I have
been reading a book by Joshua Foer called ‘Moonwalking with Einstein’. The book
describes the journey of the author to the finals of the US Memory Championship.
Through this journey the author shares his research on history of memory, more
specifically memorization.
Over many
years starting with my father and then my friends and finally with colleagues
at work, I have had debates about importance of memory in academics. In India, to
a large extent, even now (though dwindling at a rapid rate) rote learning is
the method of “stuffing” information in the heads of students. Application of knowledge
is given lesser importance and assessed sporadically. These debates have
yielded mixed results. My father’s input had the first impact on me as a
teenager. He said, “How can you meditate over an idea until you have memorized it?”.
Friends and more importantly colleagues have argued otherwise.
Being in
the education field modern curriculums emphasize less on memorization. The focus
is more how a student will acquire that information and more importantly apply
it. This last part has had unanimous acceptance everywhere. At the end what
good is the education if one cannot apply it. But even here one cannot do away
with memory. One still must recall, for example, Newton’s laws of motion to
apply them. No one debates the importance of recall either. Bloom’s taxonomy
clearly states that recalling is one of the fundamental skills that a student
should possess.
The situation
that I want to bring to notice is that the education system has confused rote
learning with memorization. Memorization is often confused with rote learning with
good reason as other methods of memorization aren’t known or not popular. As I have
realized, by reading Joshua Foer’s book, is that there are many ways of
memorization like ‘memory palace’ method, ‘person-action-object’ method, etc. These
can very well be used to store information aiding in recall for application of
knowledge.
The other
situation is the dependence or reliance on technology to store information.
Virtually every piece of information can be stored or can be found use
technology. This has apparently altered our brains according to a psychiatrist
friend of mine. The debate about memorization takes me back to the debate about
whether automation is good for the economy, something I wrote about in one of
my previous blog posts (see The Schumpeter Diagnosis). Is the change in
learning environment due to change in one variable i.e. memorization good for
us in the long run? Is reliance on technology for memory good for us in the long run? From
Foer’s book we learn that there was similar uproar after the Gutenberg press
was invented. Till that point in history the only method of gaining knowledge
was by remembering things and reproduction of any written work had to be done by
hand. Hence, with printing press, one did not have to memorize content any more.
They could store it externally, in books. Needless to say, it did not create
much of a problem in the long run as people have become smarter and
proliferation of books has led to education of the masses. But is it different
this time?
But, there is a warning. It is said that destruction
of library of Alexandria set the world back by atleast a thousand years. Is destruction
of external storage of information possible? If so, by how many years will humanity
be set back?
