Memorizing anything anywhere ever except as practice for understanding how memory works is always an indication that something has gone wrong however.

I agree. I can't recall the last time I had to work on directly memorizing something, after the poetry assignments in high school. In all the other instances, the memorization occurs in the course of understanding the material, thinking or reading in terms of new concepts. This applies even to language learning, where the new words are learned in course of reading with a dictionary (if you are not in a hurry). The concepts learned this way can always be tabooed without hurting the knowledge.