Don't stop children from memorizing! LINKEDIN | 26 APRIL, 2016

The networked and connected era has taken its first toll –the practice of memorizing things. Today’s students are told that they need not park knowledge or information in their memory as they have many ways to get them any time, anywhere. Instead, they are asked to divert their energies to processing data, advancing opinions, arguing pros and cons and presenting their interpretations. There is no doubt that developing such skills in young minds will stand them in good stead for dealing with adult life and its challenges of a changing world.

But, should it be at the cost of ‘memorization’?

The previous generations (pre-internet, pre-computer era) spent a significant part of their educational life in acquiring and storing knowledge – from mathematical tables (upto 13 and in some societies, upto 16 and even 19, the hardest that I found), vocabulary (200 words of atleast 8 characters!), dates of events (most certainly dates of forthcoming exams), capitals of the world, languages spoken, names and heights of peaks and mountains, 1 to 10 in different languages, musical notes, scientific formulae, periodic table, ancient literature or poetry, scripts of plays, prayers, chess game strategies and more. Added routines included memorizing 3 dozen telephone numbers, names of subway stations (in order), names of all cousins of all ages, logos and slogans of companies, quotes by famous people and the list was endless. In one short decade, all this is now considered redundant and the premise of memorizing information rendered completely defenceless.

It is argued that the ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ of things are less important compared to the ‘how’ and ‘why’. Human minds are now meant to be reoriented towards processing and analyzing information rather than merely storing them for perpetuity. The cells released from the storage function are expected to be diverted for creative purposes. I am not a neuroscientist, but I am not sure if this indeed happens. Creative people that we know – Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, the German, Viennese music geniuses, the South Indian music trinity - all lived 200 to 600 years ago and their creative work is still unsurpassed. They did not have the internet era to fall back upon. They must have memorized something, perhaps a lot.

So, does the argument against deposition of facts and information in the brain chambers hold water? The children of today may not be able to cook without referring to recipes and instructions from the internet, not play Beethoven’s sixth symphony (or a short segment) without the sheets, navigate from place A to B without GPS or Google maps or worse, hold a 30 minute conversation with a stranger, perhaps in an unfamiliar topic without the aid of devices. They will be useless in darkness, if their devices don’t work (New York city had a total blackout for 4 days as recently as 2013). They may not remember their financial position (you may argue that apps will tell them) or their upcoming flights and schedules (yes, I hear you saying the same word – ‘devices’).

Take these scenarios a step or two further and you will understand how gadgets will run tomorrow’s lives to an unimagined degree. It is certainly a merited thought that the human mind is capable of much more sophisticated functions than memorization and therefore, building skills of reason, analysis, argumentation, postulation, reflection, opinion formation, problem solving etc must be a top priority of the new education paradigm. I am however, not convinced that this should be at the cost of information storage for its sake, to be called upon when the circumstances demand. Memorizing is also a surrogate for skills like concentrated reading (or listening), sorting of information, storage and recall in a particular sequence, speed of thinking, cognitive ability, attention span and multitasking for the brain. Memorized information many times acts as the building block for finding solutions to problems quickly. It also aids in the ability to see patterns and connect dots. Yes, we don’t need to memorize Obama’s dog’s name or names of fish in the Antarctic, but there are other worthy information that the brain would love to preserve, on our behalf, for our benefit. Let us not subject our young ones to ‘induced dementia’. Assessing students on information memorized, may however, be a thing of the past.