When memorisation hampers learning

Soon after I was finished with my first post I was instantly interested in posting another one. In the beginning I was flooded with enumorous ideas, ideas from across the spectrum, ranging from education to politics to even God and spirituality. To overcome my dilemma I paused for a moment and asked myself, “What's that one thing that bothers me the most in today’s society?”. Well the question didn’t actually help me constrict my options rather it seemed to agrravate my already existing problem. Since I had to write about something I realized I needed to quickly focus my attention and train my thoughts. After hours of thought I decided to write upon something that has been troubling me since the very nascent years of my school life and which is: rote learning.

Mugna, ratta marna or rote learning, irrespective of how you call it chances are you’ve experienced it quite early in your life. We’ve all gone through the period when we were forced (yeah I used such a strong word) to remember long list of numbers or dates of events in histroy which seem irrelevant to us even today. The fact is, it’s almost impossible to survive in our current educational construct by evading it. Personally for me it hasn’t been a plesant experience overall as I’ve always struggled to learn this sombre skill.

While the west maintains a firm stance to condemn the concept, the east still remains bereft to open and healthy discussions on the topic. The west is perhaps a testimony to the fact that the true potential of person can be harnessed to the best of it’s abilities through proper understanding and reasoning of things. We should lay emphasis in inculcating such ideas in the minds of our future generations rather than encouraging the act of mindless memorization.

Do I really hate rote learning? Well hate is a rather strong word to describe something which is still perceived correct by a majority of our world's population. I don’t strongly condemn it though I feel there should be an extent to which it is preached in our schools and colleges. There is no doubt that one cannot tread deep into the ocean of knowledge without knowing some fundamental principles that govern it’s working. A simple analogy could be something like reading a book; one simply cannot read and understand sentences without remembering the alphabets that form them. So at what point does one stop remembering things by heart (and rote learning) and starts to understand and reason out to facilitate learning of new ideas?

I’ll let you think for a while...