Thank you, RightYesButNo.
What you need is the mindset that says ‘I don’t know that, I’ll look it up’ and that can be modelled for children. School should definitely aim to develop it, not stamp it out!
I think it’s that which leads to, maybe not intelligence, but an ability to put together apparently different pieces of knowledge to answer questions. Because one outcome of being curious and looking things up is a broad range of knowledge, even if you haven’t been somewhere yourself, or seen something yourself.
I think of it in terms of having ‘hooks’ to hang your knowledge on. A random fact which is not connected with anything else you know, is likely to be forgotten. But if you have watched a TV documentary and something is mentioned, a country, or an animal, or a custom, or whatever it is, and then it comes up again in something you read, you kind of already have the ‘hook’ to put your new fact on to. As you read, or listen, or watch stuff, you get more hooks, retain more information because it makes sense, and you can start to join them up.
There will always be things you don’t know. If a Pointless question came up on chart music in the last five years I’d be hopeless. But if a question was asked about music in the fifties or sixties or seventies, I would hope to be able to make a sensible stab at a decent answer, knowing that Frank Sinatra would be a daft answer for the nineties, and Gary Barlow a stupid reply to one about hits in the fifties! Being good at quizzes doesn’t mean knowing every fact, but knowing enough to have a go with a reasonable best guess. And you do that by looking things up you don’t know!