Studying is Cheating

What is school really for?

All the way up through high school, I was known for saying the phrase "studying is cheating". It seemed to me that if the major occupation of our time as kids was to spend time in the classroom, then we should make the most of it. Exams, I thought, were all about evaluating long-term knowledge and skills. So what seemed strange to me was that all of my peers would go home and review/study/cram all the knowledge relating to a particular subject before a test.

This seemed absolutely absurd to me, because I always thought that school was for learning and home was for rest and play. And if people were always cramming last minute before an evaluation, then can we really say that the evaluation is a fair representation of meaningful long-term knowledge?

What I found was that most people (including many university students) often rely on rote learning rather than a full understanding of a subject matter. No doubt, this is helpful when you need to memorize some dates for a history test, but it can also remove the necessary mental component of critical thinking. So I had to ask, is school really a place of learning?