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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

The problem with a lot of high school subjects is, that you have to memorize a bunch of dates and years, random names of random plants and animals, that you then immediately forget after you pass the exam.

For example, (for me), the "important things" about world war 2 is, who, why and how... what was before, what made people make decisions they did, how did it start, what happened during, and why and how it ended... the exact date when some named general attacked some small city somewhere is pretty irrelevant (atleast not a thing you should keep memorized), but a lot of history classes focus on exactly that... on which date which unit/general took over which town where did they break through, etc... I'd prefer half less memorization data and a googling class for kids to find the dates needed, and more focus on the whys and hows, because history repeats itself, while dates and names don't.

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To be fair, rote memorization is one of the most improtant and transferable cognitive skills you can develop.

Also, even if I agree that history classes often go overboard, having some notion of the years and even dates that some things happened is important to having a general understanding of history. If you know the who, what, why of WW II but have only a vague idea of when it started and when it ended, or when some of the major events within took place, you'll have a very hard time correlating with other events. It matters for example that WW II happened only 20 years after WW I, not 5 years after, not a century after. You won't get a decent picture of the sequence of events if you don't know some rough dates at least - especially for events happening in different parts of the world, with more indirect linking.

> To be fair, rote memorization is one of the most improtant and transferable cognitive skills you can develop.

To say so is missing the whole point parent comment is trying to make. Memorization is an important skill, that is one thing but saying memorizing random stuff to build that skill is entirely a different claim. I bet there are better ways so learn and hone memory skills than memorize history place/time/dates and kill a student's interesting in learning.

I followed up that statement by explaining that anyway some level of place/time/dates learning is in fact important for history education (though I will re-iterate that entirely too much emphasis is put on that aspect of history, especially in earlier grades).

Still, I don't think that the claim that asking you to memorize (pseudo-)random things improves your skill at memorizing things is a strong claim, I think it's fairly obvious. It's not necessarily the best way, but if it's paired with fairly important education, I don't think it's that bad either.

It's also important to note that, whatever career you chose later in life, there will be lots of random factoids that you'll need to rote memorize to be effective at it - be it names, years and places in history, JavaScript frameworks in programming, diseases in medicine, or even hair styles and product names in hair styling.

My teachers were moving away from date memorization back in the 90s. These things were mostly approached as a lecture that talked about exactly what you wrote about WW2. Is your experience outdated or did I just get lucky? I went to American public school if it matters.

Former yugoslavia, then slovenia... I had to know every goddamn date and every goddamn village on the exams. And ok.. WWII was the start of the socialist yugoslavia... but I had to know the same for napoleon and the french revolution, and he barely passed here. Franco revolution, the same.. and soviet one too. Also a bunch of caesars too.

Geography was the same... ok, countries and capitals.. sure.. but a bunch of mountains and rivers and streams, where exactly the source is, and where and into which river it flows into... not just the major ones, even the crappy minor ones. Also stuff like, what is the greatest export of nigeria and other countries that are far enough, that I didnt need to know.

Of course I forgot all of that data probably days after the exam, and never cared for 99% of it, and googled the last percent when needed.

FWIW, history teaching seems to have moved away from just looking at dates - at least where I am.

I graduated high school <10 years ago and most of our history classes (including WW1 and 2) were spent on what, why and how. A significant amount of time was spent looking at the leadup and aftermath of both WW1 and WW2 as well as the ideas of the time. We pretty much didn't look at troop movements, generals, battles, etc. apart from mentioning the really significant ones. Same goes for pretty much every other unit of history (mediaeval Europe, colonialism in Asia and Africa, etc.).

Maybe this is a reflection of differences in teaching styles in different parts of the world?

I graduated HS >20 years ago and did not have to memorize a single date in HS history. We did need to know the general ordering of events though. For example, we had to know that the Munich Agreement was before Pearl Harbor, and that the Korean War was after WWII, but it's hard to know anything about these events without knowing that.

OTOH I know people my age who went to different schools that had to memorize things like the exact date that Lincoln was assassinated, so there's definitely disparate pedagogy.

There are certainly many ways in which education could be improved to be more effective, and the way math is often being taught isn't an exception there. Many people rely on memorization for learning math as well, which is as counterproductive as it gets.

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