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> We were all told we have to memorize things because we can't carry the textbook around with us

I was told to memorize things because it's much faster to recall items than it is to look them up.

I also don't consider memorizing certain historical facts "pointless", I think they are vital for context. The birth/death dates of a certain author may have little value in of itself, but it may have a lot of to say about the era they lived in and how/why their works were/are relevant.

Agreed that "critical thinking style education" is worlds better than mere memorization, but let's not forget that the devil is in the details, and its those details that you benefit most from memorizing.

I think it's pointless to have to memorize it. You need to know the events and the general timelines, but does it matter if it was 1492 vs 1500? It's okay for your brain to generalize and compress a lot of that knowledge, the context will still be there for general discussion. If suddenly the exact date does become important, it'll take our kids 90s to look it up.

As technogy gets more integrated into our lives (think Siri), that could drop as low as 30 or even 15 seconds.

What's important is that you are able to have an informed and intelligent discussion about the topics you learn in school. The exact year of the Emancipation Proclaimation is less important as long as you understand the events around it. Same thing with the melting point of Gallium. There's no need to memorize that, as long as you understand the general concept that Gallium melts at a very low temperature, and what this means in terms of its uses.

> does it matter if it was 1492 vs 1500? ... If suddenly the exact date does become important, it'll take our kids 90s to look it up

The issue is more subtle than that. In lots of cases the value of knowing the information is when it lets you make connections that you wouldn't otherwise have _realised_ were important.

Let's say you're reading something that happens to mention The Alhambra Decree. You've never heard of this before, so you do a quick Wikipedia lookup, where the first paragraph says:

"The Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) was an edict issued on 31 March 1492 by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by 31 July of that year."

If that "1492" is a well primed trigger point for you — especially in a context involving Spain — you're much more likely to pause for a second and wonder if this might be related to anything else you know about that year. And, although the remainder of this page never mentions Columbus at all, it doesn't take you much searching to discover that there are indeed some very interesting connections between the two, some of which lead to further questions about Columbus' own religious background and leanings.

But if that 1492 doesn't have that trigger effect, you're much less likely to draw any connection here, and simply nod and return to your original reading.

We do that all the time. There are so many things that pass us by constantly because we simply don't even realise there's anything worth paying attention to. The more hooks we create in our brains for those to get snagged on in passing, the deeper you start to understand things, and the more interesting life becomes.

If you are a history major then what you said might be true, but expecting every student in the US to memorize those dates and everything similar (melting points, number of protons/electrons, dates of birth of authors) is insane and very counterproductive. Especially in basic required classes in high-school.

Students are not willing to learn those details and it turns them off to school and wastes valuable time that could be utilized to better prepare them for the real world.

How many professions could use ANY of the information you mentioned in your post?

With ADD medicine becoming more and more pervalent in American colleges- is that proof that kids' brains are already rewired? and society is forcing them to snap back to the old way of thinking?

I think that's more a sign of the current pressures to succeed (get good grades) in college and double major and etc. are extremely high and the perceived penalties for 'failing' also quite high. A combination of a high pressure situation, more work than most people can comfortably manage, and the opportunity to take a pill that allows you to do more maintained, focused work than you would be able to otherwise? I think many people would go for the pills. They're extremely effective at allowing you to maintain an intense focus on an activity for much longer than most unmedicated people would be able to.

There isn't any evidence that I'm aware of that there has been any noticeable change in people's abilities to do actual, focused work: studies today show that most people can at most manage around 4-5 hours of focused work, and as far as I know that hasn't changed much in the last 200+ years. Ritalin can allow a healthy person to put in bursts of 10+ hours of focused work. Of course students are going to take advantage of that. My understanding is that it's also fairly common in other high pressure situations that require prolonged focus (stock trading, etc.).

Things like the web/etc. do allow people to do more multitasking-esque behaviors (with the obvious impacts on focus), but that's less about people's brains being rewired at some fundamental level and more that there are now more opportunities to goof off. Pre-internet, you had a much higher activation energy of chatting with friends (you had to go call them and talk with them, versus clicking three times to get to Facebook). I don't think that's limited to people in the younger generation, though: one of my family members (an English professor, one of the top in her field in the world) will sometimes turn off the internet/block distracting sites while writing and does all of her editing away from the computer in order to avoid Facebook/reading the news/playing scrabble against the computer.

right, but not committing any of history to memory, collectively, makes it pretty easy to rewrite.

What do you mean?

Learning date ranges is important, what years the wars started and ended (approximately), what period of time an author was born (1700s, 1800s, etc). Knowing a specific date and being tested on knowing that exact number is completely pointless.

If you fill your head with dates that you do not recall often, then they can often get confused, you think you remember what date something happened and spit out the wrong one.

No, history is all about writing. That's pretty much its definition. The invention of history happened precisely when people decided to start writing things down for the future.

We prevent the rewriting of history by distributing the writing as widely as possible. And that's precisely what the internet is doing.

A post on archive.org estimated the average lifetime of a URL as 100 days.

Physical distribution of acid-free paper books are better at preserving history.

Edit: blog post by archive.org on digital preservation efforts for Wikipedia outbound links: http://blog.archive.org/2013/10/25/fixing-broken-links/

Wow is this ever an abuse of statistics. The URL has very little to do with the content it points to.

They were referencing unique, long-tail content such as blogs or personal sites, not bit.ly redirectors to mainstream content that is widely replicated on CDNs.

Edit: try using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pag... or similar extension to find caches/archives of dead links that are no longer online at an alternate address. Agreed that link rot is not the same as offline content, but there is digital content which can no longer be found in any archive or search engine.

http://fileformat.info covers issues related to digital preservation.

Even given that, its not at all comparable to the idea that history is written in books. Books themselves are printed and published and duplicated if people care to do so. How much content that is scribblings in journals and other disposables is lost daily, which is why blogs and the like are the digital equivalent of?

Content that is initially valued is duplicated. Content that isn't dies away. It isn't like things being digital makes them more transient, instead it makes rare copies far more accessible.

The original comment was about "rewriting history".

History is written by winners, who change over time and have been known to rewrite history. Digital formats require constant transformation from legacy formats to modern formats (per http://fileformat.info). This has an economic cost and only a subset of content is prioritized for forward migration, depending on which parties wield economic power at that time.

A book on acid-free paper that has a reasonable print run will be stored in geographical locations worldwide and will preserve information for decades if not hundreds of years, without requiring battery power, OS upgrades or file format migration.

History is also about economics. Digital storage economics is increasingly driven by cloud vendor bulk manufacture of custom servers and data centers, e.g. OpenCompute. Centralized copies can be rewritten. If local communities start building their own https://archive.org/web/petabox.php to record local/global digital history in archival file formats, maybe digital can record long-term history, EMPs not withstanding.

Do you know about Wikipedia's version control and discussion features?

Wikipedia is about 10 GB compressed, meaning that anybody can download a copy and save it forever, for free.

If you include the discussions pages, images, and revisions of Wikipedia it amounts to several terabytes worth of data. (A couple of hundred dollars for a hard-drive that size).

There are many backup mediums that are meant for long-term storage. EMP protection is relatively easy.

How many "acid-free paper books" would it take to store that information?

Wikipedia is a great example of data in an open format that is intended to be migrated forward as technology changes.

It does not protect against rewriting history, one could argue that Wikipedia exists to rewrite history based on the latest consensus and reduction of controversy. While anyone could review the change history, in practice most readers use the latest version. There is at least one research paper showing a steady decline in Wikipedia contributors due to tough editorial policies created to thwart spammers.

Books are decentralized from both a physical and editorial point of view. Look back at any major event in history and there will be multiple records and perspectives of the event. Decentralized locations record the subset of events that are locally most important.

At any rate, it's not an either/or situation. Digital will coexist with print and paintings and sculpture and architecture. Each has a different information density, diversity and preservation profile.

> Physical distribution of acid-free paper books are better at preserving history.

I don't doubt that those books have better survivability, but they also represent only the tiny fraction of written information that was worth publishing in book form.

archive.org is a great example of how a relatively small nonprofit organization can now afford to archive historical information at volumes that were previously impossible.

Archive.org wrote a post explaining why they are keeping physical copies of their digital assets, http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-the-ne...