It's easier to verify rote memorization than actual understanding so naturally shitty schools focus on the former at the expense of the latter. Most American schools are shitty by academic standards.

In Spain we did have to memorize it. Truly idiotic. People just invented mnemonic phrases to get through the exam and that's it. It served no educational purpose whatsoever.

My teacher, in germany, used memorising it as a punishment. Like four dudes in my class had to do it.

Czech here, also had to memorize it. But our school system here is 90% just memorizing shit, it's a fucking joke.

In Lithuania we literally have the whole periodic table on the wall in every chemistry class I have ever been to.

My school was barely 15 years ago, but we also had a thin book handed out to us in 7th grade or so that contained charts and references for pretty much everything in a very condensed form. Periodic tables, formulas for math and physics, chemical and physical attributes for a bunch of materials, ... And the entire ASCII table for some reason.

That was in Germany during the 00s and I still have that book, and three or four copies I stole over time.

In America, we didn't have to truley memorize it. For tests we had a reference packet that included the table.

That being said we did have to memorize a few major ones.

Its also important to recognize education is a state by state thing, not federal. The curriculum in Texas can be different than the one in Florida. Even teacher to teacher, I could see one class having to memorize it while the one next door doesn't.

Memorizing the periodic table is probably the high-school assignment I'm most angry about to this day.

It might be, I didn't take chemistry in high school but those I know who did spent weeks memorizing it.

You were lucky. Many education systems around the world still use memorization instead of comprehension as a measurement of learning.

American here - we didn't have to memorize it. All we had to do was know the groupings (Noble gas, metalloids, etc)

Are you talking about Binas? All the homies love Binas.

In Canada even in university I don't think it was expected to be memorized.

My prof did offer extra credit to anyone who could sing the entire element song in front of the whole class, which was very fun, and some people nailed it.

My highschool teachers did the same.

I've always liked those efforts to make bohring content engaging

We were expected to memorize it, yes, along with the properties of each column and generally what went where.

But that was like the first part of chem, and after that test we had the table up on the front wall.

I had to memorize it in university. And I didn't even study chemistry, but "engineering science". As a matter of fact: I actually always disliked chemistry.

Binas in the Netherlands

It's a thing with some teachers in some places. The quality of education in the US is hugely variable, because standards and curriculum are largely left up to local school systems with widely different funding and priorities.

I agree with you. Though some people out there do really love being flesh books.

We had to memorize a small part of it in Turkiye too, but there is a new curriculum coming up which has a chance of changing that.

Brazil here, we had to, me and my friends even made some vulgar funny songs (to teenagers at least) to help memorize it, I had a pretty bad chem teacher.

In the UK we had to memorise up to 20 (Calcium), but that was alongside knowing how the elements are grouped and orbits of electrons etc. for GCSE chemistry (age 14-16, end of secondary school)

If teacher is shitty, he will force students to memorise it, as mine.

When I was doing my Chemistry class in like 6th grade (Eastern European btw), we had to memorize it as one of our first assignments lol. Ofc, we didn't need to know the full table but progressively learn the first 30-50 elements over the span of few months.