It's my understanding that this same debate raged when writing became a thing. Many viewed it with suspicious, or derision, as memorization was the big intellectual thing. So writing and reading back to remember was terrible. It's true it was a dependence, but the value was too high. With reading and writing a person could work on and synthesize from a far wider range of concurrent materials than one could with just memorization and recitation. Yeah, it's lame cheating, but writing enables a lot and so it won out.
Yeah, exactly -- when we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, it was fine. Today, we're automating thinking. And, while there are people that still lift weights for fun, it's not needed professionally any more. I think we'll end up in the same place with thinking -- education is probably going to be a hobby, not a requirement.
In any case you can say the exact same thing about reading. Take the book away and bam, you know nothing. A person who memorized the book is not dependent on an expensive, heavy thing like a book.
