Comment by altrego99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by altrego99 | Hacker News Reader

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* Kids should not be penalized for knowing which is the capital of what, nor which part of Americas grows the most bananas. It is useless information unless the kid loves that kind of stuff.

* Focus should not be on memorizing anything, unless they are a building block of something which they will understand later, and better, with the memorization. May be the Spanish language verb forms are one of those, I'm not sure. From my experience I know a lot of knowledge do fall in this category, e.g. trigonometric manipulations, algebra of integration/differentiation, etc.

* Kids of that age, 13, have a fairly developed brain to decide which subjects they like, and which they are not interested in. They should be allowed to choose not to study Earth Sciences in favor of Physics, if they want to. Or to study Linguistics in favor of Maths (I assume they already know a basic level of mathematics to get by), if they want to.

I wonder how these kids gonna grow up, will the relentless homework on often useless subjects, create the discipline in them that is their most probable intention? Will this discipline help them to do better in life, as opposed to the Captain Kirk types?

There's a legit trade-off. 100% memorization is bad. 100% learn to learn with 0% memorization is bad too. Research indicates that people learn more when they have context, which unfortunately comes from memorization. (I hated memorization, I'm more of a derive the facts person)

E D Hirsch has some of the research behind this. http://www.coreknowledge.org/books

> 100% learn to learn with 0% memorization is bad too.

100% learn to learn with 0% memorization isn't bad, its just an incoherent concept (to be bad it would have to be a real thing.) Memorization is an essential component (though not the only one) of learning to learn.

> as opposed to the Captain Kirk types?

What do you mean by "Captain Kirk type"?

> Focus should not be on memorizing anything

I have to disagree. At that age the things you memorize get seared into your mind permanently. I can still effortlessly rattle off a few Shakespeare soliloquies a teacher had us memorize, for example.

I think having 13 year olds memorize things is a great idea, but the things should be important and useful. I wish we had extensively drilled on mental arithmetic.

Here's what's happen when we focus on memorization:

I suspect the most dangerous habit of thought taught in schools is that even if you don't really understand something, you should parrot it back anyway. http://lesswrong.com/lw/i2/two_more_things_to_unlearn_from_s...

Which more or less directly leads to http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/

With such a method what will be permanently seared into their young minds, is the idea that it is good and proper to guess the answer the boss is expecting, instead of actually searching for the truth. Those are different goals, which often don't overlap.

My point is there's a very valuable window at that age to permanently learn things. The window should be used to, for example, learn a ton of vocabulary in a foreign language. Or learn a bunch of arithmetic tables by heart, so you can do mental arithmetic without even thinking hard. To waste the window is silly. Learning such things as I mentioned isn't "parroting."

I agree. I am thankful for my dull, rote learning of multiplication tables.

I do maintain my reservation above however. Currently, schools are doing way too much rote learning, and do not teach the fundamentals of good thinking.

I agree, but there needs to be some good selection. Memorizing multiplication tables will serve you for the rest of your life. (Especially since it doesn't even take all that much, there's a lot of symmetry and patterns in there.) Memorizing huge swathes of a foreign language is the only way to learn it. Memorizing state capitals is debatable. Memorizing who exports the most bananas is USELESS. In 30 years, it may not even be true anymore. Learning the basics of geology may be useful; learning intensive, college-geology-major details about mineral crystallization is a waste of precious time.

What burns me is that there is so much good stuff in the world to learn, more than you could ever possibly learn, and they waste our time so frivolously. They sit your child down in front of the world's finest multi-course banquet ever conceived, then thoughtlessly stuff them full of dry crackers, because that's what the standards say we have to do. Augh. Such a waste.

I agree with you. Older minds analyze better than younger minds. They have more knowledge to bring to bear on a topic. Younger minds memorize better than older minds--repeated things make more of a lasting imprint.

Both young and old need to do both, but the best results come from using this time-limited memorization advantage strategically, not haphazardly.

Unfortunately, that's not what we do (in the US). Memorization is described by progressive educrats as "drill and kill". Instead of carefully analyzing what should be memorized to provide the most strategic leverage, they deprecate it almost entirely. Why put a lot of effort, they ask, into memorizing anything in the 21st Century? Multiplication tables? Everyone will have a calculator, they answer. Geography? Google! No, they insist, understanding is what matters: concepts, not facts, as if people reason better with facts stored at Google than with facts in their own heads.

Then they rush students through too much material too quickly for serious analysis. Our minds have multiple modes of operation, and when we don't have time to figure things out, Plan B is to stop analyzing and just try to remember--use memory and metaknowledge about tests to pass. The writer's daughter was explicitly aware of that mode switch.

So we end up with a "progressive" education industry denigrating memorization as a knuckle-dragging, traditional practice with the result that, instead of eliminating memorization itself, they just eliminate the "strategic" part.

And how do those soliloquies serve you?

The things they need to memorize for life are the things that serve you for life. Arithmetic is a fantastic one - you should be able to do all forms of simple arithmetic in your head, and everything to do with fractions and simple algebra on paper, and you should be able to do that stuff so naturally and instinctively that it's like riding a bike or speaking English. Because that's an ability (not just knowledge but something you can do) that will serve you for life.

Literature is a part of life and it forms how we see the world. Those pieces of poetry I have committed to memory, as diverse as "Scaffolding" by Seamus Heeney and several poems by folks like Lord Byron or William Butler Yates, inform the way I look at life.

Living is an art, not a science, and making art a part of us, for example by memorizing poetry, is an important part of being good at that art.

It's very hard to enjoy something you are forced to memorized. The things I remember in the long term I deemed important enough to keep with me. I would even say things that were drilled in me I rebelled against.

The good teachers give you a choice of which to memorize but still make you memorize something artful.

Not everyone can memorize as well. Anything I've ever had to memorize in school I can't remember now and I was an honors student. I'm jealous of my husband who can rattle off memorizations of Shakespeare or such. There is also a difference between being able to show off that you can be an actor and memorize Shakespeare and being able to take a second and do the math mentally. Memorization does not teach what something means. When I have to memorize, I spend more time trying to find those mental tricks to remember what to memorize that what I'm memorizing means. You can have a 13 year old memorize a soliloquy, but ask them what it means.

There are very different learning types. I for one am very bad at memorizing facts and forget them quite fast after not using them any more, no matter at which age I learned them first. Concerning mental arithmetic, I was quite good in 5th and 6th grade, but now I am painstakingly slow even with simple multiplications like 7•8 ("Seven times eight was something like fifty-six, right? Let's check, so seven times seven was forty-nine, forty-nine plus seven… yeah, fifty six"). I just don't typically have to solve such problems at this time in my life (the closest I've come to needing arithmetic in the last few months was when I was studying Galois theory). But at least I am confident, that I can train myself, should the need arise.

The most frustrating experience with memorizations in school were poems for me, because it always took so much effort and even while I was slowly mastering it I knew it was all for naught, because in a few weeks everything would be gone again, even with those that I actually liked.

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