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I suppose I am the odd man out because I actually enjoyed Bryn Mawr's intro bio class. While I agree that the memorization of facts is not fun or easy, it is sometimes necessary. The main focus of any class should be the development of critical thinking skills, which will be useful to the student throughout their life, regardless of what career that student pursues. However, there is no way that someone can do well in upper-level science classes, or upper-level humanities courses, if they do not understand the basic principles that form the foundation of the field. Just as people in history classes need to learn people, places, and dates to put the event into a broader context, people in upper-level biology courses need to know how mitochondria work in order to understand metabolic diseases. If any of the basic information is left out of an introductory course, the student will just have to work harder in their later classes to learn that basic information in addition to learning the material in their current class.