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Comment by ozim | Hacker News Reader

I always get triggered when people argue against „rote memorization” - but it also is technique that builds up knowledge, skills and experience.

Even if one won’t need that specific know how after exams - just realization how much one can memorize and trying out some approaches to optimize it is where people grow/learn.

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Coming from the other side of this argument: In my degree, rote memorization was required for a surprising amount of courses. It required students, me included, to memorize huge quantities of things we knew were utterly irrelevant to anything but being graded. (This prediction remained true). Committing irrelevant course work into memory over and over again almost burned me out, certainly made me lose all interest and fun in learning for over a decade afterwards. To be honest, I still feel slightly burned and that might never go away.

You might have attended a good degree, where the learned information was actually beneficial. But I'd bet for most degrees out there, rote memorization is the consequence of professors wanting easily gradable exams, existing for their benefit, not the students.

Which means the actual problem is low quality education and degrees and we might find common ground here.

Memorizing things is somewhat helpful but being able to parrot back answers to questions is not at all the same thing as knowledge, skills, or experience. Memorizing a bunch of facts is an adequate way to fool someone into thinking you have those things. Testing for memorized facts is a good way to misidentify useful skills.

And yet there is still value in facts. For example, learning the ideal gas law in high school has enabled me to understand in my adult life how gases will react when compressed or when released. Yet the ideal gas law is a simple fact that you can memorize in minutes. In this case, memorizing that small fact about physics enabled me to apply it to gain understanding of other situations.

I believe that the same holds true for other facts one might memorize. Yes, the fact may seem like meaningless trivia (and might even be so at times), but in the right situation knowing that fact can help with understanding. You can certainly spend too much time on memorization of facts, but that doesn't mean it has no place either.

A law is an infinite family of facts, it's already several steps up from memorising a concrete fact like the density of oxygen at room temperature and pressure.

I think memorization is very important for one big reason:

Facts and knowledge acts as a scaffolding, making it easier to absorb more information and knowledge the more you have.

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