When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning

Some things are worth memorizing--addresses, PINs, your parents' birthdays. The sine of π/2 is not among them. It's a fact that matters only insofar as it connects to other ideas. To learn it in isolation is like learning the sentence "Hamlet kills Claudius" without the faintest idea of who either gentleman is--or, for what matter, of what "kill" means. Memorization is a frontage road: It runs parallel to the best parts of learning, never intersecting. It's a detour around all the action, a way of knowing without learning, of answering without understanding.

Memorization has enjoyed a surge of defenders recently. They argue that memorization exercises the brain and even fuels deep insights. They say our haste to purge old-school skills-driven teaching from our schools has stranded a generation of students upriver without a paddle. They recommend new apps aiming to make drills fun instead of tedious. Most of all, they complain that rote learning has become taboo, rather than accepted as a healthy part of a balanced scholastic diet.

Certainly, knowledge matters. A head full of facts--even memorized facts--is better than an empty one. But facts enter our heads through many paths--some well-paved, some treacherous. Which ones count as "memorization"?

I define memorization as learning an isolated fact through deliberate effort. The process can unfold two basic ways.

First, there's raw rehearsal: reciting a fact over and over. When I had to memorize a speech for ninth-grade English, I huddled in the school library for 90 minutes, whispering the words to myself again and again, until they settled into my memory. The process was slow, dull, and stilted. I forgot the speech within weeks.

Raw rehearsal is the worst way to learn something. It eats up time and requires no real thinking. So of course, it's popular among students ranging from my Oakland 15-year-olds to  Harvard undergraduates. During a unit on memory, I once heard a psychology student recite, "Raw rehearsal is ineffective," before proceeding to practice her vocabulary using the same technique she'd just denounced.

 Second, there are mnemonics and other artificial tricks--songs, acronyms, silly rhymes. In sixth grade, for reasons only heaven knows, I memorized 48 prepositions (about, above, across, after...) to the tune of "Yankee Doodle." I can still recite them.

Such tactics certainly work better than raw rehearsal. But they don't solve the underlying problem: They still bypass real conceptual learning. Memorizing a list of prepositions isn't half as useful as knowing what role a preposition plays in the language.

So what are the alternatives? How can students learn facts, rather than memorize them?

First, there's repeated use. Like raw rehearsal, it relies on repetition to chisel a fact into memory, but unlike that method, it comes naturally (without "deliberate effort"). In 10th-grade English, I wrote a paper on Robert Frost's apocalyptic poem "Once by the Pacific." I read it dozens of times, dissecting every phrase. Months later, standing on a rocky, storm-swept beach, I found that I could recite the poem by heart. I never set out to memorize it. I just...did.

And second, there's building on already-known facts. Like mnemonics, this technique relies on connections and associations. But here, the connections emerge naturally from the material. The fact is no longer an isolated thread, held in place by a clever trick. It's part of a tapestry.

For example, suppose we're learning that Maryland fought with the Union during the Civil War. We could invent a mnemonic, like "Maryland starts with 'marry,' and a marriage is a union"--cheesy, but fine. Or we could build on other facts. For example, Maryland borders D.C., so if it had seceded, the American capital would have been surrounded by foreign territory. For exactly that reason, Lincoln worked hard to keep Maryland on the side of the North.

What separates memorization from learning is a sense of meaning. When you memorize a fact, it's arbitrary, interchangeable--it makes no difference to you whether sine of π/2 is one, zero, or a million. But when you learn a fact, it's bound to others by a web of logic. It could be no other way.

Memorization's defenders are right: It's a mistake to downplay factual knowledge, as if students could learn to reason critically without any information to reason about. But memorization's opponents are right, too: Memorized knowledge isn't half as useful as knowledge that's actually understood.

See full article: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/09/when-memorization-gets-in-the-way-of-learning/279425/#article-comments