questions. Yes even for sciences and mathematics. That's what I guess Americans call "essay questions". Unpopular with teachers because they are harder to grade, easier to fall foul of subjective grading but boy do they exercise the students mind better. They are also far harder for students to cheat on. Show your method, show your reasoning. It also has the bonus of partial grades if you get the right method but flub on the right answer due to silly error in the math, the equivalent of a typo. A multiple choice test for maths would never allow that.

Besides, work that can be done purely by recalling facts - that's highly automatable. Work that requires reason, subjective nuance, and judgment, or even imagination and innovation based on algorithms and methods rather than results - that's much less tractable to the application of automation. Or at least it will be lower down on the list of things to get automated.

And yes, doing jobs where you actually have to think and give a bit of yourself to the task rather than just putting pegs in holes all day - has to be more fulfilling right? Assuming you are not one of those who was raised to loathe thinking - perhaps because they are lazy and just want to be entertained 24/7, but perhaps because they are contrarian thinkers, or didn't fit the "style" of classroom education and had speaking up and thinking for themselves beaten out of them at an early age (hopefully not literally, although in my day that was still a distinct possibility in the extreme case).