In Defense Of Memorization
Defense is such a strong word, maybe pity
I had my schooling till High School in Pakistan under the local education system. There were many things that I thought were wrong about it but the biggest was the prominence of rote memorization. How bad could it be. Well let me take you back to my freshman year in college.
We were sitting watching TV. My friend David Fajardo was also working on his chemistry homework and says, anyone remember the atomic number of Sodium. I say, “Yeah, 11.” “You sure?” “Yeah group I, Hydrogen, Lithium, Sodium, Potassium, Rubidium, Cesium, Francium. First element in third row. It’s 11.” “Okay cool, so then atomic mass is 22.” “It’s not, it’s 23.” “But atomic mass is usually around double” “Yeah about double. But Sodium is 23.” “Okay I don’t believe you, I’m going to check the book.” He does what he had been trying to avoid the entire time, gets up, opens the book. Cusses at me, and tells me what a useless thing to know. I agreed and tell him, “well we had to memorize it for school to be able to solve these numerical problems. We even had to memorize Manganese is 55.”
So do you believe me when I say there was too much rote memorization. If you don’t then please consider that it’s been 19 years since I’ve been out of high school and when writing this post I didn’t bother verifying any of the numbers above. So yeah there was too much memorization and you had to memorize as if your life depended on it. So much so that I still remember Manganese has an atomic weight of 55. I mean seriously who cares about Manganese.
But as much as I hated it and am on a crusade to destroy education because it is too much about memorizing in the age of Google. I want to recount the value I did receive. More as a food for thought than something I want to actually promote.
Your Creativity Is Bound By Your Memory
So this is perhaps the only reason I am even writing this post. In the end finding creative solutions requires making new connections. Relating concepts and drawing from analogy. And your memory and your ability to recall marks the total experiences you have that you can use to draw creative inspiration. John Boyd in defining the OODA loop described this as a part of the activity orient:
He must orient himself to decide what it all means. Boyd calls orientation a “many-sided, implicit cross-referencing” process involving the information observed, one’s genetic heritage, social environment, and prior experiences, and the results of analyses one conducts and synthesis that one forms
— Richards, Chet. Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business
And while information is available to lookup very easily in this world, many times it is memory that quickly tells you what it is that you should look up in more detail. Plus if it weren’t for memory how would you be able to insert random anecdotes making everything sound so much more personal. I mean aren’t you curious what happened to David? Well, he still finds my memory annoying.
A very similar idea is how having your times tables memorized allow you to do a lot more mental math. Making it easier to do mental math and be more comfortable with numbers. In turn reducing your friction as you practice mathematics indirectly making you a better mathematician because you did not get bogged down by the boring stuff.
Memorizing Is Easier Once You Grok Something
My wife has already complained that I show off too much of the words I memorized for my SAT and need to make my vocabulary more accessible. So I’ll define the word “grok”. It was invented by Robert Heinlein in his book “Stranger In A Strange Land” and it means to understand fully. In the book it means literally to drink so to understand something, drink it in to the level where it is a part of you.
So this is both a vindication and an indictment. For many topics it becomes a lot easier to memorize something if you have spent a lot of time thinking about the underlying ideas. If the ideas are clear enough to you that you can rebuild them from scratch. So memory and recall is evidence of retention.
On the flipside, this vindication is sullied by the very fair question. “Doesn’t this mean that if something is truly important to you that you need to memorize it, you’ll remember it anyway?” After all you’ve played with the idea, visualized it, thought about its corollaries and objections. If you spend so much time actively engaging with a concept you’ll retain it.
The Virtue Of Hard, Boring Work
Rote memorization is hard, boring work. You are programming the neural pathways in your brain to find something important even though you don’t. Repeating the same text to yourself multiple times hoping to override some neurons in the hope you’ll be able to recover the information when needed. It’s hard and it’s boring. But the reality is no matter what you head out to achieve in life, you need to be trained in hard work, and you need to compromise with the fact that you’ll spend a part of your time doing boring work before you can achieve your goals. So hard work and patience for things you don’t want to do but have to do are both necessary virtues.
I learned these virtues from being in an extremely competitive education system. One which really forced me into working in forms that I didn’t like and I wasn’t comfortable with. There was no way around memorization. And in the end of the while I tried to understand so I would have a place to put the words in my head, I still had to memorize topics in the books so I could create facsimiles. So I trained myself in working hard and dealing with boring stuff because that was my only option. So much so that I found college trivially easy compared to my high school.
But At What Cost?
So I wanted to acknowledge some of the value of memorization. And I am not a supporter of throwing babies out with the bath water (bath water can be filtered again and reused no need to throw it after just one baby). Rote memorization takes its toll in many ways and it is not worth it at all. Some of the impact it has:
- Kills intrinsic desire for learning
- Sends the message that school is something to be gamed not an opportunity
- Makes you too comfortable with accepting the status quo
- Keeps you from practicing your creative skills
So while we think about how to make education better. Let’s at least put some thought in how not to lose the virtues of the status quo that we want to destroy.
With that as a parting gift I leave you with a clip from one of my favorite movies critiquing the educational rat race in South Asia
