I had to recite Chaucer. But that was at age 16, not 6, and it was to make sure we could understand the prologue of the Canterbury Tales, which we were working through in the original Middle English. Reciting helped us get a grip on text that looked really odd and would have been inaccessible to most of us. Some of my class never worked with Chaucer again, but I went on to do an English degree, so was grateful for the exposure. None of us died doing the exercise or were even that bad at it. It took maybe a few minutes of public speaking to get through.
From what I've observed, the 6 year-old in my house actually needs a two-pronged approach to learn anything. She needs to know how to figure things out in the first place, because everything from reading a sentence to adding 10+2 is a challenge for her. But she also needs to just remember things, so that she isn't stuck forever on counting her way through 10+2. The more she practices remembering things (song lyrics, her lines for a play, card games, number bonds), the more capable her memory gets and the more confident she grows, thus more willing to try figuring out something new.
That said, IMO, there's an awful lot of top-down pressure all over the UK to make the school curriculum "just so", and I think this actually risks creating gaps in knowledge. Which, I think, is what a lot of this dialogue from Gove is based on in the first place, right? www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9322525/School-leavers-unable-to-function-in-the-workplace.html
To me, there's a difference between "you ought to know this" and "you ought to know this by now". If you rely too much on tests, levels and exams as proof of the latter, I think there's a good chance that children could be rushed through the curriculum before they've really mastered the material.
Case in point - last year, same kiddo was bringing home schoolwork that involved adding money together, e.g. 50p + 20p + 5p. She got through this assignment with me and DH successfully, and we assumed that this meant she was learning how to add money at school. Didn't understand at all why money confused DSD over the summer break, because surely she'd gone over working with money at school. The following October, her new teacher informed us that DSD actually needed to go back to learning her number bonds 0-10, because she actually didn't know them. This despite performing adequately for more advanced homework assignments during P1. I think if DSD's teacher had been more pressured to get DSD performing to a certain standard by age 6.5, that DSD might have performed adequately on several more assignments, but would not necessarily have been mastering much.