> But I am in total agreement with the writer that modern education does a grave disservice to young learners by discarding rote learning and repetition.
I've come to appreciate the importance of rote learning over the past couple of years... but despite its simplicity, I would call it a very advanced technique.
You don't need rote learning to get to understand something. You don't even need rote learning to become very good at something. You only ever need it to be able to think faster about certain advanced topics or if you'd like to become fully fluent in a language.
These are not things a high school student should necessarily spend much time on. Especially considering that rote learning, if not self-motivated, can be incredibly demotivating and have the opposite effect of what was intended.
I disagree. We are expecting students to learn more than ever before. Math is a great example. Their ability to handle even a simple concept like multiplication requires fluency in addition. The ability to learn algebra requires fluency in arithmetic. The ability to learn calculus requires fluency in algebra. Tons of kids pass one grade but emerge unprepared for the next. The author hits the nail on the head: they understand the material at the time, but never develop fluency. Then next year when they try to build on that foundation it has evaporated. Rote learning should begin in elementary. I am thankful that I was required to learn my multiplication tables.
Yes, we need to tailor our teaching to the attention span and abilities of our students, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be using this powerful tool of fluency through rote learning.
It really depends on the goal. From a mathematician's perspective Engineering is still part of the kiddie pool of math. The kind of things some people did in high school mostly though route memorization.
However, for ~98% of the population it's by far the most useful parts of math. Then again you can also say the same thing about just Arithmetic, basic Algebra, Logic and Statistics. So, it's really a question of what your goals are.
There is actually a lot of Math that's been dropped from K-12 education. EX: Understanding logarithms is really fundamental for using a slide rule or understanding floating point arithmetic, but it's not really that useful for most people.
Even though I chafed a bit at the delays it imposed and kept asking the teacher about other more advanced topics, I do not regret a single minute of the time spent chanting 12-times tables in my first couple of school years. Same deal for written exercises and homework - I don't think I'd be so good at mental math, estimating, and 'back of the envelope' calculations done in pencil if it weren't for all that practice as a child.
> You only ever need it to be able to think faster about certain advanced topics
This (and pretty much only this - you don't need rote learning to become fluent in a language, as evidenced by the way people learn their first language). Rote learning is what in tech we call caching things.
I very much prefer calling it like that, because it immediately highlights some benefits and drawbacks of the method:
- you cache things for quicker access, therefore it enables you to think faster
- the biggest benefit comes from caching things that are most frequently accessed; therefore learning multiplication table makes sense, it significantly speeds up every math you do in your head explicitly
- rote learning basics of a given field can help you learn it faster as again, the basic facts you need will be readily available in cache
- this matters because a lot of thinking people do has timeouts (aka "power of will", "energy", "patience", "curiosity") - if figuring out some connections between pieces of knowledge takes too long, you will get frustrated and give up early
- rote learning of history dates usually makes little sense because you end up caching vertices of a graph, while what you really care about are edges and traversing
- there is only so much you can fit in cache without losing its effectiveness, so memorize what matters, not everything
- rote learning is caching things, not developing understanding
- spaced repetition is a hack to force your brain from removing a particular information from cache prematurely; after few iterations it will understand that this piece of information you keep repeating is important and should stay cached
Also note that various memorization techniques are basically very fancy names for data structures optimized for human brains. For instance, "mnemonic link system" (aka. "chain method") is basically a linked list, where you use stories to build cons cells. There are variants of this method that are essentially doubly-linked lists or skip lists, and then you have other methods that implement association lists ("memory palace"), hash tables, etc.
This is important because you can apply knowledge about those data structures to evaluating those memorization techniques. For example, the reason it's difficult to insert another item in the middle or at the end of the list memorized with "chain method" technique is that you have to first traverse linked link to the place of insertion and then re-cons it there (develop two additional stories). It suggests that a/ maybe try to add new elements to the beginning of the list, and b/ you shouldn't use the "chain method" for remembering things you'll need to have random access to.
I've come to appreciate the importance of rote learning over the past couple of years... but despite its simplicity, I would call it a very advanced technique.
You don't need rote learning to get to understand something. You don't even need rote learning to become very good at something. You only ever need it to be able to think faster about certain advanced topics or if you'd like to become fully fluent in a language.
These are not things a high school student should necessarily spend much time on. Especially considering that rote learning, if not self-motivated, can be incredibly demotivating and have the opposite effect of what was intended.