In ancient times the ability to memorize was a prized skill.
Whole cultures were passed down through the centuries by those who remembered
the stories, legends, history, and taboos and laws. The advent of the printing
press launched a new era of “looking things up.” Today, the Internet and its
search engines may seem to be making memorization irrelevant in the modern
world. What we don’t remember, we think we can always look up.
Schools have generally abandoned requiring students to
memorize poems, famous speeches, multiplication tables, and all sorts of
academic material that used to be ingrained in the curriculum. A growing
disdain for memorization emerged among the other intellectually damaging
effects of post-modernism. Now the emphasis in education is on new math,
critical thinking, inquiry learning, “hands-on” activity, and the like. There
is nothing wrong with these new emphases, except that they come at the expense
of children learning the mental discipline of memorization. Teachers and
professors I know agree with me that today’s school children, in general, are
more mentally lazy than those in the past. The one inarguable effect of honing
memorization skills is that the mentally lazy can’t succeed at it.
Here are five reasons that we should all strive to improve
our ability to remember:
1. Memorization is
discipline for the mind—much needed in an age when so many
minds are lazy, distracted, have little to think about, or think sloppily.
Memorization helps train the mind to focus and be industrious.
2. No, you can’t
always “Google it.” Sometimes you don’t have access to the Internet. Not everything
of importance is on the web (and a great deal of irrelevant trash will
accompany any search). Nor is looking up material helpful under such situations
as when you learn to use a foreign language, must write or speak
extemporaneously, or wish to be an expert.
3. Memorization
creates the repertoire of what we think about. Nobody can think in a vacuum
of information. To be an expert in any field requires knowledge that you
already have.
4. We think with the
ideas held in working memory, which can only be accessed at high speed from the
brain’s stored memory. Understanding is nourished by the information you
hold in working memory as you think. Without such knowledge, we have a mind
full of mush.
5. The exercise of
the memory develops learning and memory schema that promote improved ability
to learn. The more you remember, the more you can learn.
History documents that great minds are filled with
knowledge. Jesus had to know scripture in order to show Pharisees what was
wrong with their practice of it. Picasso had to know how to paint before he
decided what to paint. Einstein had to know the physics literature of his day
before he could realize its errors. Warren Buffett makes tons of money because
he knows what he is doing.
If you want real educational reform, go back to the
fundamentals that worked in the past. What we are doing in education today is
not working!
And what are the fundamentals of developing
learning and memory skills?
Join this site and peruse its archives.
Check out
my books (Better Grades, Less Effort
and Memory Power 101).
